Every Day I'm Puzz-uhling

As I mentioned, having my first solo weekend at home in ... years? ... I was excited to break out a new puzzle, especially since one of my best friends said she'd come over and help.

It's taking over my life.  It's 2000 pieces and soooo hard!  

Friday night, it was just the shrink-wrapped box: 

This puzzle was a gift from one of my best friends, and I could tell it was good when I saw this sticker:

Although I have a sneaking suspicion "lost piece service" will not be quite as helpful as I want.  I'm envisioning something where I call and say, "I'm looking for the piece that is under the right side of the vault in the second bridge arch from the left, it looks like it should be salmon colored on the right half, darker purple on the left half, and have the 'out' prongs on the horizontal, and here is a photo of the remaining pieces laid out on my table, please tell me which one it is."  Instead, it probably works like this, "I'm done with the puzzle but one piece is missing, the 33rd row down, and it would be the 19th piece from the left, could you please mail it to me?" 

Anyway, the puzzle description was in a bunch of languages, including Spanish AND Catala.  Anyway, in English, it extolled the virtues (upside down for some reason) of the non-reflective surface, which is quite nice.  Yeah, that's me, living the high-end puzzle life thanks to my Christmas gift!

Saturday at noon, this was the status.  All pieces right side up, edge pieces closest to the camera (and a few easy edge parts built), the remainder roughly grouped by color for the sky/water, and the right half of the table was everything that appeared to be other than sky and water:

It was immediately clear that we wouldn't be able to work on the puzzle on the table unless we added a leaf.  I usually do 1,000 piece puzzles, so this was twice as big.  So we parted the sea of pieces and added one leaf to the table. 

Here we are Saturday around 6:00 p.m.  You can't see it really, but over on the right side of the table where I was sitting, I had put together most of the church dome: 

Saturday night at bedtime.  Edges done (but needs to be moved up on table so it will fit), San Pietro built, part of the Trastevere sidewalk done, and the grates on the bridge built all the way across the puzzle:

Here is Monday morning before work.  Lots of progress on the arches of the bridge:

Tuesday morning before work.  Harder to see the changes, but on the left side, the upper half of the bridge is now done, and a few miscellaneous pieces that were missing are now filled in:

 

Unfortunately, I haven't taken one this morning.  Suffice it to say that it's slow going right now...