Tampa, Colds, and Yu-Gi-Oh!

This is a Yu-Gi-Oh! card. Colin is obsessed over them right now. Somehow he has passed a bit of that obsession on to me. I think this is the first time Colin has introduced me to something rather than the other way around.

Several weeks ago Colin was invited to a birthday party for his friend Tyler. The boys along with their fathers all went on a train trip from Fort Worth to downtown Dallas and back. One of the presents that Tyler received was a Yu-Gi-Oh! starter deck of cards. Another boy who was at the party had his cards and they played all the way home from Dallas on the train. Colin came home and suddenly the only thing in the world that he wanted was a Yu-Gi-Oh! deck for himself.

I had no idea what these cards were. I'd heard the name, but that was it. We got him some cards and now he wanted to play this game that looked really complicated and that neither he nor I nor Maria really understood.

Two weeks ago I was going to go on a business trip to Tampa Florida. This might normally be a great vacation spot, but I was going to solely attend a pretty dry convention (The System & Software Technology Conference) and so I knew I needed plenty to do to keep me awake and keep my time occupied at the end of each conference day. I discovered there was a newly released Yu-Gi-Oh! game for the Nintendo DS which had a fairly in-depth tutorial on how to play the card game. So I purchased the game and started playing it as I left for my trip.

I got hooked.

I think when I got home 5 days later, I had already put in 40+ hours on the game. Now a little over a week later I've put in 74 hours and am still at only about 30% completion rate of the game. This little card game has an amazing amount of depth! More than I believe Colin and all of his friends who obsess over it even really understand.

If you are wondering how I could spend so much time on a game when I am supposed to be working, well, a big part of that is that somehow I brought home a pretty awful cold from my trip. I think it was from flying shoulder to shoulder in a crowded coach flight. I'm still recovering today after missing church last Sunday and two work days following that. I nearly lost my voice for a couple days and developed a bit of a bronchitis or something similar. Anyway, my illness has freed me up to play lots of Yu-Gi-Oh! Oh, and to attempt to get through a few more Harry Potter books before the new one comes out. I'm only on book 3, though. I'm not sure if I'll get there in time.