Mono Monday : : Balance

Almost everything we do in life involves some sort of balance when you think about it. Should I have salad and a piece of fish and feel miserable, or should I have a big bowl of Pasta Alfredo and a smile on my face? 

What came to mind immediately when I thought of today's challenge was a puzzle OilMan and I bought many years ago in Florence (see extra) just because it was both elegant and fun. It lived on our low coffee table and became a balancing game which entertained us all, singly or as a group for hours.

I took me awhile to remember what I had done with the puzzle when Blake joined our household. That involved taking apart the television room and balancing the books from the trunk that doubles as a coffee table on the arm of a chair so I could open it and peer inside. 

Having found the puzzle, I took apart my desk to assemble on the floor what I thought would be an interesting black backdrop. Interesting to Blake anyway.
"Blake, sit. Blake, lie down".

Climbing laboriously to my feet, I noticed dusty paw prints on my black backdrop.
"Blake, GO AWAY"

I finally got all the pieces to balance on the kitchen counter out of harm's way, took a picture and left to see my Pilates trainer who made me do balancing exercises for an hour.

Back home again, I decided to reassemble the puzzle for the "extra" shot and realized that one piece was missing. It has probably been missing for years, I reasoned, but just to be sure, I rebalanced all the pieces in front of our alabaster lamp to see if it looked the same...

It didn't. One piece had gone missing. Recently.
"Blake, where are you?"

Distant sound of OilMan's voice outside,
"Blake, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

Back inside, Blake settled down quietly in a corner with his fuzzy yellow duck while I started reassembling the puzzle into a puzzle. 
Sound of chewing.
"Blake, What have you got"

You'll never guess what he had.

It took a fair amount of balancing irritation with giggles,  patience with shouting, getting something else done today (which turned out to be balancing on one leg  and trying to balance  a bunch of little resin sea creatures for today's Mono Monday blip). Thanks to The Aphid for this challenging challenge.

In other news: The three young American men who stopped a gunman on a train in Europe and saved the life of one of the passengers bleeding from a box cutter wound in his neck, are a definite balance to the likes of Donald Trump. They make me proud to be an American