Two Geeks In Love . . .

(First picture by Edward . . . LOOK AT THE DETAIL ON THAT TINY PUZZLE PIECE!)

It's only fair that I come clean about my own geeky thing now that I've "outed" the yo-yoing love of my life. And I know I said I would do it yesterday, but I've been kinda busy doing my geek thing and couldn't be interrupted. I just couldn't find a way stop until I was done. Now it is finished . . . all 1000 glorious pieces of it. Ya see, the thing is, I am hopelessly addicted to putting together jigsaw puzzles.

I completely blame my parents for this. They've had a tradition with long time family friends that each year at Christmas they will send each other a tortuously large and difficult jigsaw puzzle. I don't know when this tradition started - I just know that I was hooked the minute I started interlocking little tabs and connecting edge pieces.

One year the puzzle was a grove of Aspen trees - entirely made up of small green leaves, white birch bark and nothing else. This year it was a 2000 piecer of the New York City skyline . . . at night. But the mother of all doozies was the year they sent us a puzzle of the Rosetta Stone - actually shaped like the Rosetta Stone - in other words NO edge pieces and an all black stone face with tiny white writing in three scripts not familiar to any normal human being - hieroglyphics, Classical Greek and Demotic Egyptian. I think my younger brother Matt might have actually shed tears over the putting together of that puzzle.

My freshman year of college I was sick on a Sunday while home over the Christmas break. While my family went to church, I began and FINISHED one of the puzzles by myself. I'm not trying to brag - okay, maybe just a little - but I am so very good at this. The hubby even commented on my superior spatial reasoning and uncanny ability to find pieces quickly.

For the past two years the Hubby and I have shared this puzzle tradition with some good friends. I don't think they realized the first year what they were getting in to. We sent them a Disney puzzle of Donald Duck entirely made up of thousands of tiny different pictures of Donald Duck. They sent us a sweet little puzzle of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

This year they upped the ante and sent us a puzzle of a Thomas Kincaid painting. When we opened it, I immediately thought to myself, "Aww, how cute, a puzzle from that guy they call the Painter of Light. This is going to be a walk in the park and even has a park in the picture."

It wasn't until I finished two thirds of the puzzle that I realized how sneaky our friends were. The entire sky of the puzzle was a sunset with light pinks, oranges and yellows barely distinguishable from one another. AAACK! The Hubby wanted nothing to do with this puzzle and even went so far as to utter the unthinkable words, "This puzzled stuff is your thing." Big C put in about 20 of the 1000 pieces. Hannie B talked to me while I worked on it. Red Dog dropped pieces on the floor and had to leave the room.

This is where the geekiness really kicks in, so stop reading now if you want to preserve some image you have of me being normal or, dare I even say it, cool. I pretty much put the sky together based on only piece shape since the colors all looked the same. I separated all the shapes into similar categories and went at it from that angle. I am a geek. And it was enjoyable. But dang you Thomas Kincaid! Your subtle hues and divine lighting nearly did me in.

But I conquered and will now have to wait another year to feed my little geeky obsession. I only do this at Christmastime . . . just trying to keep that geek portion of me under control and all. Now you know - SO FESS UP! WHAT IS YOUR GEEKY THING?