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<center><h3>What I did during my summer vacation</h3></center>

This summer was the best summer ever. I got to swim at the greatest pool on the planet every day that I wanted to. I made lots of new friends and hung out with a bunch of old ones. I got to watch a few basketball camps, and twice a week, I got to play video games on the computer. My game of choice was Team Fortress Classic. TFC rules. It's really old, but it's still great. I would have played it more than twice a week, but my mom said I had this thing called a quota. A quota is when someone puts a limit on how much you can do something and then you have to whine about how unfair it is. I was limited to playing TFC twice a week. She said if I whined too much, I wouldn't get to play at all. I whined a lot, but not too much.

In TFC, two teams take the field and try to break into the other team's fort and steal its flag. Each team has nine people on it and half of them play offense and the other half play defense. At least that's how it is supposed to be played. Sometimes it goes differently. Like my last game of the summer, I played against this team called the "Bloody Vikings." They were a bunch of cool guys, but they couldn't find nine warm bodies to play against my team. Sometimes this happens. It happens a lot, actually. And right before school starts, it almost always happens. When this happens, we call it "playing down" or "playing short." The Vikings had to play two men down because my team had 11 people show up. That is a big turnout for us, and it made our leader very happy that so many people wanted to play. In case you are wondering, I am not the leader, and I don't want to be because our leader is so cool. He's not perfect, like when he chose to play an !
old version of a map when the new one was so much better, but nobody is perfect. Other times he makes good decisions like having a server on the West coast when most of the team's members live on the West coast. Some people from the East coast think the server is in China when we tell them it's on the West coast. I learned in geography last year that China doesn't have a West coast, but it does have a southern and an eastern coast. They say sometimes people forget what they learned over the summer. Maybe that's why people think the server is in China.

Anyway, against the Vikings, our leader thought about having four of us ride the bench so that our team and the Vikings would have an equal number of players on the field. I got worried that I would have to ride the bench because I always ride the bench when someone has to sit. I think it's because I only play games two times a week and other people play them a lot more. Then our leader said that playing seven of us against the seven Vikings wouldn't be fair to the people that showed up if they had to ride the bench. That was his decision to make because that's what leaders do. My president says leaders are decision makers that make decisions, and that they are also problem solvers that solve problems. My leader's decision made me happy because I like getting to play. If he had tried to bench me, bad things would have happened. I know how to get mine, just like my hero Terrell Owens does. Some people call that being a "locker room cancer." Terrell's agent calls it !
being "proactive."

Even though 11 people showed up for the match, we barely found four warm bodies for the offense. Really, we didn't have four warm bodies. It was more like three warm bodies and a decapitated corpse. Really, it was just like that. You know that skull that Mel Gibson talks to in Hamlet? We convinced him to play for us. So we really had three warm bodies and a skull head on our team.

Hamlet sure was a boring movie, but my parents said it was good for me to experience Shakespeare. From my experience, I think Shakespeare should make more action movies like Romeo and Juliet and not make anymore boring ones like Hamlet. Anyway, it turns out that Mel's skull friend is really good at TFC. He doesn't kill too many people in the game. Maybe because he knows how much it sucks to be dead, but he's really hard for the defense to hit, and he grabs flags like they are free money.

Even though the Vikings only had seven people, they fielded a full defensive team. That meant it almost felt like a real match for our offense. The downside was that our defense had very little to do because the Vikings only had two people going after our flag. I didn't feel sorry for our defense because they needed a break from carrying us so much the previous week. They had so much time on their hands. I think our engineer built some stuff in our base and then went out in the yard searching for cookies. The military calls this going AWOL. I call it being hungry.

Our offense definitely tested the Vikings' defense. We used our concussion grenades to launch ourselves past their frontline and into their flag room. The people at Los Alamos say concussion grenades create a force wave when they explode but do not do any physical damage. I say that force wave makes for a wicked ride.

I think because the other team wasn't used to playing on a West coast server, they leaned heavily on their engineers to build auto-aiming sentry guns. Sometimes we saw one engineer in the room with the flag. Sometimes two. And sometimes even three. The sentry guns' shiny metal sides distracted most of our offense and slowed them down, but the skull was immune because he has no eyes. He never paid them any attention. He would fly right past the sentries if they were functional or not, grab the flag, and run out. The rest of us tried to set up shop in their flag room, but the Vikings kept kicking us out and making us walk across the yard again. It's a good thing the yard is so small.

After thirty minutes, the Vikings called for a break and found enough people to field a full team. This made things a little better. Winning with superior numbers isn't worth talking about. It leaves both teams feeling bad. I was happy they found an eighth and a ninth person and that their server was just as horrible to us as ours was to them. My teacher calls that "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you." My mom calls it "reciprocity." I call it a much better round.

The Vikings having a full team caused some problems for our offense. The backbone of our defense is very excitable. That means he gets excited easily. When he gets exited, he throws grenades at the exit to the base, which makes it hard for the offense to get out. During the second round, he was so excited that the offense got excited when it made it to the yard without being half dead. We asked how we were supposed to make it to the flag if we were slowed down more than a crippled turtle. We were told that we should walk around the danger zone. How is that fair? It's not like the offense should attack its own defense on the way to the opposing team's flag. It's not like the defense walks around the flag carrier when he's coming back to the base. No, they wind up their autocannons, kill the carrier like that ol' yella' dog, and take the flag for themselves. Some people would call that stealing. Our defense calls it "an accident."

We weren't going to take the high road and walk around our own defense. Instead we waited for the backbone to buckle and then we made a break out of the base and into the yard. It was intense, but we managed. I wonder if the Vikings thought about all of us entering their base at the same time. If they didn't like it, they should talk to our defense. When we couldn't get out without dying, we went down fighting our own defense. I don't think it taught them anything though, since it was summer.

Not only did the Vikings have more of an offense the second round, they changed their defense too. There were a third as many engineers building sentry guns and more mobile soldiers and demolitions men. In case you didn't know, soldiers fire rockets at people. These rockets take off a lot of life if they hit you, but soldiers can't fire very many of them at a time, and if they don't hit you, they can't hurt you. Demolitions men lay explosives around the flag and make them blow up when you try to take it. It is a good thing my mother signed me up for dancing and piano classes last year because I had to do a lot of dancing around the rockets and explosives. The skull did too. It takes very quick fingers to do it. I don't know how the skull did it. The rest of the offense blew stuff up. There was a lot of blowing happening to a lot of stuff in the Vikings' base. A lot. The rest of the offense doesn't like dancing or piano.

When our defense wasn't making our offense hide in the corner, they were stopping the Viking's attack. They had infinitely more problems with four Vikings than they did with two Vikings. My math teacher says that infinity is the largest number. I asked about infinity plus one, but he said it ain't larger than infinity. I asked him if "ain't" is really a word because my grandmother and Microsoft say it isn't. He said it was, but my English teacher said it wasn't in the dictionary but it was part of something called the vernacular, but then I found it in the <a href=http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=ain%27t>dictionary</a> and I was all confused. What I do know is that even though the defense had more problems the second round, the defensive leader solved those problems because he's a problem solver who leads.

The match ended and my team won. The Vikings gave what my coach would call a "gutsy effort." That's when you do something even though you know you probably won't enjoy it or get what you want out of it. He says it a lot when he talks about being married. My dad says that about getting a colonoscopy, but I don't know what that is. He says I'll find out when I'm older. The Vikings played with fewer people in our house, but they never gave up. A lot of teams have given up in the past. A lot of teams will give up in the future. But the Vikings didn't give up during the last match of the summer and that counts for a lot.

When the match ended, I thought that this might be the last summer any of us play TFC. Some of us will fill our lives with other things. Some of us will play newer games on our newer computers. Some of us will fry our computers and play nothing. Maybe next summer we can all play TFC 2 together, but people have been saying that for forever. Maybe not for forever, but definitely since the last millennium. Then again, maybe enough people will eke out another year of this game so we can play through next summer too. "Eke" means to make something last longer than it normally would. "Eek" is the sound of someone screaming at a mouse.

Yep. That's what I did this summer. I swam. I played games two times a week. I made some friends, and even I found a way to get Shaggy to wash his hands when they said it couldn't be done. Greatest summer ever.

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