I do it because I love it!

I worked the people and beach earlier this summer.

 Or: "She's a Puzzlin' Blogger!" (title credit: Addie)



I think, LF, that I may have alluded to the fact that taper translates sometimes into fun and recreation (taper field trip, a week ago), and I may also have alluded to the fact that taper involves obsessive attention to detail. Well, my friend, what better combination of leisure activity and obsessive detail than a jigsaw puzzle! 

This ain't no disco...

 If you haven't experienced the joy of working on a Ravensburger Premium Puzzle, I strongly encourage you to take the time to indulge this pleasure. And don't, my friends, stop at the pretty little 100 or 200 piece children's puzzle.  Take it all the way, with a 500, or in my case a 1000 piece replication of The Singing Butler, by Jack Vettriano. The pieces are simply lovely, and what's the point of squandering  20 or so hours of your life away if the object of your lust doesn't feel great beneath your fingertips?

It was this or Planet of the Apes with the family.

 I can honestly say that this is the toughest puzzle I've worked on in a very long time.  The background, although seemingly different shades of grey/green/blue/brown, is compleletely blurred on our dining room table. Time to employ the highest level of obsession: I sorted pieces according to their notches and have been plugging away, trying to fit one piece at a time.

If only all of life were this easy to sort and shove into place.

One might wonder (say, all of my housemates, for example) how I can justify such a monotonous practice for such great amounts of time. It is, after all, tedious, and hardly rewarding as time creeps by and the wheels of progress roll forward.

So close I can almost feel it.  Will we finish it in time?  Who knows.

 But of course the answer lies in the explanation of why I'm rewarding myself with downtime this week, at all.  It is the mundanity of puzzling which so strongly reflects the tedium of sitting on a bike saddle for hours on end, or shuffling along the streets in a walk/jog/run fashion for hours at a time, or even banging back and forth in a pool, year after year after year, never getting any faster (or even better). I do it because I love it!