Small Victories

I'm not big on computer games. In my family, we grew up playing cards and board games. Would could play some mean games of double and triple solitare as well as Uno!, Simon, and Mastermind. I was jealous of our neighbor who owned an Atari, our babysister, who had a Nintendo, and our cousins, who also had a Nintendo. I can't say I was really good at any of the games, but I did enjoy playing them.. I ruled on "Jeopardy!"

So when I got older and got my own computer, one of the first things I did was check out the games available.. Minesweeper, Solitare, Hearts, and Freecell. I never understood Hearts, Solitare bored me, Freecell was 'eh', but there was something about Minesweeper.

So I started to play it.. and kinda figured out how it worked. Then it got to the point where I had to have the 'best score' for all three levels on any computer that I used.. not counting at work. However, when I got a laptop for work, that quickly changed. So after I got the record, as it is with sports, it got me to think "what's next?" The only logical thing to do was to beat my previous record.

And thus it challenge began.

I'd get bored waiting for internet pages to load, so I'd play "a game". That game led to 20, and then.. lord, who knows how many. Then I couldn't go to bed until I won a game. If you know how to play minesweeper, you know it can take awhile sometimes before you win. Oh, and I only play the Expert level.

So much to my surprise, as I'm taking a break from listening to the live broadcast of Iroman Lake Placid on the internet, chatting on AIM, and trying out my new cross-cutting shredder, I thought I'd play a few games. Not much to my surprise, I won a number of them, and mostly under 90 seconds.

Big whoop.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I completed a game and a small 'window' opened up congradulating me.

I broke the record! I think my previous best for the Expert level was 74 seconds, but I was able to drop the best time down to 71 seconds.

Pretty sad that that was the highlight of my night.