puzzling issues

First things first: It's Pi Day!!! Happppppy Pi Day!! In honor of one of my favorite days, I will share an important bit of information with you:

Did you know that 3.14% of sailors are pirates??

HAR! HAR! HAR!

You can thank the guy on NPR for that little funny. I wish I came up with on my own, but I didn't.

It's also my bestie Catherine's 30th birthday today. I will never cease to be jealous of her Pi Day Birthday.

In other life-changing news, Matt and I finally finished the puzzle we bought and started two weeks ago. If the fact that our idea of a good time is working on a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle for two weeks is wrong, I don't wanna be right. We dominated that sucker.

When I've shown pictures or mentioned working on/completing the puzzle during the last few weeks, several people commented that they didn't know we did puzzles.

YES. It's this whole secret life I've been hiding from everyone. Matt and Erika: PUZZLE MASTERS. We pretend to watch TV or garden, but really we secretly hoard puzzles and like...enter puzzle-doing-tournaments. Puzzling Tournaments. Yep. You thought we had a desolate nursery lurking in the back of the house-- really it's our Shrine of Completed Puzzles. We frame them and put them on the walls.

Or not. Although I've dabbled in puzzles in my past (like...Mom might receive one for Christmas and we'd all work on it for the rest of Christmas break or something, back when I was living at home), actually purchasing one and choosing to set it up on a card table in my own living room for half a month is a new thing. When we were in Texas last month, my Nana had a puzzle going and I would sit with her and work on it and I thought it was such a nice thing to do...we could chat, our hands were occupied...it was lovely. So that inspired me that Matt and I should do that, too. And it was delightful! I was happy to find a puzzle that was more intriguing (to me) than a random landscape or watercolor painting. This one was magazine and newspaper headlines from 2001-2011, so it was fun because I've seen many of them in real life. Plus you could overhear Matt and I saying things like hey, if you see Obama's head, pass it my way and dangit I KNOW I had Brad Pitt's lips, but now I can't find them. You just don't get commentary like that over a mountain landscape.

Anyway. Now the puzzle is done and I'm not quite sure where we go from here. We definitely need to admire our hard work for a few days before we break it down. Do we move directly into starting another one? Do we take a puzzle break? Should we find someone to loan us a puzzle (or swap this one) because like...we really don't need to accumulate a bunch of puzzles. I mean, is it the kind of thing where in a few years we'll want to redo this one? So many puzzling questions. So few answers. Truly overwhelming.

But I'd rather be overwhelmed with my puzzle issues than my other favorite (?) current rabbithole: conspiracy theories about the missing Malaysian Airlines flight. Holy crap, people. With every day that passes, it gets weirder. I can't stop reading everything I can find. And when even the reports from the mainstream media read like the pondering of a paranoid person...it's just insane. What on earth happened?? Is it weird that at this point I'm sort of hoping it was 'just' a plane crash?? That's horrible. Obviously I don't wish that 239 innocent people were killed in a horrific wreck. But like...plane crashes are a known evil. They're awful. Tragic. But somehow...if it really were just a 'normal' wreck caused by some catastrophic engine thing or something...that seems better than an unknown evil. It's just too hard to imagine that this could be the result of someone's (or some government's??!) plan. I mean, if everyone aboard is dead. Now if they're all safe somewhere, I take back my wishing it were a regular crash. But it seems kind of unlikely at this point. And if they are alive...something makes me think they're not in a good situation. Are they all hostages? Holy cow. I just don't know. Ugh. I'll stop rambling. I clearly need to stop Googling "Malaysian flight disappearance theories." Maybe tomorrow. 

So! This weekend I have big plans to pay bills, see my friend's community theater's production of Hello Dolly, sleep in, get my toes done, and do some circuit training. And hopefully stop Googling scary things. Oh, and drink more water. And work in my secret dungeon puzzle lair. Have a great weekend!