I love a good puzzle.  It's a well-known fact about me.  And placing the rocks for the back patio / walkway is proving to be one of the hardest puzzles I have ever done.  The one exception to this statement would be the ugly, ugly puzzle that Gene and I attempted around Christmas.  I bought it at the grocery store for under $5.00, which at the time seemed like the bargain of the century.  It should have come with a large label that said "buyer beware: due to the extremely low cost of producing this puzzle, it is likely that you will find it very difficult to actually complete it due to the poorly cut pieces which will make it seem like 50 pieces fit into the same side of a puzzle piece!"  No, not frustrating at all.  Needless to say, that puzzle has left the building.  It's now residing at the Salvation Army, waiting for another poor sucker to be pulled in by the pretty picture!

The reason the stone patio is proving to be a difficult puzzle to solve is because there is no right answer.  To most people this might seem like a godsend, much like a math problem or story problem where there are multiple right answers.  Not to me.  I hate tests or quizzes or story problems with more than one right answers because I am naturally indecisive due to my perfectionistic tendencies.  I want the answer that looks the best aesthetically, makes the absolute most sense, and is 100% right!  (That's not asking for too much, I say.)  David has been his usual patient self during the process, so I know that we will get there eventually.

I am writing this at night, so pictures will be hard to add right now.  So I will add them in a few days.

Postscript added May 2, 2010:
We all know marriage is a compromise between two individuals, right?  And that each spouse will tend to relax or adopt specific manners or habits of their spouse and how they live as they cohabitate.  For example, the toothpaste.  I have always been a squeeze it whereever and however kind of girl, even though this can create a bit of mess and I am kind of a neat freak in general.  My sweet husband is not a slob by any means, but he is not a neat freak in any sense of the word either. Except when it comes to the toothpaste!  He always takes the cap completely off, even if it is a flip top.  And don't even try to squeeze from the middle, you'd better be applying pressure from the bottom at all times.  At first I was very resistant to even caring about this.  But after watching my normally extremely even-keeled sweetheart get irritated each day about this, I decided that I needed to make a change, and I did.  Now it's second nature to me.

Fast forward to around three months ago, when David was making salmon salads for dinner.  I arrived home from work and walked into the kitchen to these beautifully presented salads.  What's completely wonderful about them is that he had no prompting from me as to how he arranged them.