Tahiti

My son bought me a box of eight jigsaw puzzles for Christmas this year. My family knows me well enough to know that jigsaw puzzles will always be a welcome gift. I finished all eight puzzles already (biggest one was 1,000 pieces), but the gift also helped inspire me to take on Tahiti, a 4,000-piece puzzle that I have owned for about 15 years, but never completed.

This puzzle presents some particular challenges. First, it's 4,000 pieces. I'm not sure what mathematics would say about it, but from experience I know that a 2,000-piece puzzle is much more than twice as time-consuming as a 1,000-piece puzzle. I just did a little math, and if you assume that the time a puzzle will take is related to the number of choices you have -- i.e. you have to choose among 4,000 pieces to start, then 3,999, etc. -- then a 4,000-piece puzzle is about 15 times as hard as a 1,000-piece. That seems about right to me.

Next, I don't have the picture. Jackie bought this puzzle for me years ago, and the picture on the box is a painting of the coronation of Napoleon, in a room with lots of wooden walls. A really large amount of brown in that picture, hardly any blue. So when I opened up the box and found hundreds, then thousands of blue pieces, I knew something was amiss. At some point, in one of my other puzzles by the same manufacturer, I found a little brochure with a picture that I know is my puzzle. The puzzle is called Tahiti, and it is a picture of the beach. Lots of sea and sky, lots and lots of blue pieces, not easy. If I still have the picture somewhere, I don't know where it is, and it was a really small picture anyway. The picture above gives some idea -- beach in the foreground, water and sky beyond, but it's not the same picture.

Another factor is the physical size of the puzzle. The finished puzzle is about three feet two inches by four feet six inches, so it won't fit on a small table. Fortunately, I have something called a puzzle caddy that Jackie also got for me. It's a set of cardboard pieces that fit together and make a good place to build a puzzle. The puzzle caddy is big enough to hold the finished puzzle -- it's really large -- and there are a couple of additional sorting trays that go with it, but I still don't have enough room to lay out all of the pieces unassembled. I'm working on a strategy to deal with this.

Jigsaw puzzles are a good fit for my personality. I like all kinds of puzzles, and I enjoy the solitude of working on them with my chosen music playing. They always remind me of my father; when I work on one, I will often imagine how he would go about it. He used to enjoy them the same way I do, and he taught me how to do them.

I expect that Tahiti will be the culmination of all my jigsaw puzzle endeavors. I have never completed a puzzle this large before, and I don't anticipate that I ever will again. So this is a litle bit more than sitting down at a table and having fun. This one is the ultimate.