It seems to work

Well, my game came a little earlier than I expected, which I'm not complaining about. I actually got it on Monday and tested it out. I figured I'd just put it in and set things up, like my user profile, game settings, stuff like that. But I had started and then, just like we tend to do with just about every video game, I jumped right in. There was just going to be a little tutorial and then I'd stop, right? That was the plan that quickly went out the window.

The first exercise involved avoiding a ball bouncing around the screen while hitting other ones. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, I quickly realized that in my haste to find a technological solution, I had neglected to find an additional important piece of hardware. A lens. A wide angle lens that would allow me to stand the proper distance from the camera and still be the proper size on the screen. But as it was, I was about three times bigger than I was supposed to be. That made dodging the bouncing ball so much harder. I had to be particularly spry and that didn't quite work out so well for me.

After doing that and another couple of exercises, a screen came up, asking if I wanted to add an optional module. Dripping sweat because I had just spent 40 minutes working out in the same clothes I went to work in, some unknown force gripped me and I thought "Yoga sounds nice," forgetting that when I started doing our yoga DVD a couple of years ago, I thought my head was going to explode a couple of times. It's hard. And yet I pressed on in my masochistic bent until I told my virtual personal trainer, Anna, that I couldn't do that one anymore and moved on to the final stretching module.

I swear that cooldown stretch made me more sore than anything else in the routine. But by the end of the exercise routine, I was sweaty, exhausted, and felt like I was about to throw up. Also, it was about midnight, which is too late to be exercising, if you ask me. I jumped in the shower and kept turning the water colder and colder until I felt myself calming down. It was like my time in Ukraine all over again, with the cold showers and the exercising.

The training went fairly well and I got on for my second routine again today. Still a little sore and without the lens to make me the right size on the screen, I had a tough time hitting targets precisely, so I'll have to find one of those lenses and snap it up. They're tough to find, I've learned, but the cost is still going to be less than even a single month of a gym membership. In the meantime, I'm on a roll and feeling good about what I've done.  EyeToy: Kinetic sets out a twelve-week exercise program that I've started on, so I'll keep you up to date on how it works out for me. The best news, though, is that I've lost a couple of pounds since last week. Let's keep it on the downward trend.