As I mentioned the other day, we have been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles here during pandemic quarantine/avoidance and smoky summer days.
We have probably bought a couple of dozen brand new. We visit our local independent bookstore once a month on haircut day and Donna usually buys one, while I buy an actual book. We have also bought a few at Fred Meyer when we catch them on sale.
But most of the puzzles come from thrift stores, Goodwill sells them for $1.99 or $2.99 and one place in town has all of their puzzles priced at ninety-nine cents, otherwise we probably couldn’t afford our habit.
And what a habit it is too, for the last 10 months there has always been a jigsaw puzzle going on what used to be our dining room table. I have been posting photos of every puzzle we complete on Instagram and early on I was just using the hashtags #jigsaw and #jigsawpuzzle, but after completely a bunch of them I started to add #jigsawpuzzleanonymous, a play on Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, to them because it was looking like we were addicted.
As it turns out, so far, I am the only one using that hashtag, so when I want to know how many puzzles we have done so far all I have to do is look at the #jigsawpuzzleanonymous page and count the posts. There is one post with three small puzzles in it and for one panoramic puzzle of Portland, Oregon I created a triptych with 3 posts so the counts works out perfect. Right now we sit at 93 puzzles in 275 days or about one every 3 days.
Yesterday I had someone like a photo of a puzzle from a few days ago and I went to see his page, to see how he connected with me, and he posts time-lapse photos of his puzzle building. Five hundred piece puzzles in three hours…yikes, but it is fun to watch: For some reason, none of the puzzle builds are available on his YouTube anymore…