Stephanie and I like all kinds of puzzle. We play puzzle video games (she became addicted to Picross DS), watch puzzle game shows (we went to the Wheel of Fortune auditions in Rosemont), have puzzle books (Crossword, Sudoku, Kakuro, etc.), and have put together a good deal of jigsaw puzzles together. So, receiving a puzzle as a gift at Christmas came as no big surprise.
What was surprising was the type of puzzle. Steph's grandma (Grandma B) found a site online that custom prints a 400-piece jigsaw puzzle from US Geological Survey data. Through http://www.my-jigsaw.info, you can enter a US address that serves as the center of a 4 mile (north-to-south) by 6 mile (east-to-west) map. The centerpiece of the resulting puzzle is shaped like house. Now, even though we live in Chicago, we don't actually own a house yet (we're still in an apartment), so Grandma B gave Stephanie a puzzle to remind her of roots: Saint Paul, Minnesota. And after three months, we finally put the puzzle together :-)
As an interesting side note: having grown up in the area, Stephanie's approach to piecing together the puzzle was to identify the streets in each of the puzzle pieces to figure out the general location of where they go; while I relied solely on color and line keys to fit pieces together.
