Staying Home and Keeping Busy - Jigsaw Puzzles!

It seems that staying home during the pandemic, everybody has rediscovered jigsaw puzzles!  Facebook is full of posts with pictures of completed jigsaw puzzles. 

My mom LOVED jigsaw puzzles.  We'd get one out and work it on the dining room table.  We didn't eat in there most of the time, so it was a great place for puzzling!  When I vacation with my sister, we often take a puzzle to work on.  One infamous night, we got a puzzle out at 10:00 at night, "just to find the edge pieces," and we finished it around 3:30 in the morning.  There must be something terribly wrong with us.

Here's the infamous 1,000-piece puzzle that kept us up all night on vacation.
It looks likes it's been framed, but we worked it on a bamboo and glass table.

I've been wanting to work a puzzle, but...we have cats - naughty cats.  That's why taking puzzles on vacation is a great idea - the cats stay home!  I needed a cat-free zone at home in order to get a puzzle out and not have the pieces turn into cat toys that disappear under furniture and down heating vents.  I ruminated on the problem and finally figured out where I could set up a couple of antique side tables that, pushed together, are the perfect size for working jigsaw puzzles! 

I also have one of those puzzle organizer/storage caddies with a large area for working the puzzle and trays for sorting pieces.  If you have to move the puzzle or put it away temporarily, everything goes inside the caddy, the puzzle stays assembled, and nothing gets lost.  Then, when you're ready to work on it some more, you open it up, and there everything is, ready for you to resume the puzzle!

So I dug out my puzzle caddy (it's a really fancy one - HA! - made of corrugated cardboard) and found an empty puzzle box next to it.  I put it on the tables and opened it up, and found A PUZZLE!  Maybe a little more than half assembled.  It is TOUGH.  I've found an average of 5 pieces each evening this week.  At least I'm actually finding pieces.  The first night I worked on it I almost despaired of finding ANY pieces.  You'd think it would be easy to distinguish between the different colors of the trees.  You'd be wrong.  No wonder I put it away for a while! 

But by golly, I WILL get the whole thing put together.  All 1,000 pieces of it.

Here it is, in all its glory.  You can kind of get an idea of what the puzzle caddy is like.