Opening the box! Four years ago today, the UPS man delivered my 28-pound package of puzzling joy, and yesterday marked the four-year anniversary of starting this blog! Wow, it’s hard to believe that I have been doing this for so long. Click here and here to see those historic posts once again. 🙂 This puzzle entitled, Life: The Great Challenge, has certainly been a metaphor in my journey with this big, beautiful beast. Here are some of the many Life…
Wow! I can’t believe it’s been a month since I last updated the blog. It has been super busy around the house, and I honestly haven’t gotten in a good deal of time lately. Lots of company in and out….Derek, Cole, and I all had strep throat at the same time (THAT was fun!!), and poor Derek also got Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease (really, just a virus not an actual disease). We’re also in the process of re-doing our…
Section 3 is well underway, even though I have not posted anything recently, I have been getting in some good puzzling time. I got some new “working boards” that are small, but sturdy and have really allowed me to work on the puzzle in the evenings while still spending time with Randy. Good start on the fishies! I just bring up one or two of the small working boards, and a particular bucket of pieces and work in the family…
So I officially opened the bag for Section #3 and started sorting on April 17th. This is now my 3rd go round with the sorting, and I am finding that as I do each section, the sorting gets easier and faster, and I’m much more detailed with my buckets. I went from about 5 or 6 buckets in Section 1, 12 buckets for Section 2 to 18 or so for Section 3. This time I sorted into the following buckets:…
Just a couple of new photos of the process of flipping Section 2 over on the puzzle board. At least this time it should go faster because I’ve done this process once and figured out the best way to flip each section over and get it back together. I anticipate I should be ready for contact papering by end of the day today. Here’s a couple of pictures… Preparing the mini section for removal from rest of puzzle. The extracted…
SECTION 2 IS FINISHED!!! Woo Hoo! Today, April 13, 2014, marks the completion of Section 2 and 50% of the entire puzzle. Wow, it doesn’t seem possible that I am finally halfway done, but at the same time it also seems like I’ve been working on this project FOREVER! LOL Here are my overall statistics… Section 1: 2 years, 8 months and 10 days assembly time Section 2: 1 year and 11 days assembly time Section 3: Goal is to…
It’s amazing what a little alone time three days a week can do for a puzzling momma! I have been getting in at least an hour or so on these days and it has been wonderful. It’s also getting a lot easier since I have a lot less pieces to weed through to find the right one as I get closer and closer to the end. Here are a couple of picture updates. As you can see, all that remains…
I can’t believe that I have gotten to work on the puzzle multiple times this week – it makes me sooo happy. Between yesterday and today I was able to place well over 200 pieces, I think. Very excited about that. I have also set a new goal for myself so that I can finish this section up in a timely manner and then take a small puzzling break to do a thorough spring cleaning of my house, and to…
It’s been three weeks since Derek started school, and I’m so pleased to report that each day it has gotten a little easier than the previous time. He still likes me to stay with him for a few minutes or “10 and 5 minutes” as he likes to say. LOL I usually sneak out after just a few minutes and he seems to be doing okay with that. So, each day I have been getting in at least 45 minutes…
Today was Derek’s official first day of preschool, and it surprisingly did not start off well. For months on end, we heard nothing but “I wanna go to school….when can I go to school?”….etc from him. But then right before he had his “try it out – discovery day” at school back in January, he started saying that he didn’t want to go. So we kind of dropped it for a while. Then as scheduled, he started this morning. We…