2023 was the most fun, the most busy, and the most amazing puzzle year I have experienced so far in my entire life! November 2022, I left my job of 10 years as a medical coder to puzzle full time for about six months, which turned out to be a full year! The place I was working at wasn’t a good fit for me any longer and we had no real debt except our house payment, so I made the decision to puzzle full-time and concentrate on YouTube and social media, then I planned to go back to work full time as a medical coder. The puzzle I started off with on this amazing puzzle adventure was the 60,000 piece What a Wonderful World puzzle by Dowdle! We had purchased the puzzle through Costco and I set about on this very large puzzle adventure. This puzzle was bagged in 60 sections of 1000 pieces each. I didn’t have the space to mix it since the full puzzle is 29 feet long and 8 feet tall and I wanted to do something more than just sixty 1000 piece puzzles. So I set up a 60-day challenge! I would complete 60,000 pieces in 60 days! And that is what I did, except I actually finished it in 57 days! It was the holiday season, so I didn’t puzzle on Thanksgiving or Christmas and I finished it one day ahead of what I had planned. So there were a few days that I actually puzzled more than 1000 pieces. Each day, I would time lapse my puzzle, do a couple of shorts showing the puzzle, edit the time lapse and get that video scheduled to post on YouTube the next day. It was such a busy 60 days! I absolutely loved it! I got really good at editing my time lapses during these 60 days too! What I learned during my unboxing video for this 60,000 piece puzzle, was that being on video made me incredibly anxious! Lol! My video was reversed so the words were all backwards, I didn’t have a knife or scissors to open the box properly, so I used my phone charger and wound up ripping the box open, but it ripped on the seam, so that was ok, although you couldn’t tell in the video. I honestly forgot that I could literally pause the video and edit it! I really learned though, that it is ok to make mistakes because it is truly all a learning experience! But I was so nervous that all my rational thoughts were obviously absent from my brain! After that craziness, things were a bit more smooth as far as videos go! Lol!

Throughout the year, I did some extremely hard puzzles and some fun puzzles and I did the 40,000 piece Mickey Through the Years puzzle by Ravensburger. Again, I didn’t mix the puzzle together due to space, but I will say, that puzzle was absolutely amazing! I enjoyed it more than the 40,320 piece Disney Memorable Moments puzzle because it was actually quite a bit easier! Some more challenging puzzles I worked on in 2023 were the solid color puzzles of the Impossible Gemturt Puzzles with their cool squiggly pieces, a crazy Rubik’s Cube puzzle from Cool Cube Merch on Etsy, the Krypt Universe by Ravensburger, and I did a bunch of other fun puzzles that were normal! I think I gained a bit of a reputation for mainly doing crazy puzzle challenges, but I really do love all sorts of puzzles, even the easy ones! I tried some new brands as well, which is always a treat! And there are so many new brands on the market these days! I will be doing blog posts on more brands and puzzles stores starting in a couple of weeks!

I think the coolest part of my year in 2023 was really getting to know the puzzle community and my fellow YouTubers! One of my first YouTube connections was Vicky from Vicky Makes and Builds. Vicky’s channel is amazing and we have a lot of puzzles in common. In January 2023 I was part of the coolest thing on YouTube – The Battle of the YouTube Puzzlers, created by For the Love of Puzzles! I will do a dedicated blog post on BOTYP and why I missed BOTYP4. Another amazing thing that came about later in 2023 was Good Mythical Morning used my time puzzle lapses in one of their videos! They were guessing the puzzle and you know their videos are always funny. It was quite the honor to be able to see my time lapse videos in their video! I made a lot of friends in the puzzle community on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I did quite a few long format talking videos in 2023 and I learned as the year went on that my crazy nervousness and video anxiety never went away. I edited a lot out of my vidoes and I got really good at editing, so that’s a plus! The other challenge I faced was my husband had changed jobs early in the year and his work office was our kitchen table for almost the full year. His co-workers were coming in and out, the dogs were going crazy and UPS, Fedex, and USPS were ringing our doorbell daily! In retrospect, I feel like had I waited another year, I might have been better with my videos and creativity, but on the other hand, I had the best time puzzling and meeting some incredible puzzlers in the online space! I plan to puzzle much more in the future, maybe more in 2025 because my next blog post will let you know what 2024 has been like, which was quite a bit different than my amazing 2023 puzzle year!