I am elated to announce that

• Do a much more thorough job of initial sorting.  In the first section, since I had never worked with any of the pieces before and didn’t have any kind of sense what was what, I didn’t do a very good job of sorting the pieces.  I designated one bucket for each of the following – all the animals, anything that was blue (which was the sky and the underwater stuff), anything that looked like a clownfish, anything that looked like a hot air balloon, and the border pieces.  As anyone reading this who has also worked on or completed Life knows, this is not NEARLY specific enough.  So, needless to say, I had a ton of refining to do in the sorting process throughout the section.  Now that I have spent almost 3 years looking at the puzzle pieces and the textures, I think I will have a much easier time sorting this next section.  It will take me a lot longer to get through the initial sort process this time, but it will pay big dividends in the end when I can easily pick out a particular animal to work on or a specific balloon, etc.  I think having looked at the pieces for so long, even though the next section has different stuff, will help me tremendously.  I will have a little better understanding of  how to sort a clownfish piece from a balloon piece, for example.
• Don’t save the worst parts for last.  My intention when I first started the puzzle was to do the border, followed by the hot air balloons, and then move immediately into the clownfish as all the other Hall of Fame stories on the Life website I’d read indicated that the clownfish were the hardest part of the section.  For some reason, and I’m not quite sure why now, I didn’t follow through on that.  Regretably, I ended up tackling the clownfish almost dead last (followed only by the even more difficult area between the waterline and the start of the clownfish).  I won’t make that mistake again.  Luckily, there are only a few clownfish in this next section.  Most of the fish in Part 2 are different from one another and should be much easier to figure out, but the area between waterline and fish will still need to be tackled early on to prevent having the hardest sections to do last.
• Double and triple check floor and clothing after each puzzling session.  Not following this advice could be the reason I am missing one piece!