A piece of the puzzle

Recently Riff bought me a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t know why but we were out shopping and I mentioned that when I was a kid, I was obsessed with jigsaw puzzles. So he bought me one. A rather nice one of a photograph of the lumps of rocks along the Great Ocean Road in Melbourne, you know the ones, there was one of them that fell back into the ocean last year. Yeah, the Twelve Apostles of which I think there are really 7 or something. I’m a Queensland, so shoot me.

Anyways, 748 piece jigsaw puzzle all laid out on the coffee table ready for me to do. One thing I learnt from this puzzle, I am an obsessive nutjob. I cracked open the box on the Friday night and sat there refusing to go to bed until the entire lot of edge pieces all fit together, unfortunately there was some pretty hard pinky/orangey sky pieces that had me going for ages, but I insisted. I was going to get that bloody outside done. Didn’t help with poor lighting, the fact that I’m half blind as it is, and the chair I was sitting on was in fact a footstool that had last seen any seating type comfort back in the 70’s, I was going to get that edge done. Around 11:30pm, I got that outside done, went to stand up and realised that I had been sitting in that one position with this lean across the table thing happening and had pushed a hip out and not even noticed the pain!

The next day I’m back on that damn stool, and the afternoon, the evening, and was eventually dragged to bed kicking and screaming around midnight. Next morning, back on that stool again. Hip was gone, back was aching, eyes were watering after 3 days of staring at these colours trying to distinguish between a pink/orange and orange/pink sort of sunrise. Never mind me catching myself turning over all the pieces so the colours are all facing up and then places large groups of similar colours on one section of the table, while others sit in the box. I think it’s the librarian thing, we have to group and classify stuff.

It took me 3 days, 3 days to get that damn thing done. Looks nice, am too scared to open the 1000 piece German castle jogsaw that’s sitting there. Worried my obsessive ‘must get this thing finished’ tendencies will surface and the boy will run screaming. I pretty much did not talk to him while doing this puzzle and even growled menacingly when being pulled from the table and cramped position I had origamied myself into.

Hi, my name is Romilly and I’m addicted to jigsaw puzzles.