2000 Piece "Enchanted Valley" Puzzle

Frank I completed a 2000 piece puzzle a few days ago. We started on July 8 and finished on July 21; but we were not working on it constantly and sometimes we did not touch it at all for a few days. The picture is titled Enchanted Valley and the artist is Joseph Burgess ©2018. Frank and I were so drawn in by the lovely painting with a fairy tale aura about it that we were willing to attempt the 2000 piece size. It was pricey – I think we paid $34.99 (list price) at a downtown shop – but, since it was manufactured by Ravensburger, we knew the quality would be good. The Ravensburger website description, cited below the photo, promised it would be worth it. I have since learned that Amazon's lowest price is $79.99 with other prices ranging up to $119.99. Yes. For a jigsaw puzzle. 

Assemble the pieces to reveal an idyllic countryside scene complete with colorful cottages, rolling hills, white chapel, and meandering stream. Ravensburger 2000 piece puzzles are create a challenging and satisfying experience from our strategic image selection to our unmatchable quality.

Puzzling is more than just fun! Puzzling develops logical thinking and problem-solving skills, memory, focus, and concentration, and builds confidence. Plus, it’s a great way to unplug, relax, and destress.

Ravensburger puzzles are designed to be a positive, frustration-free experience. Our steel-cut pieces offer a perfect, interlocking fit with no tearing or dust – and no two pieces are ever the same shape! Extra-thick cardboard pieces mean your puzzle will last for years.

July 8, 2020

After lingering several months untouched among our other puzzles, Frank and I opened the box with all the typical initial enthusiasm of starting a fresh, new project, i.e., the honeymoon phase. The colors in the picture were varied and there were many textures to explore. How hard could it be? We took up our traditional puzzle roles. I challenged myself on sky and edge and Frank attacked the buildings with gusto. The uniquely colored sky and three distinct buildings gave us a jump start.

Beyond the initial stages, when our progress became extremely slow, Frank considered surrendering and even checked how much he could sell the puzzle for on eBay. He learned $60 - $100; so, if we quit, we could possibly turn a profit. While he was exploring eBay I just kept plugging away a bit each evening and then he came around and joined me. Sorting pieces onto plates and bringing in an extra table helped. The completed puzzle would measure 29½" by 38½". The butcher block table in the foreground is 3' by 4', large enough for the puzzle but leaving hardly any room for piece sorting or small subsection assemblies. The supplemental Costco table behind it measures 2½' by 4' and provided the extra space needed for a work in progress.

July 14, 2020

I – as the tortoise – continued plodding on with insertion of a few pieces each evening. Frank – ever the hare – continued his quest to accelerate the assembly process. He found puzzle stackers on Amazon. It was one of the best finds – ever! – better than using those round plates with curved edges. We decided upon and ordered a set of Becko Stackable Puzzle Sorting Trays. The twelve trays stack very well, leaving enough height for the puzzles pieces in the tray below and, with their hexagon shape, they close-pack very efficiently honeycomb fashion on the table surface. The trays come in both a light and a darker color which lends itself well to collecting and seeing the shape clearly of either light or dark pieces. We deployed them immediately and did away with the plastic picnic-style plates.

 

We continued to forge ahead. Frank claims my color skills from quilting made me more adept at sorting similar pieces into separate trays based on their gradation in color. I could tell which pinks and which blues went where, for example. Our progress included the flowers over the bridge, the reddish bushes, the range of blue hues of the flowers, the difference between the upstream and downstream waters, and the subtle grey variation in the two cobblestone pathways. Texture distinguished the blue house from the similar hued blue heron in the foreground.

July 17, 2020
Ok, by now we are basically left with green: light green, yellow green, teal green, deep green, black green, white speckled, leaf textured, grass textured, blurred texture, and a few straggling nondescript green categories. Attention to detail became a strong requirement for fine tuning the potential candidates for piece placement.

You have to look very closely but there is progress in the preceding July 17 photo since the previous July 14 photo. Finding the differences is like those picture games in Highlights magazine I enjoyed as a kid. Studying both pictures closely or, looking quickly back and forth between two images, your eye can sometimes detect the absence or appearance of another object. Can you sleuth out the changes? Alright, I will tell you what the additions are: the tree trunk and tree roots at the far left, the grass between the blue house and the white chapel, the bush and bench near it at the right. Often I would stay up later than Frank, draw by some strange addiction to get in "just a few more pieces" or to finish "just one more bush or lawn area". Frank would be in bed, asleep, and when I came up to join him, I would wake him up to come downstairs to rejoice with me on the "progress". He grumbled but generally obliged me.

July 20, 2020

Here is the puzzle on July 20 following by a comparison with July 17 status.

See? We filled in the grassy area to the left of the stream and the bushes to the left of the pink covered stone bridge. A lot of this was due to Frank's effort to sort pieces into trays by shape rather than color. I contributed my plastic numbered tags from my quilt piecing notions to distinguish the trays so we could communicate to each other which tray to pass.

July 21, 2020
We waiting until each other was available so together we could savor the climactic moments of putting in the final few pieces.

Ta-Da! We were 100% successful in keeping each and every piece intact, not losing lose even one piece out of 2000! Maybe the puzzle really was "enchanted". We felt a great sense of accomplishment, are still talking to each other, and from the smiles in our selfie, seem somewhat pleased with ourselves and each other.

Since it took around two weeks to assemble this puzzle, I think it needs to stay on display at least two weeks before we disassemble it. We have another 2000 piece puzzle waiting in the wings but we both agree to take a break and do a few less ambitious jigsaws before tackling another biggie. We can generally assemble a 300-550 piece puzzle in one evening and that increased frequency of atta-boys is pretty rewarding.

Ponder: It Takes Two: Our Story

Biographies are not my favorite genre for reading but occasionally there is someone who piques my curiosity. While heavily engaged in home improvement shows, a sequence of remodeling and renovating shows featuring Jonathon and Drew Scott, as the Property Brothers amused me because of the banter and antics between the twin brothers. It Takes Two: Our Story by Jonathon and Drew Scott ©September 2017 was light reading that gave more background into their personal lives and family. It is an amusing read about their antics and entrepreneurial endeavors and it is presented in a non-braggadocio tone.

Per Amazon it got a rating of 4.7 out of 5 but that was with only 350 ratings. Should I conclude that TV watchers are not book readers?

The table of contents of the book shows how the chapters alternate between Jonathon telling the story with comments by Drew and Drew telling the story with comments by Jonathon. The comments earn several chuckles in their own right and are worth the distractions from the main text.

One anecdotal story from the book's forward will whet your appetite. Minutes after Jonathon was born, the nurse said, "Doctor, I think there is another baby.” Drew was a complete surprise. The twins were born within four minutes of each other. That may be hard to believe but the year of their birth was 1978. My own three children were born in 1980, 1983, and 1986, and even in the late eighties, I did not know their genders until each appeared. And I never experienced an ultrasound with any of them in that era. (Yee, gads! Referring to that time in my life as an "era" makes me sound old.) The book continues with more "telling" tales and concludes with a satisfying chapter addressing the issue of what is real and what is staged on these so called “reality” shows. I enjoyed this book.

 

I have also read two other biographical type books about the stars of a different home improvement show, Fixer Upper featuring Chip and Joanna Gaines and their four kids. The Magnolia Story was authored by Joanna (reviewed in my 10/30/17 post) while Chip wrote Capital Gaines (reviewed in my post for 11/9/17). Of these three biographies of icons in of the HGTV home improvement series I liked It Takes Two: Our Story best. I would rank The Magnolia Story second and Capital Gaines third, although I did give both of them four stars in my reviews. To be consistent, I rate It Takes Two: Our Story four stars translating to "Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience". 

Because my interest in home improvement television series is waning, I could, with 20/20 hindsight reconsider rating all three of these books as three stars instead of four, but I won't. My daughter-in-law enjoyed The Magnolia Story. My husband is currently reading It Takes Two: Our Story and so far liking it. I mailed a copy of It Takes Two: Our Story to my son who is in construction management and who once toyed with the idea becoming an entrepreneur with an architectural business of his own. With this much of audience engaged, the book has got to be pretty interesting, right? Let the four star rating stand among those in the audience who remain interested in this particular topic and curious about these particular celebrities of the field.

Ponder: Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild, an adventure novel published by Jack London in 1903, was about to have yet another movie released, based on the book. The movie was to star Harrison Ford, an actor who I generally like. A book is almost always better than the movie and so I wanted to read The Call of the Wild before seeing the movie. It is unclear to me how I managed to escape reading this book during my pre-college school days but somehow I did. I chose the word "escaped" intentionally. I disliked this story intensely. 

I surmise The Call of the Wild is considered a classic because of the historic period and lifestyle it captures. Set in the excruciatingly cold and harsh environment of Yukon, Canada in the 1890's at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, it paints the scene of miners' daily struggles to survive while hoping to strike it rich by finding gold. The plot revolves around a canine main character Buck who is a sled dog. It is a very uncomfortable book to read since cruelty to animals abounds unrelentingly as the team of dogs are worked to exhaustion, half-starved, and beaten when they do not perform. Think of the book as a Black Beauty tale for a dog instead of a horse, except that in addition to human brutality, there is a savagery amongst the dogs themselves. I shudder at the memory of some awful scenes and am surprised that it is categorized in the youth section of my local library. At least the book was short – only seven chapters. It was not until Chapter 6 that some human kindness entered the picture in the form of a man named John Thornton.

 The Call of the Wild's publication history is interesting per the Wikipedia entry about the book

Written as a frontier story about the gold rush, The Call of the Wild was meant for the pulp market. It was first published in four installments in The Saturday Evening Post, which bought it for $750 in 1903. In the same year, London sold all rights to the story for $2,500 to Macmillan, which published it in book format. The book has never been out of print since that time.

The particular copy of the book I read contained illustrations by Philippe Munch. I am somewhat familiar with this French artist because my daughter in her middle school years loved Redwall and Philippe Munch was the books' cover artist and illustrator. Per the Redwall entry in Wikipedia.

Redwall is a series of children's fantasy novels by British writer Brian Jacques, published from 1986 to 2011

I may not have liked the text of this book, but I was quite taken with the fine-line inked and colored illustrations, interpretations of what Jack London had described. Here are examples of sledding out in the wilderness, ambience in a mining town, bonding of man and dog, and answering back to the call of the wild. The fine detailing and the soft color nuances of the artwork drew me in.

This particular version of the book also had photographs, notations, and facts along the side margins. I found them distracting while I was reading Jack London's text itself, but I went back after finishing the book to investigate them. Here are some examples of history details and wolf facts.

The back cover of  this particular version of the book reveals it to be part of the Whole Story Series by Viking Juvenile, which according to Goodreads, sadly is out of print. I am glad I read this copy and I will be on the alert to find other titles in this series when I read a classic I missed in my younger days. There are fifteen titles on this list so I have found a future project for myself.

The remake of the movie The Call of the Wild with Harrison Ford came out near the end of February, 2020. The film got a 6.8 out of 10 rating on IMDB. I missed it probably because in March we began sheltering in place and social distancing due to the Coronavirus outbreak. Maybe others potential viewers did the same, contributing to the financial failure of the movie. Per the Wikipedia article about the movie

The Call of the Wild was released in the United States on February 21, 2020, by 20th Century Studios, the first film to be under the branding since the original 1935 film. It received mixed reviews from critics, who praised Ford's performance and the "entertaining action and earnest tone" but criticized the "uncanny" CGI of the animals. It was a box-office bomb, grossing $107 million against a production budget of $125–150 million, and lost the studio an estimated $50–100 million.

 

From what I read of the plot summary in Wikipedia, the movie appears to deviate greatly from the book. Harrison Ford plays the male lead role of John Thornton who does not even appear until Chapter 6 in the book. Based on the trailer, I still want to see the movie so perhaps we will stream it. To be sure I will be watching for that disclaimer in the end credits, "No Animals Were Harmed".

This is a long post for a short book I did not enjoy reading. Based on the Jack London text itself, despite it being a classic, I rate this book 1 star, translating to Awful but I read most or maybe even all of it. However, the particular version I happened to check out of the library had enough mitigating qualities that my efforts were not for naught. Artwork and history facts compensated for the cruel story. But when I consider this particular version with its extras, I rate it 4 stars, translating to Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience. 

On average I give The Call of the Wild 3 stars, Better than average; not a waste of time. I can now check this classic off my "To-Read" list.