I'll Do Anything You Want... Just Don't Take Away My Solitaire

I have rediscovered an old obsession of mine, Solitaire.

Back in the day, I played it all the time at school, at home, on the computer, and with actual cards, but then we updated our computers at home and our Hoyle Card Games game was no longer my computer happy. Bummer. So, I sort of got over it.

Then I went to college. Just think, an entire school filled to the brim with solitaire equipped Windows computers (the built in game package is probs the only positive thing Windows computers have going for them). I was in card game heaven.

I didn't let it take my life away, but there may or may not have been several mornings or afternoons spent in the libs or the amazing computer lab in Hoover, when I found myself straying to a quick game of good ol' Solitaire, for a "break" from that paper I was writing or the website I was making. Of course, I always lost. So, that one quick game, turned into two quick games, and then three quick games, and then four, and so on, until I was completely absorbed in my inability to actually win. Each time, I would tell myself that as soon as I won, I'd stop. And then, each time, I would inevitably lose.

I guess this was a problem for more students (and faculty?) than just me because upon returning to campus for my senior year, to my dismay I discovered a horrible fact. The school had removed all the games from all of the computers on campus. No more Solitaire, no more Spider Solitaire (another game I had recently become enraptured with), and no more minesweeper (a game I was absolutely horrible at but still liked to play occasionally). And so I spent my senior year of college in a Solitaireless state of sadness.

Now, six months later, that wonderfully frustrating and annoyingly amazing game is back in my life. Ahh, the joys of working in a newspaper office. Now in my free time at work, in between waiting for coaches to call in their scores so I can write about them and searching the AP wire for fun and interesting sports, international, and business stories and laying all that info out on its respective pages, I get to play the occasional game of Solitaire once again. Sometimes... sometimes life is good.