Fish Sticks puzzle

Late last Thursday afternoon (Dec. 24) we went up to the Ocean State Job Lot store near the Oxford/Norway line because Arlene wanted a handful of cheap putty knives for printmaking (getting ink out of cans). Of course we spent way more than six times 80 cents, but she did get those putty knives. Among (lots of) other things, we got a jigsaw puzzle just because we liked the image — the front page of the Boston Globe from the last presidential election. It’s very rare for us to buy a jigsaw puzzle other than a Springbok puzzle at a yard sale, but Job Lot prices are so low, and the pieces looked at least not all the same shape, that we got this one.

On the way home we got stuck behind some very slow traffic — extremely unusual for the area. After a couple of miles it got even slower, but there seemed to be some explanation ahead on the left — maybe a lot of parked cars, or flashing lights. Looking out the passenger window, Arlene said, “It almost looks like a parade float up ahead.” I thought I heard something, and opened my window. I had been hearing amplified Christmas music. As we got up to the parked cars, we saw a sign in front of a restaurant, “Santa arrives in Oxford, 6 PM Dec. 24.” That was it! We had been behind Santa Claus.

We did the puzzle that evening. It turned out to be easier than it had looked, because it was easy to sort pieces by picture, different sizes of type, and so on.

I thought that maybe Arlene could be more open to non-Springbok puzzles than usual, so the next day I brought out a puzzle I had got at the Casco town flea market two summers ago, one labeled “Fish sticks pieces!” It had a somewhat abstract picture of trout and leaves in very bright colors, but the interesting thing was the way it was cut — long skinny rectangular pieces with straight sides, except for the interlocking tabs, and lots of sections going diagonally. It was very hard to figure out which pieces were edges, because many non-edge pieces as well as many edges had short straight sides. We decided not to worry about edges at the start, but just to put together whatever we could. Halfway through, it looked to me like a pile of broken glass, with lots of sharp points. Look how much we did before we got even one edge complete:

It was a rather challenging puzzle, just because we’re not at all accustomed to pieces with shapes like that. After a while we did tune in to the shapes and colors, and it turned out not to be excessively difficult after all. We ended up deciding we liked it a lot.