A puzzling puzzle.

Every time we have family over for an event, a puzzle comes out. It's a tradition. However, we also will rarely, if ever, do the same puzzle twice. Meaning that for every get together we have, we need to buy a new puzzle. More often than not a trip to the toy store will be made for this exact purpose, but occasionally we stumble across the perfect one unintentionally. This is what we thought we had done for my brother's birthday. Soon we were to learn how wrong we were.

It all started out innocently enough. We were on a walk through a small shopping district in our city when something in the window of a shop catches our eye. It's a puzzle, very different from the ones we've been doing and therefore a nice change of pace. It was 1000 pieces, our standard, and had a picture of a fairy looking at herself in a mirror that is surrounded by candles and cobwebs. My mom and I both agreed that this was the puzzle we HAD to have, and that day we walked away full of excitement about our find.

After weeks of patiently waiting my brother's birthday finally arrived. As soon as I woke up I excitedly dumped the pieces onto a table and began sorting out the edge pieces. In the process, a realization slowly dawned on us: there was a lot less colour in these puzzle than we had originally thought. In fact, everything was a shade of either beige or grey, with the occasional little dot of colour here or there. As a started trying to assemble the puzzle, I discovered that the pieces also were the type to fit together even when the weren't supposed to. It took us most of the afternoon just to get the outside edge together. We're usually very good at puzzles, but this was our achilles heel.

When buying the puzzle, my mom had commented that we always finished our puzzles so quickly and maybe this one would take a bit longer. She turned out to be right, but much more than expected. The puzzle is still upstairs a day later, with barely more than the edges done. Perhaps a month from now you'll get a post from me celebrating that we finally finished. That, or we finally just burned the pieces and are pretending the puzzle never existed. One of the two.