Sometimes, everything happens for a reason.

So Mercedes and I got in a big fight last night. The stresses of island life; moving away from our friends and family, learning to communicate together, making new friends, heat, bugs, lack of services on island, our transportation situation  and not having AC in our house is making life difficult and fights more inevitable. 

So M decided to leave, to cool off and I decided to do soothing constructive. I don't like to puzzle when I am mad, because puzzling to me is something I do when I am happy and something M and I do together. Well, I made in exception last night. We have a puzzle that was crushed in a box during the move and it lost a few pieces. We decided to put it together and cut out a W for our last name in the completed puzzle (Hopefully hiding the missing piece) and put it on our front door.

So I started on the 750 piece puzzle by Julian Askins titled Lake Side View. I started as usual, sorting the edges and flipping pieces. Shortly after starting on the edges, a piece stuck to my arm and fell in a flowerpot under the table. I just barely caught the flash of white out of the corner of my eye, it might have otherwise gone unnoticed and unlooked for as the puzzle we know is missing pieces.

 The pot contains a dead stalk of a plant that we inherited when we moved in and is pining for the seeds we recently bought. I retrieved the piece, and I thought, "huh, thats a funny place for a piece to land". I also noticed there was a bit of a whole where a piece could fall in and end up under the dead plant. I picked up the plant just on the hope that our missing piece from the James Rizzi 5000 piece puzzle we just finished might be in there (I mean it seemed reasonable that if a piece from this puzzle could fall in there, why not from Rizzi?) and to my disbelief the piece sat starring back at me, freed from its dank tomb. 

I never really wanted to do this puzzle. The thought of spending hours on a puzzle only knowing you will be disappointed does not rank high on my list of things to do, but I needed to cool down and do something constructive and the end result of this was that we found our missing piece which started the healing process of our fight. I guess without the fight, we may have never found the piece, and the piece helped end our fight. 

Its seems appropriate that a puzzle brought us back together.

The missing piece

Rizzi Finished!

Today we finished up James Rizzi's Nothing is as Pretty as  a Rizzi City! We laid our puzzle piece tattoo piece in around 6pm today! So far, this is the largest puzzle we have completed together! It took us 19 days from start to finish.

We however, realized the fear that indeed, a piece was missing! We also learned that Ravensburger does not have a missing piece replacement program for puzzles 5000 pieces and under.

The Missing Piece... A very sad day!

I found a funny link while looking for techniques on how to make a puzzle piece, turns it took this guy 8 years to do a 5000 piece puzzle and he found he too was missing just one piece! I hope he gets it fixed!


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1278837/Jack-Harris-spends-7-years-doing-5-000-piece-jigsaw-finds-ONE-bit-missing.html


For now, I am going to try my hand at making a replacement piece... we will see how it goes, if it doesn't work out, then I will have to go to the doc! I am going to try and fix it using a printer, and wood epoxy like quick wood. I am going to first try and print the missing piece using a scanner and photoshop. Once I print the piece, I will place the surrounding pieces face down and lay in the new piece image, fill the whole with the epoxy, and then level it off with the surrounding pieces and let it dry. Wish me luck!

UDPATE: WE FOUND THE PIECE! Here is the completed puzzle!

Missing Pieces, Wine and other troubles.

This James Rizzi puzzle is giving us some trouble. We are 99% certain we are missing a piece ontop of spilling wine on about 25 of them... Our table puzzle is for all practical purposes, outside, so we have to go through a lot to keep it dry and organized which means shuffling between multiple tables and board to build such a large puzzle. Well, lets just hope we can get replacement pieces without issue....

The sidewalk and buildings are now complete... time to fill in the street! Maybe tonight!

-Thomas