Kilroy was here!

...and he's now blind.  I was unable to put eyes into his head.  I could try for hours to solve these things and I'm unable to solve any of them. This puzzle intrigued me.  George and I were moving the cabinets around and I came to a complete stop when I saw these puzzles. It brought back memories of my childhood when I first learned of Kilroy.  

Because I'm beginning to realize just how old I am, I'll explain Kilroy.  I first encountered Kilroy when I was in grade school. At that time, he was becoming harder and harder to find.  I'm not sure if he's around anymore at all other than on wikipedia and in a few movies.  Kilroy as I heard the story first showed up during WWII.  He was supposedly engraved on the bolts of ship hulls being built during the war.  These bolts were later found by shipmen who spread the early meme throughout Europe and later Asia.*

As is usually the case for these puzzles, I was unable to solve them.  Why?  I have no patience for dexterity (or patience) puzzles.  I guess I have the attention span of a gnat.  There are too many other things to entertain myself with right now.  These puzzles are both made of a glass top with a cardboard base and 2 steel balls to place in the eyes.  They are from the WWII period so must have been produced after 1940. The Lily library credits this puzzle to 1942,  (was it purchased by them in London circa 1942?).  My research has discovered that Kilroy first appeared on British shores when it was painted on the wing of a glider for Operation Market Garden in 1944.  According to the same webpage, Kilroy was spotted in Italy in 1943.  He was said to be in the African theater earlier than that.  Who knows when he showed up, but I'm glad he did.  It makes for a good run down a rabbit hole* and a good old man joke: 

Knock knock

Who's there?

Kilroy

Kilroy who?

Kill Roy Rogers, I'm a Gene Autry fan. 

On to the museum update: 

We have been staying here for the past few weeks again.  I'm now on a reorganizing kick.  When I first put all of the puzzles on the shelves, I tried to organize them by alphabetical order but not having a master list who the builders/designers were I didn't succeed. I think I'm doing well with names now and have been doing it the right way.  Currently I'm up to the H's and should be able to finish by weeks end.  At the same time I am reorganizing, I am photographing the pieces.  This is a major part of the job.  All of the ceramics have been photographed as they were placed on the vase wall (Yes James, I know these words are not interchangeable, but it is our place and these are the names I have chosen for them.  It makes it easier when turning out the lights.) 

When our young photographer comes in, I switch to working on cataloguing the library books. I've not gotten a master list from James, just a vague number.  Fair enough.  There are a lot!  I have a few books I want to purchase, but don't want to do it until I have an idea of what we are holding.  This process has been made so much easier with the invention of the barcode and ISBN's.  Sadly, not all books have an ISBN and need to be manually processed.  The convention didn't start until 1969, and even then not all books can be found using that number.  You can see a start of the collection at my google books page. We have chosen to make this public to help other puzzlers find books they may be looking for.  The 154 books that have been catalogued so far took me 3 hours to enter.  Those are only 1/8th of the collection including our own contributions to the library.  I expect to have this finished by the end of the month.

Until next week, Happy Puzzling!

  

*Upon searching the internet later as my curiosity has now been engaged, I came across this little blip from Wikipedia:  "The Lowell Sun reported in November 1945 that Sgt. Francis J. Kilroy Jr. from Everett, Massachusetts, wrote "Kilroy will be here next week" on a barracks bulletin board at a Boca Raton, Florida, airbase while ill with flu, and the phrase was picked up by other airmen and quickly spread abroad.^[9] The Associated Press similarly reported Sgt. Kilroy's account of being hospitalized early in World War II, and his friend Sgt. James Maloney wrote the phrase on a bulletin board. Maloney continued to write the shortened phrase when he was shipped out a month later, according to the AP account, and other airmen soon picked it up. Francis Kilroy only wrote the phrase a couple of times.^[6][17]"  I guess it is fitting that these two pieces ended up here. 

Dexterity puzzles and one big nut!

One of the collections we recieved was one of Dexterity puzzles.  There must be 1000's in what we have acquired.  This collection takes up most of the cabinets that have been installed in the chest room. When I first encountered these puzzles, I was not very interested in them.  I thought they were just toys to keep young children occupied.  I know I've written about these before, but the more I unbox, the more interesting they become.  

The collection has a wide variety of different styles. The first of course is the kind that you need to put a ball into a hole.  These are mostly a shake and pray that it gets in the correct place.  I have rotten luck with this kind.

The second type are small square boxes that have different internal parts.  These come in a wide variety of styles and sizes.  These puzzles I am not afraid to hand to non-puzzlers.  They are virtually impossible to break, but if they do break, we have so many duplicates of them that it doesn't really matter too much.  (I know James is rolling his eyes at me and I can see the smoke coming out of his ears, but when I was in Asia, I literally acquired 100's of these small square cubes.)

The third type is a maze puzzle that has a ball to be maneuvered through the maze.

The next kind has water inside.  These are trickier than they look.  The problem with them is that some of the older pieces have lost their water through evaporation via the rubber stoppers.  

Next up is my favorite type: Mercury mazes. I remember these from my childhood and am as equally enamored with them today as I was then.  I could spend many hours just watching the mercury move around the puzzle.  Sadly, Mercury has been declared a harmful substance so the puzzles must be off limits for any visitors to the HDM Puzzle Palace Museum. 

This collection is so extensive that there is no way a person could solve all of them in a years time.  I believe it would take many more years than I have left to solve each of these puzzles.  We've played quite a bit with them and find them to be a nice amusement.  

There is another puzzle that we 'acquired'.  Or perhaps I should say it came back full circle.  George got the monkey nut puzzle when he was in the Seychelles. He gave it to James when we visited after IPP London in 2014.  Today I unpacked it and it is now in the museum.  Of course when I opened it, it immediatly broke into pieces.  I spent the next half hour putting it back together again.  I know it's against my non-playing rule, but I just couldn't help myself.  

What makes this puzzle special is that it is a natural puzzle.  No two are alike.  It seems to be quite hard to come by, no only because of the remote location of them, but also because they usually fall to the ground and break into pieces which makes it impossible to complete.  After doing a bit of research, I've discovered that they are also found in Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand.  I hope that in one of our next trips we would be able find a few more of these.  I would love to see one in nature and watch it cure.  

Now on to the weekly museum update. The garage is completely unboxed.  All of the shelving units have been filled and the shelves around the outside of the garage are filling up nicely.  We have left the central part of it empty so that we can still park one car inside if we choose to.  Odds are highly agains this as in reality, this is now just an extension of the house.  It is all under air and I don't want to have exhaust fumes from any vehicle damaging the puzzles.  (I still drive a gas guzzling VW beetle while waiting on my Tesla Roadster to come in.) 

I have been like a whirling dervish in my attempt to unbox these puzzles.  I have completely unboxed all but two rooms worth of puzzles.  We still have the disentanglement puzzles to open as well as the jugs.  Other than those, all the puzzles have been opened and put on display.  This has been a true labor of love.  I wake at 7 and if we are staying in the museum I start working right away.  If we are at Puzzle Palace, I am over there by 9 and work through until 5 pm.  This has become a 'real job' for me.  One that I love much more than any other I have had before.  

Next week, I'll take you on a tour of the chest room.  That should excite a few of my readers. 

Dexterity puzzles, sliding tiles, and yet another update

We have been working non-stop on unboxing puzzles.  Or should I say I've been unboxing while George puts together shelves and breaks down boxes.  We have a wonderful system going on now.  When unpacking, each piece of paper has to be flattened out because there are many small bits of paper in between each of these pieces.  Most of which are solutions that we don't want to lose.  After this, they are folded into quarters and placed into the empty packing boxes. These are then stacked under the stairs where they await our recycling guys who must hate us by now.  The last load was 39 boxes full of paper and countless others that were broken down.  

As of Sunday 20 June, I had unpacked all but 22 boxes from the first batch.  I've run into a problem.  We need glass shelves.  Our current system of buying out Ikea when they come in is no longer working.  I really need a better source.  This week I will tackle the dexterity puzzles while George builds another hanging wall.  I'm so surprise by the amount of MIP hanging puzzles we have from this collection.  The laundry room/bar walls are already filled and we haven't put up half of the puzzles that are available.  I intend to have the workmen come back in and install more of the peg system in both the laundry room and on the cabana bathroom walls. 

It is my intent to have all puzzles put in place, then go back through and catalogue each piece.  As new puzzles come in to Puzzle Palace, I photograph them and add the information to a spread sheet which George will then import into his database that I hope he will finish by next summer.  This is an immense undertaking and I now understand why James has only done around 20% of the cataloguing. This is a project that could only be done by a retired person or one whose full time job is only this.  I'm not complaining nor criticizing James for not finishing cataloguing the entire collection, just expressing the vast amount of time that will be involved.

While we wait for the next load of boxes to come in, I will be working on labeling all of the existing cabinetry.  While we know the items in each section, we have yet to label them geographically.  With this vast number of puzzles, we realize this is a necessity here.

Which of course brings me to today's puzzles.  Dexterity puzzles and sliding tiles.  I'll start with the latter.  We had fully intended to have everything in the HDM Puzzle Palace Museum follow the "display & play" policy we have in our own home.  Unfortunately, with these puzzles this has proven impossible. There are just too many of them to be able to do this with.  I have filled 2-47 inch x 36 inch drawers full of these things.  The puzzles had to be stacked on their sides to be able to accommodate all of the puzzles, and even that didn't work.  We have another drawer half filled with these things. 

The laundry room walls are completely covered in puzzles of this sort and I have plans to have the workmen return and build more for us. 

Dexterity puzzles are another batch that we have plenty of.  In this case, we have the metal cabinets that James sent along with us. These measure 24"x32" and are filled with all modern dexterity puzzles.  They take up 38 of the cabinet drawers.  

There are 6 drawers filled with water filled puzzles and another 2 1/2 map drawers filled with antique dexterity puzzles.  In the jigsaw library there are countless drawers filled with the more antique dexterity type puzzles.  

My favorite so far are the mercury filled puzzles.  These came in a plastic box with a note telling us of the content. I have placed them in a drawer on their own so I can easily show them to some of our 'older' guests.  

Here's hoping we get another truckload of boxes this week. I'm getting anxious about this now.  There is still so much left to do and I am determined to have everything up on shelves by October.

On the Tenth Day of Christmas

My true love gave to me
Ten Dexterities

Nine Tiles Sliding 
Eight Twisted Tangles
Seven wooden puzzles 
Six Stars-a-shining
Five Puzzle Rings
Four Revo Mazes
Three Diamond Puzzles
Two Crystal Dolphins
And a Santa on a tree.  


Nothing overly exciting here.  These are from two different sets of key chain dexterity puzzles.  One set was purchased at one of my many visits to the Cubetwist warehouse.  While the other was from an unnamed site.  Half and half I would guess.  The second set was yet another give away from drinks, but this time I didn't drink them.  I ended up purchasing them only to have them arrive in HK and find out it was the same set I already had...


Now in the past, I've had complaints from one in particular (who later dropped the ball big time I might add) about not being as creative as other posts might have been and I realize this falls into that category and anyway, we finish what we start now don't we.  But look at that tree. It's full!  If we add any more puzzles to it, it will tip over.  Oh wait, it already has.  It's laying on the bed.  :-)  All will be revealed on day 12.