I Did A Bad Bad Thing

I would have added a little audio clip of Chris Isaak here to really punch this post up, but I can’t afford the royalties.

Normally I don’t go for 500 piece puzzles because just when I start to feel like I’m getting into them, they’re suddenly finished, but when I saw this one – well, to quote one of the Macbeth witches; By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

You see, my nephew is die-hard green.

I’m pretty sure he has a T-shirt or hat or something that says Friends don’t let friends drive anything but green tractors, so when I saw this puzzle I couldn’t resist aggravating him. 

Besides, he recently banged himself up by crashing during a snowmobile race so I figure a little outside aggravation will take his mind off being sidelined for a moment.

There are a number of strategies for putting a puzzle together.

You can dump the pieces out, turn them all right-side up, then go for it.

You can separate the pieces by shape, setting the edges aside as a starting point then working through the rest.

You can sort the pieces by color, which works well on those Norwegian fiord, or Newfoundland harbor puzzles.

You can sort the pieces by subject then work the puzzle from there

Or you can do the challenging ‘pick and stick’ method, where you pick a piece out of the box, check it against the image to figure out where it goes, and stick it directly on the puzzle board in its approximate position.

The puzzle I'm working on now lends itself well to the sort-by-subject method.

Though I did mix it up a little by doing pick-and-stick for the tracks and train.

Here I've completed emptying out the sky and mines boxes and am working on the mountains.

For the tractor puzzle, the New Holland (horrified gasp) tractor puzzle, I decided to make it a little more challenging for myself by doing it strictly by the pick and stick method.

So this one is for you, my thoroughly green nephew.