I spent too many hours yesterday playing the newest grow game. If you've never tried, a grow game is a simple Flash game where the player has an inventory of items and must successfully choose the items in the correct order. The items interact with one another and the world around them, and the world grows based on the ordering. The goal is to fully grow the world. It's a simple but very challenging concept, and the cute animation and annoyingly playful music carried me to the goal (that and my addictive personality).

Doolies forced me to take a break for dinner when I felt I was very close. (I beat it when we returned in about 30 minutes.) While we sat at the Japanese restaurant, my brain kept going through the combinations of inventory items, probing for weaknesses in my strategy.

I learned two very important life lessons from this game: (1) balance when you get married with your job: if you work too hard early on, you may never get married; similarly, if you marry too early, you may never get a chance to be the best at your work. And (2) if you don't have adequate sewage, you will become a computer hacker, the bad type.

I don't want to admit how long it took me to beat this game. The earlier grow games took me only an hour or two. Doolies is my witness on this one, and I spent most of the afternoon and early evening with the weird music and the world where I needed just one more turn to grow.