The telescope has been separated from the shuttle and sent into orbit; the cargo bay doors have been closed; and the shuttle has jumped to warp, headed for the second star to the right, and then straight on ’til morning.

Now that that’s all done, I have a confession to make. I ate the last cookie. No, wait, forget I said that. I meant to say that I’ve been stringing everyone along. Not in the sense of string theory, or string cheese, but rather in that I finished building the shuttle a week ago, but didn’t want to take time away from the process to write about it.

I had no Dr. Watson to chronicle my movements. So it’s possible that some of my recollections have minor inaccuracies, or major lies. History is written by the victors.

By the way, the world record (by a human) for solving a Rubik’s cube is 3.47 seconds.

When I invest in LEGOs, I sign up for attaching bricks to one another, not for putting reflective stickers onto payload bay doors. (I told a fellow aficionado on a Zoom call that I had purchased the shuttle set and the only thing he wanted to know was how much trouble the stickers were.) If I wanted to play with adhesives, I would have taken up scrapbooking.

One reviewer suggested that you pace yourself when assembling this “space geek’s dream” so that you have enough energy when you get to the delicate chore involving the stickers. How about if the LEGO people just give you pieces with the stickers already on them!

It’s like trying to get flypaper (no pun originally intended) off your hands. If you display the shuttle with the bay doors open, and the Hubble telescope in launch position, you might notice any misaligned stickers. If Hal closes the bay door, Dave might be in trouble, but everything else looks fine.

In any event, I shouldn’t have to deal with these kinds of details. I think I need a LEGO apprentice, someone to finish up the details for me. If Rembrandt could have help and still sign his name at the bottom, why can’t I?

The interior base of the space shuttle is the most colorful LEGO thing I’ve done yet, if you count various shades of gray (as opposed to Grey) as colors. It’s a shame that it will disappear from sight by the time I’m finished, assuming I finish.

My biggest obstacle now appears to be my piano playing. Huh? Well, you see, my piano teacher privately censures me if I don’t keep my fingernails sufficiently trimmed, as if that will overcome a lack of talent. Hers are down to the knuckle.

What does this have to do with my construction projects? With each set, LEGO provides you with their version of the Swiss Army knife, a tool that helps you detach different kinds of bricks from each other. It’s a marvelous tool (of course) that is of great help, but, unfortunately, doesn’t solve every problem.

I have, on more than one occasion, managed to misread instructions and mistakenly fit pieces together in ways that suggest a crime against nature and go far beyond the classic dilemma of fitting a square peg into a round hole.

Because this kind of error is unforeseen, if not actually impossible, the LEGO people didn’t bother to give their tool a function capable of extracting pieces in this condition from one another. That’s where fingernails come in handy. Without them, I’m afraid, there is a lot of blood and blasphemy.

When we parted, Pauline was tied to the railroad tracks and a train was bearing down on her. No, wait, this cliffhanger was more Shakespearean, to open the box or not to open the box.

The bag containing the box stared at me with its big red eyes, like a puppy that had been up all night cramming for its final obedience test. That bag had already caused me problems, trying to carry it home on a windy day. A big gust had almost torn it from my hands and sent it careening down the sidewalk.

Fortunately, my momentum was stopped by a van that had just pulled up to ferry a group of locals to Alabama, the land of plenty, where a million-and-a-half doses of COVID vaccine sit unused on shelves.

This added factor, concern that my wind-blown adventure may have caused damage to the space shuttle, destroying parts of the heat shield, gave me no choice but to open the box. But there were so many pieces, and I was unfamiliar with them, not sure what was what. The only safe course of action is to go through all the instructions, step by step, inch by inch, and so I will. It’s my destiny.

Temptation, thy name is LEGO. Just when I thought it was safe to start thinking about something other than little plastic bricks, like seeing friends again and carefully frolicking (is that a thing?) in the warmer weather, you came out with your new Space Shuttle Discovery and accompanying Hubble telescope.

I thought to myself, because there’s still no one else around, I need help. There must be a pandemic hotline to call. Or a book. I’ve gone through several Zoom addiction-related publications – Zoom Nation; Zoom or Die; and Bang, Zoom, to the Moon Alice.

Then I had an epiphany (the 78th one in the last 14 months according to the list I’ve been keeping). I’ll buy the set and put it in the back of a closet, behind things I never use, like the 23 boxes of Lysol wipes the CDC now says we never really needed for wiping down our mail (so I won’t bother with the tax statement i just received that was postmarked January 29).

It will be just as if I had purchased an on-sale Christmas present early. Of course I’ve never actually purchased a Christmas present, but I’ve heard stories.

So I did it. I ventured to the LEGO store, for my first in-person purchase of a set, where I had to embarrassingly admit that I was not a member of their VIP club, embarrassing only there, not in the real world, where the opposite is true.

So now I’m staring at the box, and it’s staring back, all 2354 pieces of it. Do I have the will power to stick to my plan? Tune in tomorrow.