What is your quest?

Remember these sliding tile puzzles? You mix the tiles up and then put the puzzle back together by sliding them back where they go. I had one when I was a kid. I think I bought it in a rest area vending machine on one of our trips to Skowhegan Maine to visit my Mom’s oldest sister and her family. In my sheltered small town life, those vending machines were a thing of wonderment. It was well worth getting up at 4:00AM and riding in the back of a station wagon with my siblings [some of whom were pukers] for 12 hours just to be able to purchase a folding hairbrush or Mexican jumping beans from one of these purveyors of exotic wares. Some of the puzzles had numbers on them which you were supposed to put in the proper order but the one I had was more like this one, though I believe it had the Flintstones on it. I have to admit that if I got tired of fooling with sliding the tiles around, I would carefully pry one of them out so I could put them in order.

For years, we didn’t have a spare drawer in our house, never mind a spare bedroom. Like the wise people we are, we waited until our kids moved out to buy a bigger house. Kids are tough on a house after all and you don’t want them having a lot of room to mess things up. Now, I have not just one spare bedroom, but two. For the most part, the larger of them is just that – a bedroom, reserved for visitors. The bed may have a few assorted items piled on it from time to time, but it stays pretty tidy in there. The smaller one is a different story.

The freezer is in there. The Christmas decorations are in there. My exercise bike is in there. The fold up spare bed is in there, along with a high chair and the porch swing seat. There’s a picnic cooler in there too. The entire room is crammed full of stuff and those are about the only items I am sure about – the rest is a mystery. When Lauren went in the Army, she left a lot of her stuff with us, so I used to blame the crowded conditions on her. She had a “lot of crap/stuff/junk” stored and there was no way I could ever get it cleaned up so long as that was the case. Then she ruined that by taking all of her junk/stuff/crap to Georgia with her a year ago last May when she and Steve moved from Hawaii. The room is even more crowded now than it was when her stuff/junk/crap was in there.

Last night we got about 6 inches of snow and since the kids at Cornell are having finals this week, Larry can’t start work until 9:00AM, so he had time to plow the driveway before he left. When I got up this morning, the second thing he said [the first thing of course was “Good Morning you ravishing creature – I am so glad I married you”, just like every morning] to me is “My heavy snow boots are in the closet in the spare room – am I going to be able to get to them?” Um, no.

So after feeding the dog, but before I have even one sip of coffee, I have to get the boots. This is where the tile puzzle comes in. If I come into the spare bedroom near the squiggly tail thing on the bottom of the puzzle, the boots are located roughly in a closet near the head in the opposite corner. To get to them, I have to move the box with the books over next to the freezer, so that I can put the high chair where the books were, so that I can shove the exercise bike over where the high chair was, so that I can prop up the end of the porch swing seat, giving me room to open the closet door and get the boots. While I am right in there, I may as well get out my wrapping paper organizer because I have gifts to wrap after all and I am a forward thinking person, even before my coffee.

In order to get back out of the room, I have to reverse the process, which I will let you imagine for yourself. Now, next weekend, we are putting up our Christmas tree, and the ornaments and lights are near the head of that middle guy there in the puzzle. While I am figuring out how to get those out, I have to look for Lauren’s winter clothes which she left here, not having much need of fleeces in Georgia. She will need them when she gets here next week though and I told her I would get them out for her. We are rather fond of her, so I would never send her in to look for them herself because we might never see her again.

I wish I could pry up some of the items in front of the ornaments and winter clothes, the way I could the tiles in the puzzle. And I really wish I still had the Flintstones sliding puzzle from the turnpike vending machine. I found this picture of the Impossibles puzzle on an auction site and that baby is up $115! I could buy new decorations instead of digging out the old ones….