Puzzled Out

Do we all remember how the Grinch “puzzed and puzzed ’til his puzzler was sore?” Well, my puzzler is sore.

We spent most of yesterday in another fervor of indecision, until I just completely gave out. And this morning, while casting about for blog topics — there are several, but nothing leaped to the forefront — I watched Mysteries at the Museum instead. They are rarely mysteries and, to Lynn’s annoyance, rarely have much to do with the artifact at hand, but the stories are interesting enough that I watch when there’s no SpongeBob on.

And very shortly, like five minutes from now, it will be time to go to breakfast, and after breakfast I really need to do the sorting I planned to do yesterday but didn’t. Lunch took two hours, with the driving around, color cards in hand, staring at people’s roofs, trying to determine which were burgundy and which were brown. (And when Lynn thinks our couch is brown and I think it’s green, how much agreement do you think there was in our car?)

And then, once we got home, Lynn fell sound asleep (I don’t think mine is the only sore puzzler in this house) in her chair right by where I was going to sort things, and Na Ki’o, horrible influence that he is, crawled into my lap and made no effort to stir himself for the two-hour duration of Lynn’s nap.

Thinking I could, at the very least, plow through my hefty periodical pile, I instead made a tiny dent. One newspaper and three magazines, banished to the recycle bin. It’s a tiny victory, but it doesn’t look it in the slightest.

One of my reads yesterday was World Ark, the magazine from Heifer International. Lynn and I are big fans and small supporters of Heifer, an organization that seeks to lend a hand up, not a hand-out. There was an interesting article on a village in a very arid part of Tanzania learning to husband resources and get more gain with less wear and tear on the land. (Although the part where a family has realized a princely income of $430 from 1,200 bushels of cotton — that’s about 30 cents per bushel — was more sobering than victorious, at least for me.)

But the article that most interested me seemed somewhat out of character for the magazine. It focused on a woman of means in Arkansas who, along with her husband, built or remodeled their house to become the first LEED Platinum (Version 4–whatever that is) house in the state. There are only about 30 LEED-certified houses in the state, the article said.

And right there, in mid-thought, I will leave you for today, because if I try to come back to this after breakfast, it will end with another afternoon in my chair and not cleaning up the house to make it palatable to prospective buyers (nary a looker this entire week of spring break). And maybe it will ease some strain on my puzzler, now that I already have something to talk about tomorrow.

See you then.