The good news is that it’s starting to look like a grand piano, or at least the inside of a plastic one. I haven’t committed to getting the batteries yet, and am hopeful that I won’t be sealing in their compartment such that I’d have to take the whole thing apart to insert them. They wouldn’t do that to me, would they?

The bad news is there appear to be two small missing pieces from bag number seven (in fairness to the hard-working elves in Denmark, bag number seven did contain two similar, useless, extra pieces).

The good news is that the missing pieces don’t appear to be necessary in terms of holding the piano together or making sound.

The bad news is I don’t yet know that for certain. I may have to book a trip to Billund, where there are 25 acres of themed parks that include 40 million blocks of Lego, and “borrow” what I need. In the meantime, see if you can find where the pieces belong in the picture.

It’s been 100 years since the magician P.T. Selbit first sawed someone in half in front of an audience. I bet those early rehearsals were fun. I wonder how many assistants he went through before he got it right.

I won’t be performing, especially playing the piano, before an audience any time soon, but I’m starting to think that my LEGO piano might soon, as in before all the recent snow melts (April?), be ready for prime time. Only 375 more pages of instructions to go. The real trick will be finding someone who can tune it properly.

Through unparalleled perseverance (up around 125% effort, which is significantly more than the 110% effort that has become commonplace among professional football players, or so we are told weekly by the mathematics professors calling the games), and by actually paying attention to the instructions, I slayed yesterday’s version of the impenetrable Nemean lion without having to call for help, and without losing a finger, as Hercules had done before subduing the aforementioned monster.

As I move into the phase of constructing parts of the piano that are supposed to move in unison (with the aid of batteries not included, and not yet in my possession, as they are of a size that is not used for any of the 17 other battery-powered items I own), I am overcome by the realization that there’s no faking it. My LEGO Saturn V rocket might or might not hold together if somehow launched (I’d go with the under), but I’ll never know. There’ll be no wondering on the piano.

In case there was any ever doubt, I‘ve now established that I’m officially a nerd, as I sit around constructing my LEGO grand piano while listening to Merriam-Webster podcasts of Word Matters, which is described as being for “anyone who ever loved their English class”, which, actually, I didn’t. Yet here I am.

This current construction project almost stopped before it started, the box containing the pieces weighing in at somewhere between 13 and 250 pounds, but, with the help of an online weightlifting video, I executed my best clean and jerk, sans the jerk (but not the geek), and lifted the container off the ground without adding to my current list of 12 chronic injuries.

After surveying the 3662 pieces, I flew through the instructions until number 110 (out of 840), when I reached a roadblock that may require a phone call to LEGO headquarters in Denmark, and most definitely was an excuse for diverting my current attention to less geeky endeavors, like writing a blog about putting together a LEGO grand piano.