The cold spell broke last weekend. It broke so hard that temperatures climbed into the 60s on Monday. Insane. To take advantage of the balmy weather, I’ve been tromping around anywhere the ground is solid enough to walk on. There’s not a lot of that right now.

But for four weeks, it rarely got warmer than the teens and 20s, and for almost a week it was below zero. When it got down to single digits and below zero, we stayed inside, sometimes for days on end.

We each found our own things to do. I read so many books, even re-read a couple of my favorites. Barb took on a new hobby — jigsaw puzzles. I like jigsaws but she started with one that was a photo of a couple hundred Monarch butterflies. “You can help if you want,” she said, trying to encourage me to get in on the action. I laughed. “You have fun with that,” I said.

But even though the days are short in January and February, and even though I had a lot of books to read, eventually I got a little stir crazy and started looking for something else to do. When temperatures got up into the teens and twenties, I dressed up in many, many layers of clothes to take short walks through the neighboring parks, or just around the block. Anything to get out of the house.

But, eventually, I sat down at the table and began to help Barb put together jigsaw puzzles.

On the crazy hard puzzles, like the Monarch butterflies, I helped her by sorting the pieces by color. As it turned out, that seemed to help her a little bit, so I kept at it.

On the puzzles that were merely very difficult, as opposed to baffling and impossible, I sorted first, then picked a small part of the puzzle to work on. The example that leaps to mind was a puzzle featuring three or four dozen different kinds of butterflies. I was a bit leery about getting in on this one, after the Monarch insanity, but it was much easier for me to pick out all the pieces that looked like a single kind of butterfly than I thought it would be.

We’ve been piecing together a puzzle each weekend, starting on Friday night and usually finishing up sometime on Sunday. Last weekend’s puzzle had an awful lot of black pieces in it, though, so after completing the colorful center our progress has slowed down considerably. Last night I found six or seven pieces to fill in a corner, and I considered that a huge win!

I got no help from Sparky, who jumped up on the table to see what I was doing. He could not find a single piece to fill an empty spot, not even in exchange for chin scritches. I had to shoo him away after he started clawing up the pieces we had already put in place. He wasn’t sorry about it, either.