Addiction

The playing card symbol shown here is aptly named “Freecell Addiction”. I must confess that I probably have suffered from this addiction. When I was still working, I would take a few minutes at the close of the day and play a few random games to relax a little. We eventually purchased a computer for the house and continued playing an occasional game or two. The computer we purchased came with the old Windows 95 operating system which offered 32,000 Freecell games. In checking it out on the web I found that there were some people on this planet that actually claimed to have played all 32,000 games. I could not bring myself to believe they were able to do this since I felt they would have to be playing 24 hours a day. But what a challenge that must be? I decided to start playing games sequentially beginning with number 1. Well, I have to admit, it did become somewhat of an addiction.

During the course of this Freecell marathon I decided that when I reached 5,000 I would quit. Well, 5,000 was eventually reached, but I was unable to stop, next target 6,000 and so on. As the thousand figures came, I tried to stop each time, but stubbornly carried on after Marge said, “why not keep going”? Well on and on I went till this week I completed my 15,000^th Freecell game. Since I’ve been told by my friends many times that I have too much time on my hands and that I need to get a life, I’ve decided that I’m going to go cold turkey and stop right now. I must admit that I did have ideas of doing them all, but if anything convinced me to call it quits it was the fact that the new xp operating system in this computer has 1,000,000 game possibilities. Since my first 15,000 took several years, I don’t plan on living long enough for the next 985,000. Wish me luck in keeping my fingers off the keyboard. I guess if I was able to quit smoking cold turkey, this should be a snap.