The Cook family joins the 21st century

Can you guess what we are doing in these pictures?Go on... guess...We're in our basement...Up until now, the Cook family has not owned any kind of gaming system. No computer games, Wii, Nintendo DS, nothing. All of that changed a couple of days ago when we finally broke down and got an xBox Kinect. (I have thought about getting a Wii or some such for the past couple of years as a Christmas gift for Chad, but *he* has always resisted them. Funny, then, that the xBox was his idea.)

The cool thing about it is that there are no controllers - there is an infrared sensor that analyzes your own body movements. You physically do something and your on-screen avatar does it, too. This is going to make me sound like an old fogey, but - I am just amazed that they have the technology to do that!

So far the only game we have is the bundle that came with it, but it is a total blast to play. There is a river rafting game that we all enjoy (and are playing in these pictures) - skating from side to side to navigate the raft and jumping into the air to earn points. I would never say an xBox replaces a workout, but playing a 2-minute-long game on this thing definitely gets your heart rate up! No worry about vegging out on the couch with Kinect.

So if you don't hear from me for the next little while, it's probably either one of two things. (a) - I am drowning in my job. Or (b) - I've become addicted to video games. Or - heaven forbid - (b) is the cause of (a).

On second thought, maybe the timing of this purchase was really, really bad.