Posts Tagged ‘jigsaw puzzling’
Got Away
Made it to the lake place yesterday afternoon for a few days of solo holiday. Without doing much in the way of additional cleanup of snow from Wednesday, in the morning I walked Asher with Cyndie, and we did horse chores together. The scenery was pretty striking, with the bright morning sunshine bouncing off the oodles of snow that had fallen.
The horses didn’t seem as fixated on their grain as usual, and Light even left her food to seek some hands-on attention from Cyndie. After obliging Light with lots of robust scratching, Cyndie ended up covered in shedded horse hair. When she got back to the house, Cyndie changed her shirt but moments later reported she was soon covered in dog hair.
After breakfast, Cyndie assembled enough home-cooked meals from our freezer to feed me for more than a week and sent me on my way for the drive to the lake. Before I left, I drove my car around the hay shed a couple of times to convince myself the crude job I did of clearing the heavy, wet snow would be adequate for traffic while I was away. We are expecting the farrier today.
I texted a message to Cyndie to let her know the tire tracks were mine and not some unexpected visitor. When we were walking Asher first thing in the morning, I spotted footprints in the deep snow of the north loop trail, so we trudged over to check them out. Cyndie asked if they were mine from the day before when I brought Asher back from the neighbors’, but I said no. We wondered who would have been walking on our trail.
Then, when we came upon a pile of branches under the snow, I realized it was me who had made those tracks. I remembered noticing the branches and had thought it was a limb that had fallen in the storm before figuring out it was the pile I had created when cutting up the downed tree a couple of days before.
Memory problems much, John?
When I had been pulling Asher down the middle of the unplowed road after his escape, I spotted a truck coming toward us and diverted to the ditch to give the driver the full width of the road to navigate his way against the drifts. We then made our way along that short section of our trail to reach our driveway. I blame the temper tantrum I was having at the time for completely forgetting we’d made those tracks less than 24 hours before. [shaking my head in embarrassment]
There is a lot less snow in Hayward. The short leg of the driveway to our place hadn’t even been plowed.
I am going to see how long I can keep myself from shoveling the front steps as an exercise in letting one of my compulsions go unaddressed for once.
While puzzling in the afternoon, I listened to a couple of 1960s recordings of Bill Cosby’s standup routines. I have no idea what caused me to think of choosing that.
I think my mind really needs to get away for a while.
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Enormous Void
Since I no longer work for a living, yesterday’s New Year’s Day holiday was no different than a typical Wednesday for me. Hoping to pay some respect to the festive occasion, I rustled up a college football game on television to entertain me in fine holiday fashion. That is when I unexpectedly witnessed a brief statement of news from a sports announcer.
Their “BREAKING NEWS” moment revealed to me there had been a terrorist attack in New Orleans, and it was causing a 24-hour delay in the playoff game scheduled to happen in the stadium there. Not the most joyful start for a new year.
The (peaceful) void in our home due to Asher’s week with a trainer has been filled after Cyndie and I picked him up on Tuesday. The rabbits and lackadaisical pigeons better take note that the sheriff’s back in town. I’m sure we will have plenty of opportunities to practice the “Leave IT!” command in the days ahead.
There was also a void in the latest jigsaw puzzle I assembled that had me overthinking many of my decisions about which piece went where.
After the initial build, there comes some sectional rearranging, which then permits the opening of a second bag of pieces to complete a surprise middle. Good fun in a hand-me-over gift from my sister, Judy. My hat’s off to the artist who created the multitude of entertaining details and strategically repeated portions that allow the image to be manipulated like the last page of a MAD magazine.
Ultimately, however, the most enormous void I am experiencing is the result of a member of my virtual community, Brainstorms MetaNetwork, having ended his life between Christmas and New Year’s. That was such shockingly unexpected information to read on a typical pass through new posts Tuesday morning.
I never met him in real life, but we’ve been hanging out in the same discussion spaces online for more than a couple of decades. It definitely strikes a nerve knowing he dealt with depression and some stressful life situations. He has left a lot of folks with challenges of grief, and it has currently tarnished the start of the new year for us.
I keep seeing that hole in the puzzle I built and thinking that is what our virtual community looks like this week.
I’m sure the families and friends of victims of the incident in New Orleans early yesterday morning are feeling even larger holes in their lives today.
It feels like there isn’t enough love to fill the void, but what better response could I give?
Join me, because we can conjure love from out of nowhere by simply thinking it into existence and then feeling it in our hearts. On top of that, when we are focused on love, and manifesting it into being, there is a simultaneous absence of hate occurring. Less hate, more love. Send it! Feed the world what it truly needs.
There is a tremendous void deserving of our attention, and it is within the reach of all of our hearts.
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Escape Puzzle
’Twas the day before Christmas, and what am I doing? Playing with the new gift I’ve already received from Elysa!
It’s an “escape puzzle” from Ravensburger. The information says the puzzle is different than the image on the box. I assumed that might mean completely different, so I didn’t closely look at the cover at first. Eventually, I noticed it’s mostly the same with a few minor differences.
The assembly was just easy enough to keep me engaged all the way to the end in one afternoon. Knowing where some of the details don’t match the cover image doesn’t automatically solve any riddles for me, but at least I have a good idea of where I should be looking.
Now comes the hard part. There are indications that it’s a numbers game and math will be involved. Oh, joy.
Here’s hoping you can enjoy some diversions from the real world this Christmas Eve and make an effort to have visions of sugar-plums dancing in your head.
Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!
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Spending Time
A zone of mental energy resonates when a jigsaw puzzler hits their stride and loses track of the world while reassembling an image, one piece at a time. I’m one of those who enjoy that mental resonation, yet I sometimes question the value of the outcome merely being a picture that will soon be disassembled and returned to a box and stored out of sight.
I recently discovered that I experience a similar mental energy reward by digging up weeds from the gravel portion of the driveway loop around the hay shed. In some ways, it provides a more powerful reward than jigsaw puzzling because the activity results are not then stored in a box on a shelf.
Every time I go past that weeded gravel and see how much better it looks, I enjoy a bonus reward from the previous effort. There is also a bonus brought on by time. The puzzle is never-ending because in no time at all, there will be new weeds available for pulling.
Actually, that image might make for a good challenge in a jigsaw puzzle.
On a rainy day when still in shock from an unanticipated dose of grief, losing myself in a repetitive routine task offers a welcome respite. It’s hard to tell if the body aches I experience at the end of the day come more from activity or sorrow.
When the heart hurts, a whole lot of the rest of us hurts, too.
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Puzzling Thoughts
There are hints in this transition toward the months of spending more time indoors than out, that jigsaw puzzling season is going to start very soon for me. The increased hours of darkness are a significant influence on my thinking, but I have also noticed lately that my photographic eye is trending toward images that deserve to be cut into a thousand pieces.
Maybe not each of those, but I’d enjoy a crack at assembling a puzzle out of the first one. I’m a sucker for the period when the seed plumes of our ornamental tall grasses show up and look a little like fireworks displays.
I started the day yesterday with a 6-month teeth cleaning appointment which is a necessary evil that isn’t all that fun to endure but feels great when completed. The day only gets better after that, even if the only real work undertaken involves managing the manure composting area.
It has been hard to keep the piles cooking lately. This time of year the composting process slows down, forcing me to move some piles before they have broken down as much as I’d like. It helps me to have as many piles as possible cleared out to leave plenty of space for dumping loads of frozen manure throughout the winter months.
This year we are still using the composted material to fill low spots around the edges of the driveway pavement remaining up by the house. It’s rare that I don’t have uses for the custom soil cultivated from our horses’ manure, but after the driveway landscaping is completed once and for all, I may be looking for a spot to stockpile accumulating inventory.
The horses never slow down their production, regardless of my finding new ways to put it to good use.
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Blind Spot
In my opinion, eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as it is generally made out to be. After a recent incident of missing puzzle pieces, I have lost all confidence in my own ability to see what’s right in front of my face.
Upon completing the first of the latest puzzles my sister shared with us, there were two missing pieces. Having knocked plenty off the table while assembly was in progress, my initial response was to search the rug below. I laid down to scan the surface but found nothing.
A day later, we spread out the 2000 pieces of the next puzzle. I assembled all but one piece of the border and started wondering if that last piece might have fallen to the floor. By merely bending over to scan the floor, I instantly caught sight of one of the missing pieces from the previous puzzle.
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Where the heck was that piece when I looked for it the day before? More importantly, how did my eyes fail to see what was laying out in plain sight?
A short while later, between drying baking bowls and utensils, I spotted the last border piece that had been evading my eyes up to that point. I had abandoned the Vikings game after it became an obvious losing effort to join the party going on in the kitchen. Since my skills aren’t in the preparation of food, I make my contribution by cleaning up afterward.
Our friend, Melissa and our daughter, Elysa came for the day to help Cyndie in a second round of Christmas Cookie baking.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t seem to have any difficulty seeing the expanse of cookie options covering our countertops. My A1C levels might not be at their preferred number for a while.
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Welcome Distraction
Despite how it feels to me lately, my role as the only fully ambulatory person on the ranch is not without occasional opportunities to pause and reset my attitude. Last week we were treated to a visit from my sister, Judy, and her husband, Scott. They came bearing a range of gifts, not the least of which was lunch for the day.
They also picked up, much to my surprise, a couple of bags of my new favorite guilty pleasure snack treat [thank you, Carlos], PopCorners (BFY Brands). Cyndie had surreptitiously texted a special request to Judy after our latest grocery order wasn’t able to fulfill that line item on our order. Snack-errific!
It was refreshing to have Judy’s company on my noon trip to feed the horses where she tolerated extra time out in the elements while I made a few trips back and forth to the hay shed to restock the barn stash of bales.
The one treat that is lasting longer than the chocolate-covered pretzels Judy made is the hand-me-over jigsaw puzzles they left for us. A jigsaw puzzle is a gift that keeps on giving. They brought us three options and while eating dinner the other night, Cyndie and I debated which one to do first.
After we finished eating, I decided to just dump out the pieces of the puzzle we settled on. Without getting up from the table, we spread out and flipped up all 2000 pieces and started working on the outer border. Jigsaw puzzling soothes my brain like a Zen meditation. It is bringing order to chaos. There is a specific place for each piece and finding and placing those pieces is a series of mini-rewards set on repeat.
I woke up the next day and all I wanted to do was work on the puzzle some more.
It’s funny, the whole goal is to finish, except I don’t really want to. Going through the steps of finding and placing pieces ends up being more fun than actually completing the entire puzzle.
It’s a mental distraction that is very good for what ails me these days.
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Indoor Pursuits
One day after a big melt, everything froze solid again and the wind chill is biting. Putting on the equivalent of a spacesuit to walk the dog makes sense because when we step outside the cold feels like we are in outer space.
The horses didn’t seem to pay the Arctic cold much attention, except maybe to more fervently devour hay for fuel to generate desired body warmth. We didn’t waste much time after the morning “cheers” (Ian’s and my more descriptive variant of “chores”) of seeing they got properly fed, knocking away ice that formed on their waterer, and doing the requisite housekeeping under and around the barn overhang.
We headed straight back to the house to thaw out.
The rest of the day was given to indoor pursuits, beginning with scouring the local newspaper over a warm breakfast. Cyndie and I then each independently processed the day’s Wordle challenge. After that, I lost myself in a jigsaw puzzle while Cyndie was occupied at the other end of the old family table toiling on a craft project.
We also took turns scouring our closets and dressers for clothes we can live without in a burst of decluttering. Getting rid of shirts that I haven’t worn in years is an exercise I really enjoy. I need to be in the right mood for it to go smoothly and when I am, it becomes easier as I go to dig ever deeper and jettison excess versions of button-downs or short and long sleeve tees with minimal hesitation.
At this point, there are many shirts I was only wearing to the day-job that now deserve to be retired, since I’m no longer employed outside the home.
My uniform for working at home tends to be rather limited and one combination of base and outer layer pullover shirts can last me for days before needing to be tossed to the laundry.
It all gets covered with the spacesuit when we go outside anyway, so if I can avoid working up a sweat, nothing gets too dirty except the treasured outer covering of my lined Carhartt overalls. Those now have so many accumulated layers of having been soiled that they almost stand up on their own. Makes it increasingly easier to climb into them over time.
Anything to make the project of dressing for outer space a little less onerous between the hours of indoor pursuits where we are warm and cozy.
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Everything Fatigue
I can totally relate to the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine suffering metal fatigue last weekend. I’m feeling a bit of everything fatigue lately, although, I do my best to avoid raining debris all over people around me, unlike that airplane in Denver Saturday. 
I’m clinging to my thread of sanity with a weary, wavering grip. There is a climate calamity unraveling right in front of our eyes that appears to deserve a lot more change to our ways of life than the slow-responding societies around the globe are revealing any willingness to undertake. Communities are burning, flooding, freezing, suffering drought, or reaching intolerably high temperatures –sometimes experiencing an unlikely combination of the extremes– but I still climb in my gas-powered car and drive an hour to work like always.
It just feels wrong.
It also feels dangerous. Yesterday morning, I had a close encounter that used up some of my limited luck on avoiding a collision on the interstate. I commonly operate in cruise control mode with my car holding the speed and distance related to the vehicle in front of me. A business panel van passed me on the left and then slowed down entering a curve in the highway. My car maintained the cruise speed and caught right up beside the van in the turn as it slowed, at which point he decided to move into my lane.
I hit the brakes and swerved as little as possible, having no time to look to the lane to my right for clearance. My lunch tote on the front seat instantly relocated to the floor below.
It happened so fast, I didn’t have time to honk my horn to alert the other driver to my position. I suspect the assumption was that I had been passed and was no longer a concern. It wouldn’t surprise me if the other driver wasn’t even aware of having slowed at the curve.
The event provided me an unwelcome shot of adrenaline and triggered visions of a fate I flirt with two times a day, four days a week. Haunted by a belief that anything can go dangerously wrong at any time when commuting in traffic, I’m feeling the fatigue of having tolerated the risks of this trip for too many years.
I’m fatigued with the pandemic, its death toll, and everything related to coping with the ever-present threat of spreading the virus.
I’m even growing fatigued with our latest jigsaw puzzle. We picked one with way too much solid black background that is cut entirely of one primary classic puzzle piece shape: four arms, a knob on each end, two cutouts on each side. The only variation is the size and shape of each of those features.
It is very possible I will give myself permission to give up before placing every piece. That just depends on whether searching for the barely perceptible features of each completely black piece distracts me from the other angsts nibbling at me and releases the blessed endorphins when I stumble upon ones that fit.
Endorphins do wonders for fatigue.
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Project Endorphins
During the winter, I like to assemble jigsaw puzzles. With the pandemic forcing us to stay home, I have more opportunities to puzzle. Now that Cyndie has developed a new interest in puzzling, I am all the more enticed to feed the passion.
But I am torn. I have another project that is competing for my attention at the same time. I’ve started another wood sculpture out of a section of one of our ash trees that was cut down last year.
Last night, it occurred to me that working on shaping the wood gives me the same mental rewards as putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It’s tactile. It involves transforming something into a visually appealing end result.
If you have seen the Pixar/Disney computer-animated comedy-drama film, “Soul,” you will understand the euphoric trance of being “in the zone” of our passions.
Working to shape the wood with rough grit sandpaper, I felt the familiar euphoria of pleasing progress that was just like the reward I get from puzzling.
It’s also a lot like devouring a good book. You don’t want to put it down. You are willing to sacrifice sleep to continue progress. When you are away from [the book/puzzle/sculpting], all you want is to get back to it as soon as possible.
You want more of those project endorphins.
I want more of those project endorphins. Who has time to eat? How am I supposed to go to work?
I want more time to be in that euphoric zone.
For both projects.
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Relative Something 