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Americana Journal Who Am I

The January challenge

January is jigsaw puzzle season at the Jones household. I don’t know if it’s the cold outside or just that we need a change of pace from the business of Christmas. But each year when January rolls around, we dig out our stored boxes and pick some of our favorites. Sometimes we have dueling puzzle tables. I spread out a puzzle challenge on the old wooden table in the family room and JoAnne puts a puzzle out on the end of the dining room table. JoAnne always begins with a puzzle that she has had since she was a girl for old time sake, even though it has a missing piece.

Old time puzzle challenge
JoAnne’s favorite puzzle from childhood

I usually begin the season with a Christmas puzzle with children in it as I think of the grandchildren and their Christmas activities.

Building a Snowman
Building a Snowman

But soon we move to more challenging ones. We keep track of the number of puzzles we complete and the total number of pieces involved each year. This year we each had a new puzzle to work on that presented bigger challenges. Mine was the one pictured above. It was titled, “The challenge“ for more than one reason. The cut was such that the edge pieces were not always obvious. What do these three pieces have in common?

Three edge pieces
Can you believe these are all edge pieces.

JoAnne worked on a puzzle featuring stamps from all the 50 states. As you can see it required a rather unique type of organization in order for it to be completed. She loves comparing pieces to the box picture and her new puzzle was ideal for that type of puzzle work.

Puzzle process
Puzzle solving process for stamp puzzle called “Greetings from”
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Journal Joy Notes Who Am I Wisdom

How to make a long winter shorter

An early morning shot from an upstairs window
An early morning shot from an upstairs window

Like many northerners, I enjoy seeing a little snow around Christmas but soon afterward begin to wish it were springtime.  But, alas, there are still three months until spring if it arrives on time.  Then if we have a cold snowy February like this year, it seems like winter goes on forever.  So how does one make the time fly by?   I was thinking about that today.   My wife and I must be doing a particularly good job this year as I have hardly had time to wish for spring yet.    Here are my recommendations for making a long winter shorter. 

First, be sure to make a big deal of Christmas and by all means, don’t tear all the decorations down on Dec. 26th.   For ourselves, we never take any decorations down before Epiphany (Jan. 6) which is the traditional end of the Christmas season in the Christian Church.   Then, since I invite children from church over to see my trains around the tree and there are usually some children who haven’t come by Jan. 6, I leave the trains up longer until all have had a chance to see them.   So what if it is sometimes February by the time I get it all put away. 

Second, I suggest having some winter-only hobbies.  We have two.  One is feeding the birds.  Here in rural CT, bears will tear your feeder apart, I’m told, if you feed birds while they are awake anyway, so bird feeding makes a great winter hobby.   It’s also a very cheerful thing watching chickadees, juncos, cardinals, nuthatches, woodpeckers, etc. outside your window.    Occasionally a hawk may visit seeking a fat junco for a meal.  This year I have a cute and perky Carolina wren visiting regularly.

Another activity that JoAnne and I save for winter weeks is putting together jigsaw puzzles.   We both enjoy the challenge.  After we complete one, we carefully bag up the puzzle and put it back in the box for storage.  We’ll get it out and put it together again in a year or two.  Some become favorites and go together faster every year.   Essentials for this hobby are a spare dedicated table spot that doesn’t need to be disturbed often, a small collection of puzzles you like in sizes you like, and a handy puzzle lamp.   We like 500, 750 and 1000 piece sizes the best.  

 

In addition to our work at church and our interaction with our daughter and her family, these 3 winter pastimes keep the cold days passing quickly.   Before we know it, it will be spring.   And I haven’t even resorted to pulling out the seed catalogs to make garden plans yet—well, maybe a few times.        

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Journal

Conflicted spring leads to unusual birding

Some signs of advancing spring.

This afternoon as we drove back from visiting our daughter and family in Connecticut, I noticed numerous robins foraging on the ground wherever they could find an open spot in the snow cover form the recent storm.   As I drove in my driveway here in Kirkville, one flew away from the portion of lawn that had been exposed by the plow blade.  Last week I had seen grackles and a couple blue herons.   This afternoon my wife also remarked on how the buds on our red maple were expanding and turning their characteristic spring hue.

But winter is hanging tough

But seeing the robins was a small comfort after hearing the weather reports predicting more cold and another potential weekend storm.   As if the piles of snow were not enough to indicate exactly how bad the contradiction is this year between the lingering winter and the emerging signs of spring, I was sitting on my porch watching the birds for a few moments while putting on my shoes late this afternoon and suddenly realized that those birds on the thistle feeder were not goldfinches or purple finches.   They looked different and they had little red topknots–those were redpolls!  They are Canadian birds that only occasionally irrupt into the states when the winter is bad in Canada.  I could not believe I had just seen a flock of redpolls and a robin in my lawn on the same supposedly spring day!   Now there’s a once in a lifetime birding event for this area, I would say.

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Americana Journal Joy Notes Who Am I

A little inside winter fun

B&O by John WinfieldPuzzle fun

What do you do in winter when the snow is flying and the temperature is dropping?   Well, among my wife’s and my favorite pastimes for winter evenings after Christmas are jigsaw puzzles.   We have a collection of them and we put several together every year.  Once one is together we look at it for a short time—the harder it was—the longer we look at it—then we tear it apart again and box it up again, storing all the pieces carefully in a plastic bag tied securely with a twisty so no pieces are lost.  The season must always begin with JoAnne’s old favorites from childhood.  They are thick Tuco ones with a piece or two missing, but what they don’t have in looks, they have in memories.  Then we progress to the harder and bigger ones.  We just boxed back up this one; it was 1000 pieces.  The black sections were fairly tough.    Now we are starting one that focuses on America’s National Parks.  

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Journal Who Am I

A winter pastime

In Central New York, one needs a winter pastime.  JoAnne and I do jigsaw puzzles with the help of whoever happens to visit.  As I mentioned, I now am doing them online occasionally too.  Here’s a cut I had not seen before.

 

 

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