SoCS – How Puzzling

Continued thanks to Linda Hill who sponsors this lovely stream of consciousness every week. Every Friday she provides a new word to spark our minds into action.

Check out Linda’s blog if you want to join in – check out the rules and the contribution of other bloggers. This week, the prompt is:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “puzzle.” Use it any way you’d like!

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I love puzzles, perhaps because I love solving problems and doing research. I think it is also whyI loved my career in technology – it seemed an endless challenge of solving puzzles.

My sisters and I always did jigsaw puzzles when we were together. I tried to complete one on my own and found in to be very unsatisfying. As much as individually searching for the perfect piece is a solitary act, putting together a puzzle seems very social to me.

I love computer based escape games. I remember the first one I discovered – “The Crimson Room”. In 2004, it was the rage. I think I have downloaded almost all the escape games out of the app store. I love discovering clues and solving the puzzles. I am careful not to do the games that are too motion-intensive with high-end 3D graphics. They can upset my vertigo. I always connected with my grandson over these escape room games.

(My favorite graphics are in a game called “The Birdcage” where your task is the free birds locked in a gilded cage.)

My dad loved mechanical puzzles. You know, the puzzles where you must separate bent pieces of metal, or release an object from some mechanism.

My grandchildren often received gift cards encased in a plastic box that required they solve a puzzle to open the box and retrieve the reward.

I love intricate box puzzles, too, although one of quality is quite expensive. I have bought the boxes made from balsa wood but they do not hold up. I remember a scene in the original movie “Village of the Damned” in which the children had to open a box to retrieve a piece of chocolate, I think. (That movie was a cult family favorite.)

I also love puzzle rings – if you take them off, they fall apart and are complex to reassemble. I bought one for my grandson, but it was too small. I still have it upstairs in the original box.

I love crosswords but actually prefer the non-crossword word puzzles in the Dell crossword books. All except for Suduko. I despise Suduko or any number puzzle.

I also don’t like those little slide puzzles, where you must reorganize a square of movable tiles that only have one open space.

And I confess, I still love the ‘find the hidden object’ in the Highlights for Children magazine.

Puzzling, isn’t it?

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