Puzzles

DID YOU KNOW?

We are now carrying puzzles. Two of them, in fact.

Actually we do have more on order, on the way, but it turns out puzzles have been very popular these days, and things have been backordered or out of stock.

To celebrate this, that we’re now carrying puzzles, I thought I would share with you our own puzzle that we recently finished.

We ordered it near the beginning of the pandemic, and it turns out every other shop was more ahead of the curve than us, and so all the puzzles were sold out except this one. Joy to the world! I called it a distraction from the stresses of life, and Jon called it A Distraction Liz Can We Re-Focus On This Email Order.

It turns out Caleb is pretty into puzzles. At the beginning, when all the pieces were loose and overwhelming, we did some sorting together, like we would put all of the yellow pieces together for him to do. Naomi, on the other hand, is not really a puzzle person (yet?). While a part of it surely is the age difference, it’s crazy how different these two personalities are. She would do this horrible things like grin and joke around and say this piece goes here? No? Here? And it would be a piece of brick attached to the donkey’s head or something.

And in the end, who had the deeply satisfying task of putting in the final piece? No one. We were, in fact, missing two pieces.

I occasionally get a puzzle from Value Village, and even outside of these pandemic times, people have always been shocked—what if those are missing pieces? What if you spend hours putting it all together and you can’t finish it?? Turns out, that even if you buy one new, you might be missing a few. Another metaphor for life. Especially if you have kids.

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In the grand scheme of writing this blog, there are posts that are faster to write and posts that take longer, whether it’s because I need to take more detailed photos or the photos need more set up or writing samples, or because the screws are all a bit loose up there for me. I try to have a little variety in the blog, longer posts, shorter posts, weekly updates, etc. And I do try and plan things out ahead of time, what we’re expecting to come in, what I know I need to share about.

I had sort of anticipated this post would be relatively quick to get up, and yet, it was staggering.

The length of time it took to complete this puzzle (six weeks?) meant I was sifting through six weeks worth of photos to try and find all the photos I’d taken of doing the puzzle (I did not find them all). Many blog photos are taken with my phone, and when I’m doing blog photos I need to take the same shot over and over again just in case, and I also have many photos of naked children, the cat in unusual places, weird things I need to send to Jon like questions like pop up browsers alerting me to action or smudgey expiration dates on cream, the cat and dog sleeping together, photos of things I’d like to remember for later (ha ha). I think I was vaguely planning on relying on the search functionality where you can search for a word or a face and it brings up all the photos that include that face or object, which has been very helpful in the past. (In fact, it is how I compiled this blog post, which involves bookshelves.) Puzzle is not a searchable word, in case you were wondering.

In any case, I hope you are finding lots of ways to keep your brain working.