Showing posts with label Hobbies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hobbies. Show all posts

Thursday, February 12, 2009

The Puzzle Center


A few weeks ago I mentioned that Judy and I were arranging the various areas of our house to facilitate our hobbies. The den was designated as the puzzle place. After working for about three weeks we finally finished the Tea Party puzzle. (Still missing one piece, darn it.) We pulled out another puzzle but it had too much white and the pieces were tiny. We perused puzzles at Springbok's website. We found several we liked but I never got around to ordering them. We popped into Toys R Us and found some others that we thought would be good--only to discover that the art on the box was only a part of the bigger puzzle art, and the pieces are tiny. We forced ourselves to start it anyway. I hoped that maybe it would grow on us. I managed to finish the outline and a section of the bottom where there was a red stream. Then my back started hurting. I still have trouble sitting in a chair. (Makes writing reports at work rather difficult, I can tell you!) Puzzle work has been nonexistent for days and days. So, that poor puzzle is still spread out and waiting to achieve the ultimate aim (presumably) of all puzzles--getting put together. The thing is--an integral element of doing a puzzle is the challenge and pleasure of completing the picture. If you don't like the picture--what's the point? I guess I'm going to have to order the Springbok puzzles or head to the Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley to look for something we are interested in--or the "puzzle place" is going to close down and be re-purposed.

Friday, January 02, 2009

All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Most everyone has probably heard of the book, "All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten". I haven't read it and I didn't go to kindergarten, but Judy and I are using kindergarten centers as a model for how to more consistently fit our hobbies into our lives. Tiredness and inertia after a long day of work seem to sap all desire to haul out the scrap booking supplies, or my book project, or cross-stitch projects. Zuma, that addicting computer game, can seduce us into losing hours of the evening. Zoning out in front of the tv watching junk I don't even like (Smoking Guns: World's Stupidest Criminals comes to mind.) can devour my life. So, as part of a "new year's" reorganization we are going to set up "centers" in our home. In the den we'll have the puzzle center set up. (That tea party puzzle has turned out to be a real doozy.) The dining room table is going to be the scrap booking center. The desktop computer can be the book project zone. We may switch out some centers for others as we see what works best. I'm hoping that Judy's cross-stitch Nativity may be done by next Christmas. I'm hoping my book project can be ready to submit to a publisher by summer. And maybe when we make a visit to Indiana we can show Emily and Karen some completed scrapbook pages at last. Finally, the book challenge may actually discipline my reading habits so that I can get through my substantial to-be-read stack. Fingers-crossed.