Puzzling...

Slowly but surely I am cleaning out some things from my father's apartment. Little bits, here and there, because someday I'll have to go in a quickly clear it out. The things I remove are things Papa is not using or will never use again. This is one of the little things.

Okay, I'm pretty sure these are dot-matrix labels for cassette tapes. Really, no one is going to use these again. They were a big thing in their day...but not so much today.

Then, I looked at my grocery list one morning as I'm preparing to head to Georgetown. Just wanted to be sure if I needed to pick anything up on that trip to town. This is what I found in my dear hubbies hand-writing on the grocery list.

My first thought is, "Is there a different use for pregnancy test strips that I don't know about." You see, our child bearing days are well behind us. That ship has sailed and is not returning. I went to query my hubby and that mischievous grin crept across face.  It was simply done to get my attention. It did. He was happy with his effort. Such is the nature of humor in older human beings.

Christmas puzzle for 2015. Hayden was Darth Vader for Halloween. The new Star Wars movie was coming out. Our family would be going to see it at the theater over Christmas. A Darth Vader puzzle just seemed to be the right choice for this year's Christmas puzzle. And I had a coupon for half off. It turned out to be a very, very, very , very difficult puzzle to put together. It is a picture made up of all those little pictures of scenes from Star Wars movies. There are 1,000 pieces. It ended up being mostly me and Jacob working on it. It was not finished when everyone left to go home after Christmas. In fact we only had the edges and some of the pieces in the middle. Did I mention this was a very, very , very , very difficult puzzle to put together. 

I continued to work on it here and there after Christmas with plans to have it completed by next Christmas. That should be just enough time. Amazingly on January 18th I completed the puzzle only to find two pieces were missing. I had a couple of sick days with a head cold and used them to work on the puzzle. 

A few days later I was talking to Claude over the puzzle and he asked me if I had noticed anything. Of course not! Claude had knelt down on his old, bad knees and looked under the hutch in the dining room and there were the two missing pieces. He put them in and waited to see if I would notice. Now, there is a lot of background action in this puzzle and I truly had not noticed. 

But it sure felt good to know there was a completed puzzle with every piece in place...and it didn't take till December 2016 to finish it!!