Jigsaw puzzle

This weekend Shelly and I took Savannah and Sierra to Barnes & Nobles. For a while we were a Borders family, but since their close that building has become just a semi-lit empty shell. This is the first time I have been in a bookstore for myself in a while. It is a little strange, strange in a way that helps me understand what happened to Borders.

First I walk with the girls back to the section of books that have Percy Jackson, Hunger Games and 39 clues. They are in, they have the vision I used to have of this place. They don't see it the way I do.

I step one row up form them and look at the Dungeons and Dragons books. There are no surprises here, with the exception of the price they are trying to get for an oversized box that contains 6 differently shaped dice. I know about every other book there because I have a DDI subscription, which gives me this content on my computer, or through my iPad. I don't have any need for these books any more. I think about the flavor text I am missing, but am I really going to spend that much money for flavor text.

From there I wander to my favorite section of the store, clearance books. I have from this section books on history and weapons, dictionaries and collected works of Poe and Shakespeare. I look across these books, from interesting topic to the next, but they all had problems. They were either books I could get free from Project Gutenberg or the information was nothing better than I could get from a simple Google search or oversized tomes, which I have no place for anymore. There was a Sushi instruction and tool set box, which looked interesting, but our kitchen is suffering the same problem as my bookshelves, so I leave it.

It is then I look around. I don't need reference. I don't need fiction. I don't even need the cool pens and notebooks I used to fawn over. Not only don't I need them, I don't even want them anymore. It is a sobering thought.

I meet up with Shelly, she is looking at some Star Trek fiction, but the section is small and nothing really grabs her. Together we discuss what we will get. We have twenty five dollars between us. We start looking at the games and puzzles. I'm in a bookstore, with a gift card and I'm reduced to looking at things other than books.

Last night, after church, after we ate grilled cheese sandwiches, we separated the 2000 pieces one from another. We flipped them over and began to organize them. After some prying the kids away from the TV, we did this as a family. The six of us began recreating Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Adam and God. Red and green robes. We didn't get very far on the puzzle, but I think it was a good use of the gift certificate.