The other thing I’ve been up to
Posted: September 1, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 4 Comments »When we visited the British Museum, B got to choose one souvenir from the shop. He chose a jigsaw puzzle of the Rosetta Stone. His dad and I thought it was the most wonderful, sophisticated choice ever.
Of course, we didn’t realize who, exactly, was going to be putting this puzzle together.
I’ve known this about myself for a long time, but it doesn’t come up very often any more: I am physiologically incapable of NOT working on a jigsaw puzzle. If there’s a puzzle out, I will work on it until I go blind, my fingers numb and fumbling, my brain good for nothing but analysing colour and shape. This is why we don’t keep puzzles around. Some people are like that about chocolate. This is chocolate for my BRAIN.
The Rosetta Stone, though? Hardest puzzle I have ever done. It was 800 pieces, but quantity wasn’t the main issue. It’s that the pieces were similar enough in shape – and illegible enough on the surface – that you could fit the wrong piece in the wrong place without realizing it until after you’d wasted many hours trying to find the piece next to it, the one that didn’t exist. With the Greek pieces, at least I could tell how they should be oriented, but the Demotic could be completely upside-down, and the Hieroglyphs? Fuggeddaboutit.
We set the puzzle up in B’s room, since it was his puzzle. It took us almost two months to put the damn thing together (with no help from B), and that was apparently long enough for this to happen:
That’s right: there are three pieces somewhere in the depths of B’s room – maybe. Maybe they fell into his laundry and went through the wash. Maybe they fell into the trash can and got thrown away. We’ve scoured the place, and we can’t find them.
The very worst thing, though? Is that if you put another puzzle in front of me TODAY, I’d be back at it. I am a sick, sick addict, friends.
Two months for 800 pieces!? I bet you slept way more than you needed to. Can’t be that hard. I’m ordering myself one right now.
LOL. It was in B’s room, and sometimes HE needed to sleep! Make sure you set it up some place with good light, is my advice, because that thing will make you go blind otherwise. Also, learning Demotic first might be helpful.
Heh. That’s impressive work.
I’m also laughing at my kid self, re: the Rosetta Stone. There was a replica of the Rosetta Stone hanging on the 2nd floor of the public library in my home town. The label underneath it said it was the Rosetta Stone. I read tons as a kid, but never read around in any early history-of-writing texts, and managed not to learn much more about the Rosetta Stone until way later in life. In the meantime, my young kid brain assumed that the library had the actual, ancient Rosetta Stone. Why wouldn’t a library have a cool historical thing on display, I figured? I was embarassingly into my teens before I realized what the real Rosetta Stone was.
We just found one of the missing pieces cleaning his room today, yay!
And I suppose translating the hieroglyphics was probably much harder than putting the puzzle together, and I should just stop whining.