It all started back in early December when we were at a local bookstore and Donna bought a jigsaw puzzle. We thought it might be a nice way to while away the hours during the cold winter days. If you follow my Instagram, you have noticed that it has become an addiction. I will usually post a photo of the completed puzzle or sometimes the work in progress. For the heck of it, I just went back and counted the puzzles we have done since December and came up with 55!
We have bought eight or nine new puzzles for ourselves, but most of the puzzles have come from scouring the three Klamath Falls thrift stores where we can get a used jigsaw puzzle for a dollar or three. If we didn’t shop frugally I don’t think there would be anyway to afford our puzzle habit.
You take your chances with used puzzles because sometimes they are missing a piece or two. This has happed maybe 25% of the time, so we just shrug it off as the cost of business, but this last spate of puzzles has changed our minds. It all started innocently enough when we bought 4 puzzles at one place and started doing them. The first one we started was a smaller 500 piece puzzle of a display of colorful magic markers. When we finished the puzzle it turned out to be missing one of its pieces.
While sorting pieces to find the border of the colorful marker puzzle, we found four pieces that didn’t belong at all, they looked like they came from a puzzle with hot air balloons as the theme. Well, as it turns out, one of the four puzzles we bought at the same time was a 1000 piece puzzle of hot air balloons. Maybe that is where those extra pieces go and if we are very lucky, the missing colorful marker piece might be in the hot air balloon box.
Hmmm, now what. Before starting either of the 2 puzzles we still had left from that store, we went back there to look for a hot air balloon puzzle. Sure enough, there was a 500 piece one, so we picked it up. There were also two more different 500 piece puzzles from the same company and series, chocolate candy and a street scene, so we bought them too, just in case. And here is where it gets really interesting.
We, of course, did the hot air balloon puzzle first. Those 4 extra pieces fit right in like they belonged, because they did. But the puzzle was missing three different pieces. And, as a “bonus”, there were four different dark brown pieces that didn’t belong at all. We thought we knew just where they would go too.
So we did the “Life is a Box Chocolates” puzzle next. Sure enough, those four extra pieces in the hot air balloon box belonged right here. As Forrest Gump’s mom said, you ‘never know what you were going to get’, but if you are following this, you can guess what we got, two more missing pieces and, surprise, one that didn’t belong.
So we started the last of our trio of puzzles hoping that this extra extra piece might go into our street scene one. While also hoping to possibly find any of the other missing pieces from the previous 2 puzzles and maybe even the one from the puzzle that started it all, Colorful Makers. Yippee, that last extra piece did go into this puzzle, but unfortunately, there was a totally different piece missing.
As usual though, it did have two extra pieces that didn’t belong in the puzzle, or anything else we have here right now…