Puzzles, Part Three of a Three Part Series Told in Two Parts, with a Forward by the Author's Roommate

"I think this about sums it up."
-Dub, Two Guns' roommate (2003-present)

The third puzzle that we were going to build was called "No. 3, Rivers and Streams," of the European Wildlife Collection. It was a 1000-piece special gold series Jigsaw Puzzle (by James Hamilton), produced in association with the Fédération Rhône-Alps de Protection de la Nature - Université Lyon, illustrated by François Crozat. This puzzle was more than a puzzle; it was a dream.

My roommate Dub and I were eating dinner when we decided we would start the puzzle later that day. Walking back to the dorm, I turned to Dub and told him that this was the beginning of the new me. No longer would my life be shackled by the ugly chains of Procrastination. "'Why do tomorrow what you can do today?' From this point on, that's what I've always said," I told him.

With the card table set up and World Series Poker on the TV, we began sifting through the puzzle box for border pieces, being careful to set the corner pieces in a separate stack. When the last piece had been examined for a straight edge, we began preparing ourselves for assembly mode. Then I made a horrifying discovery—we only had three corner pieces.

Figuring that we had overlooked the missing piece in our haste to begin building, the two of us started searching through the box again, transferring the examined pieces from the bottom part of the box to the top. My hopes of finding the missing corner rose with every previously-overlooked edge piece that I found, but eventually the box was empty, and our stack of corners was no taller.

However, all was not necessarily lost. While I had discovered five additional edge pieces in the second sifting, Dub had found none, and I was holding onto the hope that he was completely off his puzzle-piece-identifying game. I was going to search again, but this time I was going to search alone.

I went through the box for the third time one piece at a time, making sure that I had checked all four edges of every piece before moving to the next. Seven hundred and eighty-eight pieces later, the stack of corners defiantly remained three pieces high.

I hated that stack. I wanted it to die.

"That sucks," said Dub. "Yeah," I replied. The guy across the hall thought it sucked too. "Hey are you guys watching poker?" he asked.

The dream was over, and we knew it, so I did what I always do; I popped open an IBC and put off my homework until the weekend, which isn't until tomorrow, and might not be until Sunday.