Puzzle Exchange!
How Things Work
The Meetings: Meetings are always at Cottage Grove Parks & Recreation, 210 Progress Drive. (please drive around to the back of the building through the fenced-in area). Please look and enter for Door #2, next to the blue door.
Which day we meet could vary from month to month. We have arranged for a rotation of days that we hope will work the best for most people. We will need to be flexible enough as a group to re-schedule our meeting occasionally if the CG Parks & Recreation Department needs one of our dates for a program or meeting. You can always check the website to determine when the next meeting is scheduled.
What Are the Meetings Like? We are very informal. And while puzzles are obviously the thing that brought us all together, we have a grand time visiting with our friends, old and new alike. We don’t work puzzles at the meetings; we just swap puzzles.
How Does Trading Work: At least for now, we have a straightforward approach. Right now, everyone brings their puzzles in, they all get set out, everyone browses through them, finds the ones that look interesting to them, and everyone goes home with a different set of puzzles than they came with. We also aren’t very concerned with who brought how many and who takes how many. They all circulate from month to month, and the main key is that everyone finds something new and interesting every month.
Preventing Escapees: We found that the more we move puzzles around, coming to and from meetings, the more pieces we seem to have escaping from their boxes. The solution we all agreed upon is to use zip-lock baggies. When you are ready to put the puzzle back in the box, put the pieces into a zip lock bag first, then in the box. The gallon size easily holds the pieces for most puzzles, and the investment of about a dime per puzzle significantly increases the life of a puzzle.
Missing Pieces? Most people don’t like to work puzzles with missing pieces, and we already have so many puzzles to store, that we have decided to ask that if you work a puzzle and discover that it has missing pieces, to please recycle it. Thanks!
Puzzle Tracking Sheets:
How many puzzles do we have?
The Email List: We will maintain an “anonymous” email distribution list for sending out meeting reminders and group updates. We don’t share or disclose our email list with anyone else, as we value your privacy as highly as we do our own.