Jigsaw puzzles
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Puzzling Out an English Village Murder
A quaint little village in the Cotswolds, or the Lake Country, or somewhere in Oxfordshire. A place where everyone knows your name and what you’ve been up to. The public house is the center of community activity and the place to escape the troubles and worries of daily life. There’s a manor house, the hoary old church, the classic English cottages. But there may be the new development, causing tension in the community. Long-held grudges and long-festering feuds suddenly boiling up in the face of change, with murder the result. Fertile and deadly ground for thousands of mystery novels, and countless television shows. It’s also the inspiration for Murder in…
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A Puzzling Mystery, Part II
Like a mystery novel, the mystery of how I became an avid jigsaw puzzler in 2020 is more straight-forward than why. In 2019, I wouldn’t have tried a jigsaw puzzle. I’d watched my wife do them years earlier, and it just didn’t appeal to me. What changed? The lockdown in the Spring and Summer of 2020 had an unanticipated silver lining: a pause. That pause of staying at home gave me and others the opportunity to slow down. I think I’d actually be interested in puzzling all along, but had been intimidated by it. I had enjoyed fast moving video game “puzzlers” like Tetris Attacks, Columns, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean…
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A Puzzling Mystery, Part I
I’ve been impressed by jigsaw puzzles for years, and watched as my wife LeAnn did them, some that seemed like such an endeavor to me. Though it was interesting to see her puzzle, I couldn’t imagine myself doing it. It seemed too hard, and I preferred the interactivity of a game. Then the Covid-19 pandemic arrived. By that June I became interested in actually trying a jigsaw puzzle, and LeAnn happily obliged. We started with with a one hundred piece puzzle, then went to a five hundred piece one, featuring a painting of “Flora,” a cat on bed. It was a challenging puzzle, and by the time we’d finished, I…