Puzzled

I like doing puzzles of all kinds and I'm always in the market for new and different puzzles. Sudoku, hitori, crosswords, cryptograms...and jigsaws. Work today involved finding information about a particular jigsaw program and while I was looking...after I finished my work...I stayed and played.

Weird thing is I have always found the "next to last" stage of putting together an online jigsaw puzzle the hardest. There always seems too many pieces for the board I'm playing. I manipulate a piece here and there, listening for that lovely "you got it right! click" only to hear nothing at all, and think; but where else can I put this piece???? There is no where else for it to go!!! And the thought always crosses my mind that I've been double-crossed; the puzzle makers have added pieces just to confound me! (Ok, I'm really not that ego-centric. I do realize the puzzle makers don't take a personal interest in me...)

But of course once I've placed a few more pieces of the puzzle in the "extras" turn out not to be "extra" at all. They were needed, they necessary, no matter how annoying they felt at the time. And in the end, there is the puzzle, completed, all mysteries solved.

But I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to do the zebra.