Okay, now before you go thinking that I’m getting all philosophical and religious, let me explain…

As I posted in my previous entry, I believe I have run into my first official “missing” piece.  It’s the solid orange piece going into the tail fin of one of the orange clownfish.  I have searched and searched through all my remaining pieces and cannot find it.  Then, a couple of days ago I discovered the blog of a fellow “Life” puzzle enthusiast, Charly, who lives in Chile.  He is also completing Section 1 currently, and we’ve been sharing experiences on the easy vs. OMG hard parts of doing this beast.  While looking at his blog, I discovered an entry that shows an up close detail picture of the orange clownfish where my piece is missing.  A light bulb went on at this point and I thought, “Oh great!  I can use his picture to look at my own and see if I might have one piece in the wrong spot that is making it look like I have a missing piece when I really don’t.”  Seems like a fantastic idea, right?  Well, it should have been, except….

His puzzle is cut slightly different than mine!  I couldn’t believe it as I would have thought all the Life puzzles were cut in the exact same way, but apparently, they are not.  Even though our picture is exactly the same for that area, his pieces are cut in a different way so that his piece might be one with three knobs sticking out, and mine might only have two.  Isn’t that bizarre?  Maybe to those of you out there who have been doing large puzzles far longer than I, you might say…of course, you silly goose, not all puzzles are cut the same way, even when it’s the same picture, but I sure didn’t know.

So, my initially brilliant idea to figure out if I had something mixed up in the puzzle turned out to be a bust, but I did learn something new that was far more interesting….not all “Life” is created equal!