Puzzles

We almost always do a jigsaw puzzle over the Christmas holidays, and this year was no different. We did a 1000-piece picture of an old mill on a stream, so there was water streaming through a sluice and over a mill wheel, down into a pool at the bottom. The mill was made of stone and there were trees around it. All manner of color, in other words. The problem is that I don’t do very well with colors. I have a hard time picking out whether something is dark green, black, navy or even a lighter shade of one of these. People with full color vision can snag a piece from the pile based on its hue, but I do jigsaw puzzles about 20% by color and 80% by shape. I divide the pieces into groups that look sort of the same to me in terms of color, and then I narrow them down by shape.

I didn’t realize I was partially red/green colorblind until I was about 17 or 18, when I took a test as part of my physical exam for a summer job at the papermill. You’ve probably seen these tests before — the Ishihara Test, where you are supposed to read the number shown in the circle made up of other colored circles. If the background is green and the number is red, I can do it. I’m pretty helpless at the others, especially ones like this:

Criminal Minds broke with their usual format a touch last night, starting the episode in media res instead of showing the behaviorists being recruited and traveling to the site. It was an interesting duel of the minds, but it only goes to show that you can’t trust another criminal.

I liked the vector of Law & Order last night. It started out as a show about a guy who figured out why a plane crashed and ended up being about a lawyer who had committed most of his adult life to one case and would do anything to win. I laughed at McCoy’s parting comment about the rather indelicate crime scene that almost was.

As I work on this latest project (and there should be an offical announcement about it by the end of the month), I find more and more that I can watch most TV shows with only one eye and not miss much. I was doing research last night while “watching” crime shows. I even had my back turned on the TV while watching Without a Trace–I was working on another jigsaw puzzle, a Christmas gift. This one was a lighthouse, and the puzzle itself was shaped like the outline of a lighthouse and the contents of the puzzle was a collage of other lighthouses. The pieces had eccentric shapes and went off the bias at times. No neat rows and columns, but everything from little wedges that were almost slivers to huge pieces that had two or three tabs or slots on one side. It wasn’t even always obvious which pieces were edges. It was a good challenge. Very hard at the beginning, but progressively easier the more I filled in and learned the “rules” of the shapes and what the colors meant.

Reached the 60% point of the manuscript this morning. I’ve been working on Chapter 7 for a couple of days now. I think I’ll finish it this evening.