When last I wrote, a week ago, I was nearly finished with a puzzle of a wizard riding a dragon defending a castle. I finished it Monday afternoon. I corresponded briefly with my daughter about the process to preserve the puzzle as a poster so I could hang it in our Purple Room. Yes, my house is like the game Clue. I have a Blue Room (aka Family Entertainment Room), a Green Room (aka my daughter’s former bedroom and now my home office) and a Purple Room (formerly my son’s bedroom, but when he moved to the basement, my daughter commandeered it). I’ll let you guess which rooms were painted by my daughter and which were painted by me.
I placed an order for some puzzle glue, foam backed paper and a different method of preserving a puzzle. My order was scheduled to arrive on Friday, which became a very busy day for me. During the week, in the evenings, Terry and I have continued to play classic games, mostly Yahtzee and dominoes. By next Monday we should have finished twelve games of Yahtzee, so I’ll share our scorecards and some statistics at that time.
A game that Jon won. 
A game Terry won.
Thursday dawned overcast, just like the previous Friday, which had also heralded the beginning of Summer. I went to check on our tomato and pepper plants and just happened to look up and west and spied a rainbow – yet there was no sun peaking under the clouds from the east (see photo above). Very strange. Later, when I took out the last of the trash and recyclables (because Thursday is trash day here), the sun was shining, the rain was coming down fairly hard, but no rainbow to be found. Again, very strange.
Friday I needed to drive to Kansas City to retrieve a replacement laptop. My Windows 7 old workhorse laptop was showing signs of imminent failure. A Windows 10 Surface laptop 3 was ready and waiting for me on my desk. After a morning full of frustrating conference calls (frustrating in the sense that we didn’t resolve all known issues and/or found new ones to troubleshoot), I drove, for the first time since March 16th, to work.
Our Kansas City office is in Phase One of our Return Two Work (RTW) plan. I am required to wear at mask at all times, unless I am at my desk. I must observe traffic flow indicators (i.e. hallways are one-way and only three people to an elevator to maintain social distancing). I can only work on site six hours in a day (hence the reason I went in and arrived after one o’clock).
I spent the afternoon in a couple more conference calls, surprising people with video of me at my desk actually in the Kansas City office. I had my weekly one-on-one with my manager, who works on site every Friday. I sat outside his office in the hallway of our IT cubicle area so neither of us had to way masks. The remainder of the afternoon and early evening I spent prepping for and executing an upgrade of our on-premises records management system. I had only one slight hiccup which prevented me from completing the upgrade in time for me to make the monthly meeting of the Tolkien Society of Kansas City (for the first time since February we were meeting in person at Minsky’s just down the street). I managed to arrive only fifteen minutes late and had a very enjoyable evening visiting with eight other TSoKC members and discussing The Return of the King (first half of Book Six) and Sauron Defeated (first half of Part One: The End of the Third Age). I was back home and in bed before ten o’clock. We observed proper social distancing and wore masks when not eating or drinking and were spread out in the large event space of Minsky’s (known in the mornings as Eggtc.).
Saturday I opened my puzzle preserving packages and discovered the backer board I had purchased was not what I had wanted nor could I use it for this project. I am returning it and will find what I was looking for at a local store this coming week. I decided not to use the puzzle glue at this time. Rather I used sticky stiff backing paper. I’ve temporarily hung the puzzle in the Green Room until I can acquire the correct backing board for permanent hanging in the Purple Room.
Next weekend I might possibly start the other puzzle I purchased at the same time I purchased this fantasy themed one. It will depend on what we have planned for celebrating the 4th of July.
