Solving Puzzles

At our home, we have lots of puzzles. We have cheap puzzles from the dollar store, where pieces will "fit" in more than one place, so you have to make sure the colors and lines match as well as the bumps and gaps on the pieces, and sometimes that is really hard, and you aren't sure that a piece goes where it goes until you have all the pieces that fit in around it. We have children's puzzles that are so simple that we have literally attempted to do put them together blindfolded - and made progress! We have puzzles with pieces that are 9" across, and puzzles with pieces that are only about 3/4" across. We have puzzles with fully interlocking pieces, and other puzzles that are not so interlocking. We have a children's puzzle that consists of sixteen blocks, with six solutions - based on which side of the blocks is showing. That one is fun to use as a slide puzzle, by simply removing one of the blocks and trying to slide the other blocks in their base until the puzzle is solved. We have puzzles that would fit on a 9.5"x11" sheet of paper, and puzzles that are so long they only fit diagonally on our 3'x3' card table. The puzzle with 9" pieces can only be done on the floor.

We have puzzles with pictures of mountains and rivers, pictures of houses and cabins, pictures of pianos and carnivals and hot air balloons. We have puzzles with pictures of fish, frogs, horses, kittens, and even a pig. We have puzzles with weird 3-D effects, and puzzles whose pictures look like badly Photoshopped collages. We have a puzzle that shows about 50 million things starting with the letter P (That's an exaggeration. I think it's actually only about 500.) We have another puzzle with several rooms shown from different perspectives, so the puzzle doesn't have a real bottom or top. We have a Simpsons puzzle which shows a picture of the Simpsons family which is actually a mosaic made up of tiny images from the TV show. We have a puzzle commemorating the famous battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack.

If we tire of the puzzles we have at home, our HOA clubhouse also has a selection of puzzles that we can borrow. One of those puzzles that we have borrowed multiple times from there features jelly beans in a rainbow of colors.

We seek out other types of puzzles as well - crossword puzzles, sudoku and kokuru puzzles, logic puzzles. I like to do puzzles. I usually stick to a similar process in solving puzzles. I do the easy bits first - the borders, the obvious, the things that stand out. Then I systematically work my way from one side to the other, skipping over areas that prove too challenging, but returning to them as I get clues from the surrounding areas, until the puzzle is solved.

There is something very satisfying to me about picking up a puzzle piece and examining it, and then fitting it into a place where it fits perfectly - every curve, color, and line an exact match. There is something appealing to finding a solution, to making everything fit in a way that makes sense. When I'm doing a puzzle, I feel like I'm bringing order to chaos, and that appeals to something in my soul.