"Hibou"

As part of my 22nd birthday gift in March, my mom got me a wooden owl puzzle. It wasn't anything super-high-quality or expensive. Just something fun to do. At least...it looked fun, until I got into it. Let me take you through the process:

The lighting in our living room in the evening is pretty horrible and everything is drenched in a yellow-hue, so bear with me. The point is, it looks really cool when it's all assembled, and I dig owls, so I dove right in.


Every individual piece of the freaking bird had to be punched out of the sheets of wood (shown bottom-most picture, right). Keep in mind: These are WOODEN. Splinters were involved. But fear not, they gave me a 1"X1" square of sandpaper to fix any rough edges -_-


I finally got each sheet punched out and arranged like it is in the diagram on the back of the 1-sheet instructions. Here's a close-up!

And then construction began:

This was after perhaps an hour of searching, finding and forcing together. The instructions recommended glue to hold pieces together, but I did not have glue of any kind and there was no way I was going to glue pieces together if I wasn't 100% sure they were the right ones to go together only to have them be wrong.

At this point I was getting pretty exhausted/frustrated but also excited/accomplished. But then, pieces started to come off when I tried to attach others. It was like putting together a card castle, but with wood and a lot more swearing.

Here's the "finished" product:

And I have all...these...pieces left:

Yeah. Those are individual feathers that I could not find a place for, and therefore decided to disregard. They were probably extra anyway...right?

In the end, I showed Jay and Garret who both showed mild interest, and then I put it in the garbage. Sorry mom. ^_^ Thanks for the thought! At least I tried.