When I was younger, we did puzzles. I mean, BIG puzzles. A LOT of BIG puzzles.

I could point to this habit as the one that started me down the path of a certain kind of nerd-dom. You know, the crossword-puzzle, documentary-loving kind (as opposed to the D&D, Star Wars kind (Not that the two are mutually exclusive. I just happened to only pursue the former.)).

Several of the BIG puzzles my family used to work on together have traveled with me for the last decade or so. I keep them in the coffee-table:


For CTRL+Z, I decided to actually pull out one of these puzzles and recreate the feeling of having no table-top space on which to do anything but sort tiny, oddly-shaped pieces of cardboard into piles by color. Then, after making the puzzle, I get to UNMAKE it! CTRL+Z accomplished.

To some extent, though, I worried that this praxis wouldn't live up to the spirit of the task. "A system tends to degenerate over time," the description tells us. So should I not be unmaking some form of degeneration?

But then I realized: putting one of these puzzles together would undo degeneration. My puzzles had been sitting in their boxes, in degenerated form, for years. The memories of putting together a puzzle, often with the help of whoever happened to pass by the tabletop had degenerated, too.

It was time to put my puzzles and my love of them back together. (I looked forward to the unmaking bit, too, though.)

I picked this puzzle, a 1500-piece behemoth:


That first afternoon, I got pretty far with it:

The red schoolhouse was definitely the easiest part to piece together purely by color.

I only got thrown off a little by the red bridge-cover-thingie in the top right of the puzzle.

A few days later, I had made a little more progress:


Over the next week or so, I progressed slowly with the assemblage of the puzzle. I developed some lower back pain from leaning over the table to eyeball the top sections up close. Why I didn't just turn the table around to get the top edge closer to the couch, I don't know.

Finally, almost complete! Just the sky left, that peskiest of sections! You can see my waning interest turn to puzzles of the crossword sort...

I also kept putting it off since the table wasn't quite bit enough. Here's the overhang I was dealing with:


Finally, though, it was done!

I had successfully undone the broken apart puzzle by putting it back together, and in the process reclaimed a little bit of feeling-like-a-child that had deteriorated during my life-as-an-adult. I got really excited about the puzzle at first and worked really hard, then was frustrated about being stumped by it--all out of proportion. I wanted my partner and friends to help, but was a bit grumpy when they did, because I was one of those kids that liked to think she could DO-IT-BY-MYSELF-THANK-YOU.

All in all, glorious.

...and then...

I rolled the whole thing up and broke every single piece apart:


Also, there were 2 pieces left over. They don't look like they belong to any of the puzzles I own. The one with the tiny brain on it creeps me out a bit, too.



I suppose their presence is an unexpected bit of chaos introduced by my doing of the puzzle, since now they don't have a home.

Onwards, then, to CTRL+Z the left-over puzzle pieces' uselessness!