500 Piece Puzzle That Doesn't All Go Together?

So, Mr. Man and I were trying to get a restart on putting some more puzzles together last night.  We pulled out a 500 piece puzzle.  It was new in that it was not opened, but old in that it looks like it's from the 80's.  Just the look of the box and picture made it seem older.   Something I had picked up at a rummage for a quarter.

We have a whole new great area specifically to put puzzles together in which I will show you in a later post, but we sat down with great light, lots of space and cut open the box.  When we dumped out the pieces we first notices that the pieces were all irregular.  Nothing about the shape was defining.  We could tell some of the edge pieces, but not all of them.  So right away that threw Mr. Man off because he doesn't really look at the picture a whole lot.  He looks more at the shape of pieces and then tries them in different spots.  I don't know if that makes sense, but in any case it screwed him up. 

Anyway, because of the irregular shapes it took us a lot longer than initially anticipated.  A 500 piece puzzle we can usually whip off fairly quickly.  I didn't time it, but I know it took a very long time.  We didn't bother starting with the edge because most of it was undefinable.  We just sorted by the main colors/areas and went from there. 

We were going along okay when I had most of the sky done and the sky's edge.  When I noticed that this so called edge piece was not going to go along the edge.  The color was too dark to go in the middle.  So I figured there was just this extra piece.  But later, we got down to the water and the rocks and, lo and behold, a missing piece.  We did look all around the floor, but since we just opened the box and we hadn't gone anywhere with it except the table, we knew it was just not there. 

Bottom line?  Extra piece AND a piece missing.  Very frustrating as usual to not finish a puzzle, but also surprising and interesting at the same time.

Extra piece at the top and missing piece at water's edge.  Notice the shapes of the pieces.  Very odd, but it did add a nice touch of difficulty to an otherwise potentially boring puzzle.  I welcomed the slight challenge.

Here is the cover of the box.

Check out the price..... $1.79.  I wonder if that was it's new price 25 years ago or if that was a thrift store sticker at some point.  Pretty good condition box for it's age.  We did notice that on the actual pieces that the laminate was cracking or something.  It made the pieces feel dingy.

Well, at least we get to check another one off the list.  Have a great day!