One of Ed’s Christmas gifts to me was three puzzles made out of photos he had taken.  This was for one of our traditional “little” gifts we give each other, and Ed boasted of a Groupon offer that allowed him to avail himself of this otherwise expensive service at a 95% discount.  95% discount?  Looks to me like we were the lucky beneficiaries of a Groupon typo.

The first puzzle I worked on would be the one of the two of us, taken this summer at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

The puzzles arrive in their completed state.  So I had to break up the puzzle into its 120 pieces.  Kind of scary what that does to Ed and me in this picture…

120 piece puzzles are not that hard to do, and it wouldn’t take me long.  But there would be a few subtle difficulties that kept things interesting.  In particular the fact that the puzzle pieces themselves are quite similarly shaped, so if they also look very similar there is a danger of fitting them together incorrectly.

It’s a Puzzlement, musically, as well…

As usual here, try to guess title, singer, source of the songs – or discover these tidbits in the tags at the bottom of the post…

Is it a matter of narcissism or merely the fact that those pieces are just the easiest to locate that I’m putting my face together first?

Bit by bit, putting it together

Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art…

There’s Ed, finally come together.  If you look carefully you can see his arm reaching out to take the selfie, reflected in my sunglasses.

But then the last pieces wouldn’t go in, and I discovered that I had put in the top left frame incorrectly.  But look at the frame above.  Doesn’t it look copacetic?

Well, it’s not.  Disassembling and reconfiguring was in order!

Just don’t you fall to pieces…. 

There, now, we fixed the frame pieces, the frame of mind (possibly), and the puzzle too.

Next: Chihuly!

Ed took this picture at the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum in Seattle, exhibiting the glass art of Dale Chihuly.

I correctly guessed that the third puzzle would be the most challenging.  Although the first 10 or so pieces naturally came together easily enough:

Oh look, Danny, those are the pieces of you…

That was the easy part.  The rest of the puzzle, even to an extent the frame, was trickier, with so many puzzle pieces shaped so similarly and seemingly fitting together when they really didn’t.

What am I standing on?

Got to fit in each piece, even with the smallest differences…

Ed took this picture in Seattle too.  I am standing on the cement sculpture of the Fremont Troll, the Bridge Troll constructed in an actual road underpass.