Craig's Blog of Destiny

Foreshadowing comment:  We’ve survived the first crisis…

This week I’ve had the pleasure of spending a great deal of time with Samwise.  He’s such a pleasant guy to be around, and I really enjoy his company.  And we’ve done some cool things.  We’ve made two trips between Seattle and Kennewick this week, both trips Sam kept me involved in dialogue most of the way.  During last Sunday’s trip we talked a lot about music (mostly Rush music), Dungeons and Dragons (comparative values of the newer versions to the older versions and even the original that I used to play), and Pokémon.   In Sam’s life, those are probably his three passions these days.  I always feel proud of Sam and what he does, but after last Sunday’s discussions I felt proud of myself:  after Sam’s excellent tutorial on the topic, I believe I could actually follow along a game of Pokémon, and perhaps even play a little myself.

Yesterday’s drive we talked a lot about schooling and such.  Sam’s making some of those decisions a soon to be eighteen year old has to make and one of those activities is visiting colleges.  He’s pretty comfortable with the traditional college choices, like Washington State, but he’s also considering some more specialized education venues, which we talked about a great deal on the drive.  When we got to Redmond we were then able to visit one of those specialized schools: DigiPen.  DigPen offers several different Bachelors degrees and a Masters program in Gaming, specifically video gaming.   What a pleasure it was to see Sam light up while we were there.  He kept turning to me, and with a huge grin say: “They’re making video games here…”  He was so excited about seeing students in the hallways talking about programming a game or the art of a game or basic game design and there were plenty of students around doing just that.  He really seemed to be in his element.  I’m sure there will be more to say about DigiPen in the future.

This morning we got up early enough to make the drive from Mill Creek and be in Federal Way before 8:00 am.  Once again, Sam is in his element.  We’re here so that he can participate in the State Pokémon Championships.  He’s pretty excited, and he’s quite optimistic about how he’ll do.  He plays at least once or twice a week and hadn’t lost a battle in over a month.  But now, the crisis: 

You play Pokémon with a deck of 60 cards that you create from all your Pokémon cards.  Sam has been working on creating his deck for this tournament for quite some time, but this morning, after we arrived, he announced he was missing a card.  Fortunately, it wasn’t a very important card; unfortunately he had no extra sleeves of the set he was using.  So, though he could put another card in his deck, he didn’t have the right sleeve, so having the card would do him no good.  So I suggested that he use different sleeves, but he didn’t have enough of the other kind of sleeves he brought with him.  I assured him that somewhere here there would be someone selling sleeves, and sure enough, there was someone selling cards and accessories and Sam was a little surprised to learn that they not only had sleeves he could get, but that they came in the full set of 60.  So, he was able to get enough of one kind of sleeve, a few extra cards, one of which he added to his deck to replace the missing one, and feel like he was complete.  Crisis averted.

Now if only they’d start playing…