Puzzles are a lot like research

Recently I decided Dear Husband and I should take up jigsaw puzzles. It's a good hobby. It's relatively inexpensive, time consuming, can be done together, and it yields pretty pictures when its all done. Actually, its mostly the latter.

Our house has a lot of big, blank walls painted a cream color. Some have holes from where the previous owner hung pictures. We did not come to the house with a lot of pictures, and we are too frugal to buy real paintings. We could buy reproductions, but even those are somewhat pricey and it feels cheap to us.

 So until we can afford/find/agree on original art, jigsaw puzzles seem to be a good compromise. They are obviously reproductions. They are cheap. And, again, they provide hours of entertainment.

There are many ways of going about completing puzzles with lots of little pieces. There is the "Find all the Edge Pieces" method, which finds the borders and works its way inward. There is the "Hunt and Peck" method, seemingly preferred by my husband which starts with just putting together any pieces that fit. My method could be called "Divide and Conquer" or "Painstaking", which involves dividing up the pieces by come features (color and/or pattern) and focusing on getting all those pieces together. It involves choosing a piece, and trying every other piece to go with that piece until you have built up that entire section.

It is very slow going at first, but as you build up the sections you can begin to eliminate pieces from consideration on the ground of them not being the right shape, being too long, too short. Is it the fastest method? Maybe not. But it involves a lot less trying the same piece in the same spot over and over.

As I went, I realize that this is the same way I attack research (and most of my problems). Slowly and methodically. I think it confuses my PI sometimes why I insist on keeping constants, for example, running around and doing things piece by piece instead of lumping things together cleverly. I don't do clever lumping. My brain doesn't work like that.

It takes me time to get going. I am not fast at the outset. But I get faster and faster as I go because I can see pattern emerge specifically because I didn't lump things at the outset.

It's kind of nice for me to realize that I do have internal consistency in this. And it's nice to see the (more) tangible result of my methods in puzzles, even when the research is slower than molasses in January.