While we were celebrating Mike’s birthday last weekend with some much-deserved family time, my sister Ashlee managed to convince my mom that we should put together a Halloween themed puzzle.
Now, I haven’t done a puzzle in over a decade outside of something pixelated on my phone.
At the very least, you could argue that building a Lego set is a lot like fitting puzzle pieces together, right?
Except Lego sets come with detailed and step-by-step instructions that you follow until the project is complete – boxed puzzles don’t have that nifty feature.
No, instead you get a blurry rendition of the puzzle as your aspiration and a mess of pieces that are often stuck together in weird combinations.
Ashlee assured mom that the puzzle adventure would be nostalgic and fun and that we could manage it.
After all, we both have Associate degrees and careers that require us to pay attention to detail and produce results in a timely manner.
Of course, I had my doubts because I wasn’t there on this shopping trip where said 1,000-piece puzzle was chosen, but her confidence was a little contagious.
I mean, it’s only a puzzle, how hard could it be?
We used to do plenty of these boxed messes as children – as long as we didn’t drop or lose any pieces we should have been able to manage just fine.
Well, we were wrong.
Our game plan sounded simple in the beginning – find all the edge pieces, connect said pieces and then work towards filling in the middle bits.
A good half hour or so was set aside just to sort the puzzle pieces before we began and I also opted to separate the stand out pieces that formed various Jack O’ Lanterns as part of the picture.
Given the overall color differences between the orange and gold pumpkin pieces among the rest of the cool-toned blues, whites, grey, and greens, I thought it’d be easy as pie.
Plus, most of the pumpkins were supposed to be rather large and once I completed my first one, I was excited for the rest.
Oh, but how far do the prideful fall?
Ashlee worked on the border pieces up until I grew frustrated while squinting at miniscule flickers of yellow and gold on several pieces.
I gave up on my quest and instead opted to re-sort the other pieces and found a few edges that we missed.
Well, now I was worried and I felt like the whole puzzle was taunting me.
I mean, we were trying to build that border for almost five hours before deciding on pausing the project for another day.
Plus, my eyes were sore and dry from staring at terrible renditions of tree bark and the surface of the moon in vain attempts to help Ashlee.
By the time she headed back to Bryan, we were missing a handful of border pieces and I’m determined to at least fix that before the next time she comes to visit.
The hard part now is just keeping the cats from stealing pieces – Jack-Jack is a notorious thief and has made off with my toothbrush on several occasions and anything he can drag off a towel rack or bar.
