Thanks a lot, Michael...

I'd like to take the time out of my busy schedule to thank someone for reacquainting me with my dark side.

The OCD- I cannot leave it alone once I start it jigsaw puzzle gene I inherited from Dad.

Staying at Clair and Michael's (and Dawn and Daniel's) as I was last month,Michael popped out his Australian map jigsaw puzzle...which I tried to resist, briefly, and later had to drag myself away from as I feared I'd complete it before he returned home from work the next day, thus ruining the experience for him.

Hooray for my self discipline.

A week or 2 later, I made Hell Boy take me jigsaw shopping, both of us knowing full well that this was going to be bad for everyone, except maybe the cats.

K-Mart obliged us with a selection of ghastly $4 jigsaws, which sadly meant that between the 2 of us, we came to the conclusion that we should purchase all of them.

I've done an average of 1 per week (1000 pieces) and the last one was virtually within 2 days...and we went out for Yum Cha into the city, so...

In other news, my neck and shoulders seem to be quite painful.
I was even so brazen as to confess to Ed, my osteopath, that I had indeed injured myself doing a jigsaw, perhaps the nerdiest thing I've ever said.
I didn't help that he was genuinely impressed.

The last puzzle, I even had the help of Igor's 5 year old boy, Lennon. He actually found 2 pieces of the sky which was all the same shade of blue.

Lennon declared to me," not everybody can do this...you have to be smart."
"And patient," I added.

The second puzzle I did - the one with the missing piece - I'll blame the cats, but honestly I believe I vacuumed several pieces up, I got Dad to help me with.

He was over at Easter and I brought the board out. He went through his usual routine of,

"Shit, Simone, what are you doing to me? No, Jesus, that's terrible!"

And then kept Viv waiting for 2 hours while he refused to budge until he'd found that piece with the stripe and the crooked leg.

Glorious.

So, after doing 3 1000 piece puzzles of images I really didn't like at all, I decided that I wanted to do a puzzle of Schloss Neuschwanstein - my favourite building in the world, and a place we're going back to in October.
We trekked into nerd headquarters, HobbyCo in QVB, but they only had a 1500 piece one, so now our house has a permanent source of frustration, triumph, musculoskeletal disorders and profanity right in our dining room.

So, once again, hats off and a very big thank you to young Michael for setting me off and a bender.
Where was Beagle Bay btw?