Last night the Portland Gang met up at our house for Gilmore Girls My Name is Earl, but "The Biggest Loser" was having its seasons finale on and preempted it. Brent and I took the opportunity to play XBox--I rented a crazy game called Blinx where you're a "time sweeper" cat that uses a vacuum to pick up trash and then shoot that trash at the bad guys. We were completely enthralled by the game. The girls stayed upstairs and periodically came down to tell us dinner was ready. As we only had ONE more level to go before completing that segment, we told them it'd just be a minute. Pretty soon, someone would come down and remind us, culminating in a shout TELLING us to come eat--fortunately at that point, we'd just killed the major monster on that level, so we were ready to eat, anyway. When we got upstairs, they'd all eaten without us!!! Unbelieveable! Then, when we tried to tell them how cool the game was and how cool the cats were, and how cool the gang of pigs were, they just rolled their eyes and made fun of us! Can you believe it?

That reminds me of when we first got our original Nintendo Entertainment System back in the 80's. It was the one with Super Mario Brothers. We LOVED it--particularly since it was such a HUGE step up from the Atari. We would play it any chance we could get, but when bedtime came, we had to obey, ripping ourselves from the hypnotic glow of the game. Well, I remember one night getting up around 1 or 2 in the morning for a drink of water and found my dad playing Super Mario Brothers in the dark living room. He finally had to go cold turkey, because he wasn't getting enough sleep. I don't think I'm that bad--especially since Margaret will remind me to go to bed. Although, I think I'm definitely going to have to ration my play time--I could totally get addicted to playing during non-sleep hours, and that would cut into my tv watching time--and THAT would be unacceptable!