Tag: jigsaw puzzles

Jigsaw Puzzles: Relationship Building Tools

Shirleyjdietz7 Comments

The letter J has given me much anguish. After finishing a post with which I was very satisfied, I selected the text and moved my hand to select “copy”. My hand inadvertently touched something it shouldn’t have and most of the post disappeared. I could not make it reappear although I tried for an hour. I also could not remember what I had written. Wow.

A puzzle on a table in a public space is like a magnet to me. I will find myself working it with strangers who become friends, briefly.

To be up front, I consider jigsaw puzzles a diversion, an activity somewhat like washing the dishes, riding in a car or sitting around a fire. When you are lucky enough to be doing them with another person, you might as well talk while you’re working at them. You’re in close quarters with fellow puzzlers, doing something methodical and fun, and you can slow down if you wish. It’s pretty good for low stress relationship building.

My family often has a puzzle going somewhere in the house, and always at larger family gatherings, especially Thanksgiving. We even make jigsaw puzzles out of our family pics, just for fun. My daughters have grown up in this culture (loosely defined) and both will do a puzzle with me. Esther will join in for an hour. Julia has to be pulled away when the lights are shut out.

Name of puzzle: Family in Silly Hats at Thanksgiving
Even the turkey got in on this one.

Since people respond differently to this activity, when the goal is working on a relationship, it’s good to consider carefully if it’s the right tool for a particular person. Some people think it’s absolutely crazy to spend hours fitting 1000 pieces of a picture together so you can take it apart and put it back in the box a day later. I have found that even those people will stick it out for an hour or so. They aren’t much help but they will converse, and that’s sometimes the whole point, right?

There are others of us who feel like puzzling is exercise for the brain and totally worthwhile. Our eyes are seeing the slight variations in colors and shapes and our memories of where on the table that exact piece is – well, doing all that is keeping us sharp. We have our methods of working on each type of puzzle and frankly, we’ve never met a puzzle we didn’t like. Or almost never.

Because of all this, you actually can find “your people” and develop some good relationships over jigsaw puzzles. So many times our Thanksgiving puzzle marathons have ended wit high fives and such a feeling of corporate satisfaction. We did it, and it was a hard one too!

I have also discovered that there is a far deeper level of puzzle love than even I knew about. Some people are perfectly content, maybe even prefer, to do puzzles by themselves. They find community by sharing their accomplishments on social media and developing their relationships there. They trade names of their favorite puzzle brands and talk about what they do and don’t like. They have a whole social world built around puzzling.

Even the Coke can is a puzzle.

This is my present puzzle stash. Most of these beauties have been passed on to me by friends, because puzzle trading is a practical thing. I’m going to be paring down and would love to share some of these with anyone who is able to come get them, because I don’t usually get emotionally attached to any of them. This is not always the case. One of my puzzle friends has passed on her jig saw genes to her daughter who works as an artist for a puzzle company. Those puzzles are rightfully considered as family art and she probably won’t be parting with them any time soon. To her, puzzles have a definite relational aspect. Her puzzle library is also a little more extensive than mine. It’s serious, just sayin’…

Dedicated space, all categorized, dates of completion recorded… did I say serious? Yes, I did.

February Goodness: Persistance

Shirleyjdietz2 Comments
I finished it today. Here it is Elaine.

Many people just don’t get into doing jigsaw puzzles. I am not one of those people and I’m not passing judgment because I know that they have various reasons for walking away. I walk toward, sit down and lose myself in the hunt, quite easily.

It might seem like a waste of time to reconstruct a picture from hundreds of tiny pieces, look at it (maybe glue it on a board and frame it), and then take it apart and put it back in the box. For me, the value is in the process. Each puzzle is different not only in the picture, but in the way I must solve it. An hour into a hard puzzle I can usually decide what the dominant method should be. I am not always fast, but I am persistent. There has only been one puzzle that I have not finished because it was so disgustingly hard as to not be fun at all.

I am almost sure that someday I will solve a great, important mystery because I have learned to do jigsaw puzzles. It’s mind exercise.

Exercise is another activity that requires some persistence. A few weeks back I was working on 10,000 steps a day and writing about the experience. I did cut back a bit after the self-imposed challenge was over, but am still aware of how important exercise is to my physical health, of course, but also my mental health.

I decided to investigate Noom, a strategy which injects psychology into the weight loss world. I have lost 10 pounds and feel much better about the body I live in. Exercise is part of the Noom strategy and yesterday I was given a strength training regimen to work on. Yesterday’s good thing was making it through the session alive. Now I know how much stronger I need to get, and I have something new to persist in. I also got in 7,500 treadmill steps, which is a decent amount for winter.

Persistence in doing good things will be what gets us through 2021. Let’s encourage each other whenever we find opportunity. Just sayin’…

What are you doing that you would like to be encouraged to persist doing. I’d like to encourage you.

February Goodness: Permission

Shirleyjdietz3 Comments

YesterdayI stepped outside into several inches of new snow. It fell most of the day as well. I also saw that the next seven days were going to be our coldest streak of the winter – staying below zero degrees most of the time. It was as if February was giving me permission to “chill”. So I did.

January and February are our most serious winter months and often have the most severe weather. When I was a child it was with great anticipation that I listened in the dark, pre-dawn hours for the radio announcer to give the school cancellations. Back then -30 degrees was the bench mark for us to stay home, the buses would not be running that day. Or, at least, they wouldn’t be running until it warmed up a little.

I have that same feeling now when I see a blizzard, or a arctic freeze coming. It’s permission to curl up under a blanket, start the fireplace, read more books. Yesterday’s good things were:

A puzzle that got started.

At my house puzzles get covered with plastic. I have a cat.

Knitting projects brought out

At my house knitting has to be kept out of harm’s way. I have a cat.

I made soup. We ate it before I could take a picture. Sorry. It was Lentil Soup.

It was the kind of day that brings relief to the parts of you that have been getting tired (unless you’re the one responsible for shoveling the snow…). It’s okay to get sleepy and take a nap. It’s okay to sit by a window and watch snow fall. Spend a few extra minutes with a cat on your lap. Yesterday February gave permission for those good things.

Up North: September Challenge

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Okay. I’ll admit I’ve been a little quiet about our new life “up north”. I think it’s a mild form of shock, if there is such a thing. I can hardly believe I’m really back living in Hayward, thousands of miles from Florida, on my grandfather’s farmstead, in my Mom’s condo.  I’m trying to find a place for myself (and the husband) up here and it takes a lot of introspection. Introspection wears me out. “Worn out me” tends to revert to endless games of spider solitaire (confession time), jigsaw puzzles (hours spent here), thick paperback novels (three in the last two weeks), and occasionally, just sitting and looking out the window. Anything except writing.  After all,  these are stereotypical retirement activities and am I not retired now?

Haha, no, not really.

There is plenty to do up here – real work, including writing. For my own sake, I need to exercise some discipline and record the journey (that is, life) in this new place. Writing should be a daily activity, a joy, a relief, a healing outlet and a way of sharing. Thirty days hath September, and each one shall be recorded in some fashion. If I can do it in April, (A to Z in April) why not now?

In defense of jigsaw puzzles, I need to explain. Each time we finish, Mom says “Did you take the picture? Of course, I do, although I don’t always post them here or on Facebook. There is almost always a puzzle in progress in this house. We know the kinds we like, the kinds we agonize over and won’t choose to do again. We have different methods of hunting for pieces depending on the puzzle. We have special Styrofoam boards on which to lay out the pieces, and we now bag up the edge pieces separately when we put them away. These are the fine points.

The value in all this puzzling? I can think of three benefits. First, it does make us think about so many things. Color, shape, texture, direction, recognition all have to register and be in operation to get a puzzle from a pile of pieces to a picture. Secondly, no matter what stresses we have been immersed in before or after, the time spent doing the puzzle is a break. We concentrate, get engrossed. It clears our minds and emotions.

Thirdly, probably most important, it is time spent together. We don’t always talk, but often we do. All kinds of things come up as we sit there, knowing that the other person is not in a hurry, not going to rush off somewhere. We probably don’t solve any world problems, but that’s not to say we couldn’t. Who knows?

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So here is our last puzzle. We liked it because there were no parts so hard that we got stuck. We were always finding pieces, 1,000 of them to be exact.  We will probably be doing puzzles more as the days get colder and there is less to do outside. We have a whole stack of them waiting, thanks to our friend Sandy who traded with us.

I’m just sayin’ there are a whole lot of worse things we could be doing with our leisure time, here “up north”.

And I may actually write about some of them this month. The plan is to share life, the small and the significant, the joy and the pain, the awe and the awful… here it comes. 

#AtoZChallenge: My Favorite Things J

Shirleyjdietz20 Comments

Jigsaw Puzzles

I would be so wrong of me if I didn’t choose Jigsaw puzzles as my favorite J things. My family would never let it pass.  The obsession is obvious every time we gather in a group, like for Thanksgiving. But even when there are just two or three of us, it seems we have to have a puzzle to draw us together at the table. We work at it while we talk. It’s really quite addictive. Plus, I really think there’s a genetic component to this proclivity toward jigsaw puzzles since it spans three generations of our family. That’s proof, right?

I’m not naming names here, but:

Some of us bring a puzzle even if we have to fly thousands of miles with it in our suitcase.

Some of us shop all year round for the perfect puzzle for the “next one”.

Some of us panic when we run out of puzzles before we run out of holiday time.

Some of us check puzzles out of the library like other people check out books.

Some of us hide the last piece for fear we won’t get to put it in.

Some of us are afraid to go to bed for fear someone else will finish the puzzle before morning.

Some of us stay up all night to finish the puzzle before morning.

Some of us never want to take the puzzles apart and hide them under the bed for years.

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We ran out of puzzles at Thanksgiving so I had to buy this antique one at a Thrift Shop in Michigan.

Puzzles are good for the brain.  They teach your brain to think of any way it can to find the next piece, to be flexible. Sometimes the clue is the color, sometimes it’s the shape – the differences can be so subtle. We can actually feel ourselves getting smarter doing a puzzle. And doing puzzles teaches cooperation. You can only bend over another person’s space for so long before they cooperate and move to another side, as they should.

This winter we did “Puzzle Marathon” which I pictured on Facebook and am all too happy to post again here in tribute to the puzzle gene…

 

 

 

 

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And this one we had to do on the trip home through Pennsylvania

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This one was one of my favorite ones – pretty!

Seriously, this is only about half of the puzzles that we did, but you get the idea. Doing puzzles is truly one of my favorite things.

Do you do puzzles? Yes or no?

 

 

Thanksgiving Chronicle: Ordinary Times and Travel post 5

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In these days of cities and all their attractions, a pastime of young and old alike seems to be exploring. That is one of our family traditions. Whenever we gather, we try to look around us and visit some interesting place. On the Friday after Thanksgiving we bundled up (brrr….), piled into two cars and went to Port Huron, MI.

Our first stop was a museum of sorts but more. I can’t remember the name of it but the words “boat nerds” was somewhere on the building. It was on the St. Clair River which connects Lake Huron to Lake St. Clair and the port in Detroit. There is a lot of ship traffic past this place which boasts a coffee shop, an unobstructed view of the river, and knowledgeable people who call themselves, yes, boat nerds. They call out all kinds of interesting information and stories about each ship as it passes. On display are ship artifacts dredged from the river and made into art.  It was a “hangout” with a very relaxed atmosphere and quite a bit of business, considering that it was a holiday weekend. We had a good time with this place. We have a few family coffee snobs. We didn’t even try their coffee.

We all tried it on…
even Grandma

Next we went a few streets away to a small shopping district and wandered through some small, artisan-like shops. It was some kind of “small business shopping day” and they got real excited when our group of 10 people came in and probably kind of disappointed when we wandered back out. There were a few purchases, though.

By this time we were getting hungry. Our hosts led us to the Raven Café, a Poe themed coffee house and restaurant that was bursting at the seams with customers. All of us liked the food we ordered. I had a creamy latte, followed by Mushroom with Brie Soup and a half Annabel Lee’s Gorgonzola Cherry salad.  It was hard to choose from all the interesting names like “Premature Burial Bacon-Ham Melt” and “Black Cat BLT”. This is definitely a place diners return to. They have a gift shop and live entertainment events regularly, and a nice FaceBook page. Check them out at www.ravencafeph.com .  Go there.

Another one of our family traditions, no secret by now, is doing jigsaw puzzles. Some of us are more avid puzzlers than others but we all kind of like to have one going on. Somehow we had brought only one puzzle with us and we finished it on Thanksgiving Day. Cheap puzzles abound at thrift shops and libraries so we were on the lookout as we traveled back to Gary’s coffee shop. We ended up at a thrift/antique shop and it was a long shot, but they had a puzzle. Just one. It was antique, and although I’ve had some very old puzzles (think pieces missing, chewed on, etc…) I had never had a real antique so I bought it, more for the container than the picture.  Can you imagine it new for $0.49? It was our second of the season (#puzzlemarathon).

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There were many other things we enjoyed over our family time together – I couldn’t begin to mention them all. Many laughs, meals, conversations, hugs and then the inevitable goodbyes. But travel on Thanksgiving Saturday is coming up fast. The journey is definitely not over…