What will they think of next?

Seriously, what do we do at work when our computer is down and we can’t play solitaire anymore?

I just spent the last 4 days at a Keyboarding workshop in Springville, Utah.  For those of you who don’t know, that’s in Utah County; the most conservative county in the most conservative state in the country.  The birth rate there rivals some of the third-worldyest countries on the planet, I think the median age in Orem, Utah is around 4½*.  There’s a joke we tell here in Utah;

“Welcome to Utah, please set your watches back 30 years.”
They go back 20 more when crossing into Utah county.

Anyhoo, considering I’ve never taught Keyboarding before, and will be next year, it was an incredibly informative workshop.   I actually have a pretty good idea of how I’ll be teaching the class.  It’ll probably change as I learn how things work with the kids, but before the workshop I had nothing.  Zip.

So I didn’t want to spend an hour commuting through 30 miles of road construction twice a day, so I just stayed in a hotel down there.  Which meant for pretty boring evenings.  I had to find something to do, so I went to the Wal*Mart that was conveniently right around the corner from the hotel.  And what did I find to while my time away?   A manual solitaire game.  Yup, someone was smart enough to come up with these little pieces of paper we can use to simulate the solitaire program.

Just like the real solitaire, you play it on the desktop and you can turn either 3 cards,

or only one at a time.

It’s played exactly like the real solitaire, except instead of clicking and holding, you have to actually use your hand and pick them up to move the cards. One of the drawbacks I discovered is that you can’t just pick up the top card of a set and expect the whole column to follow you along, you have to pick up all the cards to move them.

But on the other side, cheating is a whole lot easier…..

* That is an exaggeration, but not as extreme as you’d think.