I think most, if not all, readers of this blog know Stacey from My Jigsaw Journal and I have been really good friends for a long time. In fact, it has been over nine years now since she first contacted me via this blog when it was just about my build of the 24000-piece Life: The Great Challenge puzzle.
What most of you likely do not know is that until yesterday, September 4, 2026, we had never once met in person or even talked live on the phone! Crazy, right?! Know what’s even more crazy? We live only about 1.5 hours apart! No joke. 🤣 I’m sure you’re now asking why the heck it has taken us so long to meet up. There are a few reasons for this:
- I work full-time (sometimes even more) and don’t have a lot of downtime
- When we first “met” online, my oldest son (Derek) was only seven and his younger brother, Cole, was just four. Having such young kids definitely made it a bit more challenging to find time to visit without having to bring kiddos along
- Stacey has faced more than her fair share of health challenges as well which doesn’t make it easy for her to travel
We have; however, spent hundreds of hours texting each other over these last nine years. When we first met online we were sending emails back and forth for a bit until we both felt comfortable and then started texting each other instead. There were lots of times we texted multiple times a day, sometimes for hours while other times it might have been a week or two between texts due to various circumstances going on in our lives at the time.
Our mutual love of all things puzzle related is the foundation of our friendship. While we also have a ton of other things in common which is great, our conversations always come back to puzzles eventually. We know each other so well at this point that each one of us can look at any given puzzle and pretty much know immediately if the other will like it or absolutely hate it. For the most part we have pretty similar taste, but enough differences to keep things interesting. This makes exchanging puzzles with one another fun because we know that we get to try puzzles we like without having to purchase all of them ourselves. It’s a great system!
So a few months ago when Stacey suggested maybe we try to meet up at my house, I was surprised but delighted by the idea. We made plans for early September and began thinking about what we wanted to do — exchange some recent puzzles in person, chat, play puzzle chess, and puzzle together for the first time.
We started the visit with a puzzle exchange and a delightful birthday gift (my birthday was 2 days before we met) from Stacey. She knows me very well as she got me two puzzles that I absolutely love and cannot wait to put together. Don’t these look fun? Of course they do! LOL
Next we played puzzle chess. I had only just started hearing about puzzle chess very recently and it was through Emilie @ The Casual Puzzler (You Tuber) that I first heard it. So when Stacey said she wanted to try it, I was game. It is a lot harder than it looks to be honest. I had no idea what to expect other than to be fun which it was. We found out that the chess timer kind of stresses me out a bit and I really struggled to quickly find pieces that attached to another piece. Once the game ended and Stacey won, we finished the rest of the puzzle without the timer and I did just fine. It was a cute little Halloween image by Crocodile Creek. Had never heard of this brand before, but it had a Ceaco feel to it and was pretty shiny. with white paper backing on it.
We were able to catch a Stacey Stance image so that was good.
One thing this game really emphasized — I am not going to be doing speed puzzling competitions any time soon. 🤣
It was so much fun getting to finally put a voice and a face with the personality I have come to know and cherish over the nine years we’ve been chatting. That was one of the highlights of the visit for sure. Neither of us like taking photos, but we did manage to capture a couple. I’m sure Stacey will post the other pics from the day, but I will share this one we took just as Stacey and her daughter were about to leave.
