"About A Million Marbles"

Day 93: My cousin Toni surprised me this year with a Christmas gift of a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle entitled "About a Million Marbles." I cringed inwardly at the age of it, fearing missing pieces. "Eh, I'll put it together once anyway," I said to myself, and dragged out the card table and the cookie sheets and proceeded to lay out every piece rightside-up. The edge went together in about an hour, and by bedtime, I had a few pieces added to the next row in. That was my plan of attack: start from the edge and work in, because there was no hope of trying the old "put the blue bits together first" method.

New Year's Day saw me out on the trail, leaving only an hour or so in the evening to resume puzzling, but yesterday, I settled in shortly after breakfast and worked all day...no exaggeration, all frigging day!...and an hour past the time when I usually retire. I was positive I'd found several places where a piece was missing. I cannot abide a missing puzzle piece, but I'd vowed to complete it, and complete it I would. This morning, with about 100 pieces still on the cookie sheets, I began again. The longer I worked, the more convinced I became that some pieces were gone, but because it was marbles...and we all know how much I like marbles...I was thinking that if it was only missing one, perhaps two pieces, I'd keep it anyway and label the box accordingly.

I wasn't counting empty holes (impossible anyway due to the irregularly shaped pieces), and as I got down to the last dozen, I was still convinced some were missing. Ten...nine...eight...seven...six...five...what the hell? I had four pieces left and only three open spots! I ran my hands over the surface and discovered one more open space I hadn't seen. Four...three...two...one...DONE!

I love jigsaw puzzles. I love HARD jigsaw puzzles (complex patterns and "monochrome" color schemes), but not gimmicky ones (same picture printed on both sides, and so on). My usual preference is for 1000-piece or greater, but in this case, I'm quite content with a mere 500 pieces. This one goes on my shelf of favorites, for sure!

Thanks to the addition of the cat's-eyes accenting the puzzle (a gift from my sister-of-the-heart, Patty), my personal collection now holds 3817 marbles and weighs about 50 pounds. While that's not even close to a million marbles, I'm hoping to bring the total to 5000 some day.