You know how you are watching Karen Puzzles’s World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship videos so YouTube recommends more jigsaw puzzle videos and you watch one about doing hard puzzles that asks “What’s the hardest puzzle you’ve ever done?” and you just have to comment? So you go to your puzzle stats spreadsheet because you love numbers and can be compulsive about tracking things so naturally you have a spreadsheet that lists all the puzzles you’ve solved as an adult, complete with the time it took to solve them?
And when you sort by the “pieces/minute” column in search of the hardest puzzle you’ve ever done it turns out to be “I Am Owl” and you’re not surprised because that puppy was hard and you shake your head, because this 535-piece puzzle took over 18 hours to solve, and while you aren’t the world’s fastest puzzler (not even close), 500 pieces normally takes you anywhere from 3 to 5 hours?
And then you realize it might be time to blog about puzzles again? And so you look at previous posts about jigsaw puzzles to see what you’ve already said so you don’t repeat yourself, and as you read your first ever puzzle post about an Impossibles puzzle, you’re suddenly wondering why it didn’t come up as the hardest puzzle you’ve ever done because you’re pretty sure it was harder than “I Am Owl”, so you check your spreadsheet, and it says your solve time was exactly 9 hours, but the post says it took nearly 33 hours, and now you’re wondering how that happened?
And then you pull out the stack of index cards where you’ve jotted the times and eventually find the two that apply but when you recalculate the total you get 28.92 hours no matter what you do?
And so you update your spreadsheet and debate correcting your old blog post when you notice that the 300-piece plant puzzle took exactly 2 hours to solve and that doesn’t seem right especially considering it was only your second puzzle as an adult so you go back to your index cards where you find that in fact “Succulents” took exactly 200 minutes, or 3.33 hours?
And then you begin questioning if any of the numbers in your spreadsheet are right and start frantically checking and the next puzzle is wrong too and suddenly your whole afternoon is going to be fixing this spreadsheet that’s supposed to be something you do just for fun?
And after you do some more checking, you begin to think everything else is fine, it was just those few entries, because you can’t find anything else that’s wrong, and then you obsess about how the heck those few numbers that were wrong got that way?
And then people are surprised to hear you didn’t sleep well?
Yeah.
Me, too.
Inspired by “I Left My Heart in San Fransisco. (But Replace ‘San Francisco’ with ‘Near the Lemur House’ and Replace Heart with a Sad Question Mark.)” in Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson. Her essay is a lot funnier than mine, but the format felt right for my topic.
I make spreadsheets for fun, too. But mine don’t track what I’ve done (other than my list of books I’ve read, which I don’t time), but are for planning for the future. Examples: possible sites to see while visiting London, options for camper vans and their various attributes (lots of numbers on that spreadsheet!), or a list of broken LEGO pieces that I will replace when I have enough to make the shipping costs worthwhile. I can spend many hours building and pouring over my spreadsheets. When conversing with a distant cousin in England, she sent me a spreadsheet of afternoon tea options. We decided our love of Excel was genetic. Ha ha!
I wonder if they’ve found the Excel-love gene yet? I inherited my spreadsheet mania from my Dad. He’s the only other one in my immediate family who has a tendency to track the heck out of things. He’s got a notebook that lists the first day of the year that he sees a hummingbird in the yard. It covers 30 years!
I also use spreadsheets for planning, mostly for packing. I have pages and pages of packing lists for every eventuality, plus menus and grocery lists for various trips. The main packing lists are where I start when I’m getting ready to go somewhere. The menus give me ideas when I need to put together a new menu quickly.
I love doing puzzles, especially jigsaws. These look like fun.
My favorite puzzles are color gradients.