This is the fourth consecutive Holidailies that I’ve been spending a fair chunk of my “casual gaming” time on the Happy Color app. A while back, I did try the Dazzly app, in which you drop “gems” into spaces to make designs, but the free version was hampered enough by ads and premium-only images that I couldn’t get a good sense if I’d like it enough to pay for it. It’s still on my phone but I haven’t touched it in a while.

The holiday focus I had when I last wrote about Happy Color has continued in 2023. I’ve been trying to do all the new pictures that show up in the Holidays tab, as well as catch up on ones I missed in earlier years plus all the bonus ones from this and previous years. I’ve missed some, so hope to clean that up next year, but since there’s no keyword search it’s possible I’m aiming for the impossible. Right now I’m in the thick of Christmas pictures and hoo boy are there a lot of them I skipped over in previous years.

I am also still keeping up with the daily pictures, though I usually don’t start them the day they show up (unless they’re holiday pictures, in which case I do, because holiday takes priority). Instead, I wait until the picture of the week has been chosen and then do all the dailies from the previous week. Why? Because sometimes the picture of the week is a daily, and I want to do the original and the newly colored for picture of the week version one right after the other so they show in my completed tab side by side. Because yes, I am still doing that, too, coloring pictures in pairs. I am delighted when I can link pairs together however tenuously to do quads or more, like these four ornaments with bows on top:

 

I wait to finish all the pictures of the week and their counterparts until the picture of the month is chosen, because of course I want the original picture, the picture of the week version, and the picture of the month version all together in my completed tab. I do have to find a related image to make that trio a quad. Here’s the October group:

 
In addition to the holidays and the dailies and the pics of the week and the month, I’m also still doing the mystery pictures, one of which comes out every Sunday. These appear as a blank white space, so you can’t see what it’s a picture of until you fill in the colors. I’ve taken different approaches to these over the years: doing the colors in ascending number order, doing all of the colors in one area before moving to another, doing all the odd numbered colors first to get an idea of what the picture is sooner, doing the light and/or grey(ish) colors first because the checkered grey blobs that highlight where they go show up better on the white background than mixed in among other colors. Sometimes I do a bit of all of those in the course of one mystery.

Time to get back to coloring. Yesterday was Cookie Day, so that meant time away from the many many Christmas pictures from years past I’m trying to complete, and while I did catch up with Hanukkah ones last year, new ones should be showing up any day now, so as you can see, I’m very busy.

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On this date in 2022: A Week in Photos: 2022, Part 48
2021: When It Rains
2020: Skiing Through a Pandemic
2019: Day 1 of Unknown
2018: Crossing the Streams
2017: Fall Road Trip, Part the First
2016: Skol Vikings
2015: On Not Working
2014: Brain Training
2013: In Which My Brain is Fried
2012: Private Leander W.
2009 through 2011: No journal entries
2008: It’s Holidailies Time
2007: No entry
2006: I Used to Crochet