At the beginning of the year we decided to buy into the Disney Vacation Club. We only bought 100 points, which will allow us a long weekend a year at one of Disney’s resorts. We wanted our first taste of the Vacation Club to be something away from Florida, but within driving distance. So, we decided to make our first destination Hilton Head, South Carolina.

We woke up early and boarded Austin at the local kennel, getting there right as they opened at 8:00 a.m. and then we the road. The route was pretty simple: I-4 to I-95 out the north end of Florida and down the east coast of Georgia. The whole trip took us 4 1/2 hours. Not too bad.

We arrived and went to check out our room. While the girls played around the outside of the condo, Jennifer and I planned out the next four days from all the pamphlets the person at the front desk gave us.

Next, we spent the whole afternoon at the pool. It was a good sized pool with a slide the girls loved sliding down. The girls swam around while Jennifer found the bar and ordered a couple of margaritas for us and we just hung out at the pool relaxing.

It’s traditional that we eat pizza on Friday night. Looking around on the Internet, we couldn’t find a local joint that had good reviews. So, we headed to the Mellow Mushroom,which is a great pizza joint we know from Winter Park.

We ended the day with a campfire sing-a-long and marshmallow roast. The two sing-a-long leaders were dressed in 70’s style clothing and led us in various camping songs, which Jennifer seemed to know well from Girl Scout camping.

It’s once again time to go back to school. We are now entering our third week of school and I can’t believe the summer went by so fast. Between working so much and Abby’s summer school, it felt like it just flew by. This year is quite a milestone: all the girls are finally in grade school together. Izzy entered Kindergarten this year and she’s so excited to be riding the bus with her sisters. Something she’s been talking about for a year.

Another going back to school event is that Jennifer is going back to get her Bachelors in Interior Design at Seminole State College. She received her Associates Degree back when we started dating over twelve years ago and now that the girls are out of the house, she’s taking the opportunity to take a few classes.

Had a great time at our media launch for Madden NFL 11, on Monday August 9th. It took place in New Orleans on the eve of the release of the game. We had a special VIP area which several PS3 kiosks running Madden on them. While I was playing a game I was impromptu interviewed by a local television station. I talked about our major feature, GameFlow, and answered a few other questions like who the highest rated team was in Madden.

Down below in the street, GameSpot had tents set up where people could get their first hands on Madden NFL 11. There was also a stage with a band playing. People were playing games trying to win Madden Gras t-shirts.

In the afternoon, it was my turn to get interviewed by our live USTREAM coverage of the event. There is a video of the recording and my part starts at 02:35:00. I gave a “shout out” to the server team back in Orlando who was still hard at work trying to make sure our servers wouldn’t melt down on launch night. I talked about various features on our server driven features and that was it. It went pretty quick, but I had a fun time doing it. Would love to start doing more media events like this in the future.

After a late lunch, the floats arrived and we got on board the last one in line. The football player guests we had, Marcus Allen, Deuce McAllister, and Marshall Faulk, were in the lead float. We rode on the float for several blocks, down Bourbon street, ending up in Jackson Square, where another huge stage had been constructed. The floats were loaded with boxes full of t-shirts, beads, cups, and koozies. We threw them out to the crowd as we rode down the parade route. It was awesome. Phillip Holt, the General Manager for EA – Tiburon said it best, “Riding a float and throwing beads down Bourbon Street needs to make your bucket list.”

Thanks to Seth Christie for the first photo above of all of us on the float handing out beads.

Last week when Jennifer was asking me what I wanted for my birthday, I had no idea of what to tell her. I’ve been wanting my own home office for quite a while and it didn’t even dawn on me until I saw one of the Featured Workspace articles on Lifehacker. It was simple and nicely organized. When I saw the pictures, I knew this is what I wanted. Jennifer spent the past several months painting the interior of our house and I knew that I could probably convince her to paint one more room. She was just excited that I wanted to use my birthday money on the house.

We told everyone to send money and we did a quick tally before heading out to IKEA. I settled on the Galant desk system which allows you to put together several pieces into a very sturdy desk. We added a couple of bookcases and some red paint and started to work. I’ve received many questions on “why red and not burnt orange”. While burnt orange would have been a great color, I do have to work in the office and I’m not sure I could stand such a bold color for that long. I tell myself that it’s Houston Astros “brick red” and that’s enough for me.

Jennifer spent all day Friday and Saturday painting and did a great job. Late Saturday, I started putting the Ikea furniture together and quickly the rest of the room came together. I would like to thank Jennifer for all the hard work she did in painting and also that she gave up her share of the office so that I can have my own space. It’s a great birthday present. I love you, Dear. Thank you.

At the suggestion of Abby’s counselors, we entered her into a county sponsored summer reading program. It was four weeks long and ran Monday through Thursday. Abby passed to the fourth grade by the skin of her teeth and it was our hope that this would help boost her reading skills. My only problem with the program was that I had to get her to a bus by 7:00 in the morning. It was a small price to pay, but this was supposed to be summer. I was wanting my extra 30 minutes of sleep in the morning before going to work. Anyway, it appears that it has helped. We’ve been reading the Magic Tree House series of books and tonight I could tell she was reading a lot better.

Meanwhile, Emily and Izzy have been attending swim lessons for the past three weeks. Izzy has already “graduated” up one class. Although that isn’t saying much, for her age group. I think the different is whether or not they get their head wet. I can tell Emily has gotten a renewed confidence in the water. She used to not go anywhere without hanging onto my back. Now she’ll jump in and swim back to the ledge no problem. She didn’t have near as much confidence at the beginning of the summer when we were hopping down to Disney to go swimming in their pools.

It doesn’t happen that often that we can actually have one of the girls’ parties on their exact birthday, but that happened this year with Izzy. We figured since her birthday fell on this Sunday, we would have it on that day. It was a little tricky since her last day of pre-school was last week, so we needed to make sure and get all the invitations out to her class mates before the end of the year.

We decided to just have a part at the house and invite some of the neighbors and Izzy’s classmates from pre-school. We didn’t have much of a turn out, only about a quarter of the kids that were in her class were able to make it, but Izzy didn’t seem to care. They had fun playing various games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey. We ordered some pizza and then had some cake. Izzy was all smiles, which she usually is. She is very excited about turning five and going to her sisters’ school next year. She can hardly wait.

While I’ve been busy trying to finish out Madden NFL 11, Jennifer has been busy at painting the house. She has started with the entry room and is now moving on to the kitchen. We decided to move the dining room into the larger area closer to the patio. It gives us more room in the dining room, for when we use it. Eventually we will hire a electrician to put in a chandelier there and we need to now figure out what we are going to do with the space that was voided by the dining room furniture.

It’s amazing how much a little bit of paint will help a house feel more “homey”. The house we bought last year had just the basics when it came to paint and fixtures. We had to put in all new mini-blinds and ceiling fans when we moved in. All the walls were painting a plain old builder’s-grade white. Now the house looks like someone actually lives in it now. Slowly we are transforming the house into our home. We are really loving our new house here in Oviedo.

I’ve been a fan of David Letterman since I was 13 years-old. Back in 1986 David Letterman’s 4th Anniversary special aired in place of Saturday Night Live. He was flying an airplane from New York to Miami and had the show on the plane with clips from previous episodes, as those types  of anniversary specials used to always have. From that moment, I was hooked. I would use our BetaMax in order to tape the show, which came on at 11:30 p.m., way past my bed time, and would watch it in the morning before school. For some reason his wacky humor really struck a nerve with me. I would write down his Top Ten Lists and would even try and write some of my own.

It’s now 24 years later and I’m still a Letterman fan. I don’t have as much time to watch it, but I have my DVR record every episode and try to at least watch the monologue in the morning.  I’ve never gone to see Letterman live in New York, though it is one of the things I’ve always wanted to do. I keep saying that I’m going to do it I even wrote to NBC for tickets way back in High School. There’s always a long waiting list and it’s never come to pass. I just hopped over to their web site and signed up for tickets, we’ll see if it happens. I guess I need to do this soon. Dave is now 63 years-old. Not sure how much longer he’s going to be doing it. His current contract runs out in August 2012.

This all leads to this past Thursday. It was a dream come true when the video game I’m working on, Madden NFL 11, was featured in a Top Ten list. Drew Brees was announced that day as our cover athlete to coincide with the start of the NFL Draft. So, he was in New York and our marketing department was able to get him on the show. I think it was a great coup to not only get him on the show, but have a Top Ten List which basically advertised our up-coming game. It was great to see Letterman holding up a box of the game before the Top Ten was read. Perhaps one of these days I’ll get there to see his show live.

The week started off with a fender bender that Jennifer got into. Well, it was a fender bender for the other SUV. For ours, it was more of a smash the radiator and push in the hood. We contacted our insurance and the truck is being worked on. The wreck did around $5000 worth of damage and we should have it back in a few weeks. In the meantime, we are renting car.

On Saturday, EA paid for the whole company to go to Universal Studio. We could pick either park and then they were going to have a “picnic” lunch in the Universal CityWalk. We chose to go to the Islands of Adventure this time since we had never been there. Last time EA did this we chose the Universal Studios park because we thought the kids were too young for Islands. It turns out there was plenty of things for them to ride.

We started off in the Dr. Seuss area of the park, which had a few very tame rides, which the girls liked. We then headed over and saw the area where the new Harry Potter section of the park will be opening up in a couple of months. We split up so that Jennifer and I could take turns riding the Dueling Dragons roller coaster. It’s a couple of coasters which are intertwined where your feet are dangling free. It was pretty intense, several corkscrew 720 spins and a couple of full 360 loops. Both Jennifer and I were dizzy when we got off and it took us like 15 – 30 minutes to recover, but it was still fun.

When we got over into the Jurassic Park area, we decided to take the whole family on the River Adventure ride. The first part was pretty tame, just floating around looking at giant animatronic dinosaurs. Once you go into a building and start climbing way up into the air, it gets more intense. The last part of the ride has a giant T-Rex and you are heading right for it and then you drop. Needless to say Emily and Izzy weren’t too thrilled. Perhaps we should have warned them, but then we wouldn’t have gotten such a good picture as we were falling.

Overall, it was a great day at the park and we are thankful to once again be working for a company who will occasionally spring for such things.

We’re now back home after our week-long trip to Texas for my sister Jill’s wedding. While it’s great visiting with friends and family, it’s always nice to return home and to be sleeping in one’s own bed again.

While we were in Houston, we visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Butterfly Center. We walked around looking at the various exhibits, but the best part was the Butterfly Center. It was amazing how many butterflies were flying around. One of the workers said there’s approximately 2,000 of them. Emily tried several times to try and get one of them to land on her arm. Even picking a tiny flower at one point, trying to pose as one of the plants that the butterflies were hovering around, but she had no luck.

The flight back was pretty uneventful. The plan was for the Jennifer and the girls to wait and get the luggage while I headed out to the long-term parking and pick up the Sequoia. I reached the truck and realized that Jennifer still had the keys. I had to trek all the way back to the terminal and meet up with Jennifer. By the time I got back our luggage had arrived so we all hauled our bags out to the Sequoia. To top it all off, we couldn’t pick up Austin from the kennel because they had already closed.

We all had fun in Texas, now it’s back to work and school here in Florida.

This weekend we flew out of Orlando to Houston in order attend my sister’s wedding in Shreveport. We decided to fly to Houston and then drive to Shreveport in a rental car because it ended up being cheaper than flying to Shreveport. There were no direct flights to Shreveport and that extra hop would have cost us another $500. So, we collected some of the points on our credit card and then used them to rent a mini-van for the drive.

The flight went smoothly and the drive over to Shreveport was pretty easy. We realized it had been several years since we had actually made that drive and the girls did great. I guess that’s the advantage of them being a little bit older now. Less drama around hour 3 in the car, which is what usually happened in the past.

Friday was the rehearsal. I met my fellow groomsmen, friends of Chris’s, for the first time. Abby, Emily, and Isabelle were also going to be in the wedding and they got instruction on what they were supposed to do. Afterwards, we headed over to Ralph & Kacoo’s for the rehearsal dinner. I tried some alligator, which tasted great (also like chicken of course). We had a great time visiting with Nana and Poppy, who sat at our table. The girls kept them in stitches when they told Poppy about their “get the plunger” saying that they made up.

The next day went pretty fast. We all got dressed up and headed over to the American Rose Center for the wedding. A lot of people had showed up and soon the wedding was underway. I escorted MaMaw and my mom down the isle and then ran back to be part of the wedding party, escorting my cousin, Brooks-Ann Camper, down the isle. Next Abby and Emily came down the isle throwing purple flowers and next Isabelle came down the isle caring the ring pillow. Finally, Dad came down escorting Jill. She looked wonderful in her wedding dress and the jacket that Brooks-Ann had made for her. The vows went fast and before you knew it, we had a new member of the French family, Chris Anderson. He instantly became an uncle to our three daughters, which I reminded him of when we all had dinner together on Sunday evening.

On Sunday morning, the Easter Bunny came and visited Nana & Poppy’s house. He was pretty sly hiding eggs in the room right next to where the girls were sleeping. But, they got up early and searched for the eggs that were hidden throughout the house. Nana and Poppy also gave them some kites, which we went down to LSUS to fly later that morning.

Saturday was an Easter Egg Hunt up at church. This was the first time we participated at the one at Oviedo First United Methodist. We had traditionally gone down to Winter Park’s Easter Egg Hunt. The “hunt” was divided up into age groups and Izzy was the first one out of the gate. She ran around, but there wasn’t too many eggs for the pre-schoolers. She only found nine.

Next the First Graders and the Third Graders were going at the same time so Jennifer and I had to split up. Emily’s group ran around a playground and she found plenty of eggs over near the wooden play set.

Abby’s group was the most complex. Their eggs were buried and were well hidden. Abby was rewarded by digging into a bag of sand and came up with a golden egg. The egg contained a message saying that she had received a free trip to Vacation Bible School this summer.

This past week I spent a couple of days going to see some Spring Training Baseball. The first day was this last Sunday where my friend, Tom Carbone, and I visited the Astros’ home field down in Kissimmee to watch the Astros play against the Mets. Tom was well prepared for the rain, but I guess I didn’t get the memo. The game was supposed to start at 1:00, but it was still raining a little bit and it wasn’t looking good when the tarp was still on the field. There was still going to be at least 30 minutes of warm-ups once the players got onto the field. They finally got the tarp off the field and the game started around 2:00. They got one inning in and the sky opened up. The players left the field and we waited for at least ten minutes in the rain waiting for them to announce something. Finally, they called it. The game was canceled. Fortunately Ticketmaster did refund the price of our tickets.

Tuesday was going to be the big double header. Tom and I were going to drive down to Bradenton, just south of Tampa to see the Astros take on the Pirates. Unfortunately, Tom had to pull out because of an important meeting he had to attend for his company, 360Ed. He was a critical part of the meeting and I understood when he decided he couldn’t attend. So, I stood the course and attended the first game on my own. The first thing I noticed upon arrival was that I was in quite the minority at the tender young age of thirty-eight. Apparently weekday baseball is a social event for the retired people of Florida. I was surrounded by old people who were more interested in talking about if their friends were at the game than watch it. It was a good game. The Astros took the early lead and kept pounding it to  the Pirates scoring almost 2 runs per inning. They ended up winning 11-1.

The game ended around 3:45 and I had to rush to Lakeland, the home of the Detroit Tigers. It was an hour and a half drive and the next game started at 6:30. I met up with Tom and we headed over to the game to see the Tigers take on the Washington Nationals. Once again, the stadium was very nice for a Spring Training facility. I then came to the realization that the Astros’ field in Kissimmee is just not up to par with the others. This stadium was huge. It probably sat six time that of the one in Kissimmee. I discovered one of the great traditional disserts at Tigers’ games: their Strawberry Shortcake Ice Cream. It was a great day of baseball, food, and fun. I vowed to start making this trip something I do every year. Can’t wait until next year.

It’s exactly three years ago this week that we bought our camper with the money we got back from taxes and now we’ve sold it. We had many great adventures in our camper, but with this last trip in January, we decided we wanted to have new adventures without it. Been there. Done that. Let’s vacation in style. So, we’ve taken the money that we received from the sale and purchased into the Disney Vacation Club. We’ll be staying at various resorts within the Disney Resort system. Going camping was becoming too much work. We just wanted to be on vacation and not feel like we were working. Goodbye Camper, it was nice knowing you.

This week was an important week for Abby. It was the first time she had standardized testing. This week was the all important FCAT: the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. She must pass this test in order to move on to the third grade. The test was 1 – 2 hours for the past three days. One day of math and two days of reading. We are really worried that her reading isn’t where it’s supposed to be. I spend almost every night reading with her The Magic Tree House series of books. She has greatly improved, but we’re afraid that her reading comprehension just isn’t where it needs to be. We’ll see I’m sure we will get word in the next few weeks. Wish her luck.

Yesterday Izzy jumped off a neighbor’s swing set and came home crying. She hurt her foot. It looked swollen, but after the initial shock of the injury, she appeared to be okay. Because it hurt to walk on, she was crawling around and insisted to be carried around. It didn’t appear to be an emergency, so Jennifer waited and took her to the Centra Care this morning. It turned out she didn’t break it. In fact the doctor said it’s very rare for kids her age to break a foot because their feet are still growing and most of their foot is cartilage and thus a lot of cushioning. Anyway, she appears to have sprained her foot. She was up and walking around today instead of crawling, so I guess it’s getting better. We’ve been lucky so far. No major injuries with any of our kids (if you don’t count when Izzy had to go in for stitches).

We got our camper back from the shop later this past week and it’s now up for sale. After taking it out last time, I think we are getting a little tired of it. We’ve had it now for three years and we’ve come to the realization that it’s a lot of work. This last time it took forever to pack up and then when we got it home, it took forever to get cleaned up. We decided to go ahead and sell the camper and then with that money buy into the Disney Vacation Club. We’ll miss the camper. We had a lot of fun with it over the past few years. Some real great memories of camping at a few state parks and down at Disney.

Jennifer has been the “cookie mom” for Emily’s troop this year. And once again, we are are overrun with Girl Scout cookies. This weekend was the last set of cookie booths. Abby and Jennifer stood outside The Townhouse Restaurant in “downtown” Oviedo on this past rainy, cold Saturday morning. They sold well, but it turns out we have several cases of extra cookies, so if you are interested, let me know and we’ll send you some. We need to get them out of here before Austin eats them all.

Last weekend Jennifer’s parents flew in to help celebrate Emily’s birthday and to get their first look at our new house in Florida. We showed them around and took them to breakfast at The Townhouse Restaurant in downtown Oviedo. In the evening we took a trip down to Medieval Times in order to celebrate Emily’s seventh birthday. Since she loves horses so much, we thought she would enjoy the show. Everyone loved it and we had fun cheering on the red and yellow knight (who didn’t end up winning).

This past weekend, Jennifer and Abby headed out with Girl Scouts on a camping trip. They left Friday night and didn’t come back until Sunday morning. Fortunately the camp was just right around the corner, only about fifteen minutes away from the house. It rained Saturday night, but apparently the tents were well made and they didn’t get wet at all. They had fun doing crafts and shoot archery. Jennifer came back with a bruise on her left arm from the archery bow. They had a fun time, but were exhausted when they returned.

This week was pretty quiet as we stayed at home and did various chores around the house. Jennifer is finishing up the drapes for our room. We went out and got Izzy’s bike fixed. A cold snap finally hit Florida and I replaced the downstairs thermostat with a programmable one. This allows me to lower the temperature at night and have it automatically increase the temperature in the morning before we get up.

One excursion we did was visit the Gaylord Palms’ ICE! Exhibit. The Gaylord Palms hotel had brought in ice sculptors to carve blocks of ice. The exhibition hall was set to nine degrees and they handed out parkas for everyone to wear. Jennifer had the forethought to buy the girls hats and mittens, so they were prepared. However, it didn’t take long before Izzy’s cute nose was turning red. Near the end of the exhibit was a giant ice slide, which the girls got to slide down.

So, overall a nice quiet week off. Next few weeks are busy: Emily’s birthday, the Texas Longhorns try to win the National Championship, the launch of Madden Ultimate Team, Jennifer’s parents are flying in, dinner at Medieval Times (for Emily’s birthday), and a camping trip down at Disney.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas this year. Because I didn’t have very much vacation time and Madden Ultimate Team was still finishing up, we decided to stay in Florida this year. This is the first time we haven’t gone back to Texas for Christmas since 2003. We’ve actually found it quite relaxing not having to be four days in the car driving.

Because everyone mailed their gifts to us, our tree was exploding with presents. We started off Christmas Eve trying to find a place for breakfast and had to settle for IHOP. Our normal breakfast place, The Townhouse Restaurant, was closed. We thought about trekking it up to Lake Mary to visit our old breakfast place, Peach Valley, but decided against it. It was already 9:00 and didn’t want to be eating breakfast so late.

In the afternoon, we attended church service and then headed home to open presents. Abby and Emily played “Santa” and handed out the gifts. It took a while, but we go through them all and are thankful for all the wonderful family we have. Thank you for all the presents. We finished off the night baking cookies for Santa.

In the morning, the girls woke me up at 5:50 a.m. in order to show me what Santa gave them. Jennifer elected to stay in bed, not having a good night sleep due to some backyard neighbors having a very merry Christmas party the night before that kept her up. I threw Empire Strikes Back into the new Blu-ray player I got for Christmas and laid on the couch while the girls played around me.

On Saturday we went over to Pappy’s Patch, a local farm near our house, to pick fresh strawberries. They were delicious. We went home and made strawberry milkshakes and chocolate covered strawberries.

I’m off from work the rest of the week, but I have to keep my eye on my e-mail. Madden Ultimate Team isn’t quite through all the testing yet, but hopefully we are close and we will be available to download next month.

This week saw a pretty big milestone. Jennifer and I are now the parents of a nine-year-old. We can’t believe that it’s happening so fast. I’ve been working late this week on Madden Ultimate Team, so I wasn’t there when she opened most of her presents. She received another gift certificate to Barnes & Noble, a charm bracelet and a lot of money (around $50). She’s already busy deciding what she wants to buy. This morning we finally gave her the present from myself and Jennifer: a Nintendo DS-Lite and several EA games (Littlest Pet Shop, Charm Girls Club, and Harry Potter). Games I really know nothing about, but thought she would like. She was very happy and we both got a big hug.

We really didn’t have a party this week because in a few weeks Abby is going to have a slumber party. She’s going to invite 9 girls over for a sleep over in a few weeks. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, we decided to postpone it a few weeks.

Also this week we were treated to a Thanksgiving musical program at Izzy’s pre-school. They sang a few songs and then we had a giant pot luck Thanksgiving lunch. It’s been a while since we’ve had a musical program since Izzy didn’t really didn’t attend pre-school last year. She was cute as always.

The weekend before Labor Day, I was watching Ken Burns who was a guest on Late Show with David Letterman. He has a new documentary on the National Park system. I came to the realization that I’m about to get really busy at work because of the new game I’m working on and that would mean that this might be the only time that we can go camping for the rest of the year. We drug the camper from Florida to Texas and back again, not using it for the past two years. One week notice usually isn’t enough time in order to get a camping spot. We were lucky. Jennifer just kept going up the coast until she found an open slot. We ended up with Anastasia State Park in St. Augustine.

I left a few hours early from work on Friday and Jennifer had the camper all ready to go. It took us an hour an a half to get there. We were pretty lucky again. We didn’t know that the gate at the campground closed at sunset. We were there about 15 – 20 minutes before they closed. It was that point that our luck ran out. Once we got the camper set up, we found that the air conditioner was no longer working. We knew something wasn’t going to be working since it was sitting idle for two years, but we were hoping it wasn’t that. I had the girls jump into the truck leaving Jennifer to continue to set up the camp. We used the iPhone map to find the closest Wal-Mart and went to look for some small fans that we could use. We found some and it help a lot to keep the air circulating in the camper.

The first day, we wandered around St. Augustine and visited the Lighthouse. Izzy was too small to go up, so we had to take turns climbing the long staircase to the top. Emily had no fear standing at the edge and looking straight down. It was amazing how far we could see once we were at the top.

The second day we spent most of the time at the beach. It was pretty nice that the campground was under tree cover, but the beach was less than five minutes away. The girls loved jumping in the waves and playing the sand. Eventually Jennifer and myself started cooking even though we kept putting on sun screen. We even had a few people tell us that it looked like we were getting burned.

When we got back to the campground we found out that we had a visitor. A squirrel (we assume) climbed up onto the side of the camper and ate through the screen in order to get to a pack of tortillas that we had sitting there. Oh well, we had no idea that the squirrels could smell that well. At least he didn’t get into the camper.

All-in-all a great camping trip. It’s always great to get away from it all and just spend time with the family. I highly recommend the Anastasia State Park camp ground. I know we will be returning.

The biggest news this week was that I am moving back to run a game team. I enjoyed the month I worked with Brian Graham and the other members of the Project Management Office (PMO), but my passion lies with game teams. Sorry, Brian and I will continue to support the goals of the PMO while I work on my new game. On the new team, I will be the Program Manager, which means I will be responsible for the development of the game. The title has not been announced and the planning is at its very infancy. So, I cannot say the exact title I’m working on yet, but once it is announced, I will let everyone know.

All week long I was in leadership training called LeaderPoint. It was a very good course and I enjoyed it. The first three days were a business simulation where we could “do anything except sell stock”. In fact, some of the people broke away from their companies and started their own company. The whole simulation was an attempt to let you “fail in a safe environment” and teach you through doing. While I thought the simulation was interesting, I thought our instructor, Mike Laddin, and his lectures to be the most engaging. Some of it was things I already knew, but it was a different spin on some other management styles I’ve heard of. It’s also really nice to have someone come in and talk where you can ask questions about situations that have happened to you. In the end, I can’t recommend it more and if you are in charge of setting up training for your business, you should check out their courses.

Another month has gone by and it’s been quite a trek for the French family. The biggest event being the pack-up of the house and driving from Houston to Florida. On July 4th weekend, I flew from Orlando to Houston one way and then the next morning started the drive back to Florida. This time in the Sequoia and with the camper in tow. It was a boring drive, but went quick and before you knew it, we were pulling up to our new house which I had closed on the week before. We were also in luck, the driver had called and said that he was going to be able to drop off all our stuff on Sunday, July 5th. This was great, because I would be home in order to help.

The next few weekends have been one of just settling into our new house. It had no lights in any of the rooms, so we installed six ceiling fans and then Jennifer’s dad sold us some mini-blinds, which we installed. Over the past three weeks the garbage guys loved us as we left a mountain of boxes at the curb each Friday morning for them. Last weekend we had a big push to get everything done. Last Sunday we were literally going from 9:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. that night. But it paid off, because we were able to just rest this weekend, which was my birthday weekend.

We weren’t able to rest that much on Friday went I got a panicked phone call that morning. Jennifer had taken the girls to McDonalds to play around. Izzy had hit her head on the gym equipment and cut it open. Several of the moms there helped Jennifer stop the bleeding and then she was off to the hospital. I met them at the ER where Izzy had to get three stitches. She was in a lot of pain, but got through it and she’s doing fine.

Not wanting a big birthday celebration, I just wanted to go out to eat where I went a couple of years ago. So, we headed out to Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville to have a margarita and a Cheeseburger in Paradise. We went there, but forgot to make a reservation, so we were waiting for over an hour for a table. The margarita was good, but the restaurant was burning up hot. We didn’t wait for desert. We booked it out of there and headed home where Jennifer had baked a Texas Longhorns helmet cake, which we devoured once we got home.

It is now the end of the first week of me being in Florida while the family is back in Houston. I finally got to see the new house with my own eyes and I’m really excited about it. Can’t wait until we move in and start settling in. There’s three big things that we are going to have to buy right away: fans, fence, and blinds.

None of the rooms have ceiling fans, which is a big oversight for a house in the South. Not too big a deal, though. I’ve installed them before and they are not that hard. Unfortunately, I think there’s about seven we’re going to have to install.

We need a fence for Austin. He likes to roam around outside some times (especially when he has to do his business) and we are going to have to fence in the backyard for that. Jennifer already has a couple of fence companies giving us quotes. The Homeowners’ Association is requiring us to get a white vinyl fence. I didn’t even know they made fences like that. It’s quite a difference between here and Texas, where every house already has a big wood fence when you move in. I think Texans live under the adage, good fences make good neighbors.

Finally, the house has no window coverings at all. So, we are going to have to get mini-blinds for most of the house. Fortunately, Jennifer’s dad sells blinds, so we know where to go for that.

So, while we are busy making plans for the house in Florida, Jennifer and the girls are having to struggle through the hot summer in the rent house back in Houston. The house has such poor construction the upstairs half of the house stays at least 10 – 15 degrees hotter than the lower portion. Now that the summer is at it’s hottest, it has become intolerable. It’s gotten so bad, that the girls are now camping out in the downstairs bedroom with Jennifer. We’ve complained to the owners, but no response. Fortunately, Jennifer and the girls only have about another week in the house before the movers come and pick-up all of our stuff.

Two months since I’ve updated Frenchville. A lot has gone on since then. The biggest news being that we are moving back to Orlando and I’m resuming my job with EA – Tiburon. I just spent the weekend driving from Houston to Orlando and in a couple of weeks I’m going to fly back and do it again, but this time with the family. I’ve learned over the past year that it isn’t really where you live, but your job that matters. You have to enjoy what you are doing for a living. I always enjoyed my job with EA Sports, playing their games and it was extremely hard playing NCAA 09 last year knowing that I started working on that game and didn’t finish it.

We have a contract out on a house in Oviedo, a suburb east of Orlando. It should be about the same drive as I had when we lived up in Lake Mary. We close on the house on June 30th. It’s in short sale, so we are getting a good deal on it, but the movement has been fairly slow because everything has to go through the bank. It recently appraised for lower than we offered. Our realtor went back to the bank and made sure our offer was lowered to the price it appraised for. That’s going to end up saving us quite a bit of money when we close on the house in a few weeks.

Last week was also Izzy’s 4th birthday. Nana, Poppy, and Aunt Marci came down to help us celebrate. Their cousin, Kinley, also came over. Of course, Izzy requested to have a Mickey Mouse cake and Jennifer made it once again. After lunch and cake, we headed over to the Sienna Plantation pool for some swimming.

Last Sunday was also Abby’s dance recital. Five months of dance lessons leading up to this final recital. It was a two hour show with about 15 groups of kids doing two numbers each. Abby’s first dance was to the Austin Power’s theme. If I would have known that, I would have shown her the opening number to the movie before she went on so that she could have seen some of the proper dance moves. Abby did very well. I thought she was one of the best dancers out there, but I might be a little biased.

So, currently, I’m in Orlando, the family is back in Houston and in a couple of weeks we will be reunited. Now that we are going to be in Florida once again, I guess I’m going to have start writing more often in Frenchville. That was the original reason I set up this blog so long ago.

I awoke early this morning to the sound of the girls rifling through the baskets that the Easter Bunny had left for them. He was pretty generous this year, for the first Easter away from our house in Orlando. The biggest gift being new ceramic piggy banks for each of them. Once they were loaded up with some candy, we had some breakfast and headed to church.

The church service today was supposed to be at the Sienna Plantation amphitheatre, but had to be moved to the Middle School because of weather. Instead of an open field, a school gymnasium had to serve as the field of (egg) battle. The combatants were split into two age groups, Izzy being on the top edge of her’s and having an advantage. When “go” was shouted, chaos ensued as with blinding speed kids ran to every corner of the gym. I fortunately had taken cover in a spot where there were no eggs. They were all limited to ten eggs and had no problem accomplishing that goal. During church service, they were able to go through their spoils and find out exactly what goodies they would be playing with, or if they were lucky, eating.

Last week we decided to spend the first part of Spring Break in Austin. Jennifer needed to have a meet and greet with some of the distributors of the product she’s selling, so me and the girls decided to tag along and make it a mini-vacation.

First though, was the Jonathan Coulton concert on Friday night before our vacation. For those of you who don’t know who JoCo is, it’s kind of hard to describe his type of music. It’s kind of folk music with a humorous geeky twist. It’s best to just go to his web site and listen to a few of his songs. The concert was great, very funny and entertaining. Can’t wait for him to swing back this way. The new House of Blues was a great venue. My only complaint was that it cost $7 for a small 12 oz. can of Shiner Bock.

Sunday, we packed up and headed to Austin. We used Priceline in order to get $65 / night hotel rooms at the Hilton near the Airport. It was a very nice place, even though it was near the airport, and kind of far away from most of our destinations. We visited with a few of my old co-workers and ate at some of restaurants that I missed (Rudy’s & Chuy’s).  Monday, while Jennifer was meeting with one of her distributors, me and the girls were dropped off at the State Capitol building. We wandered around and then headed up to the University of Texas campus to take  a few sites in. We stopped by Dobie Mall to get something to drink. I was amazed that it hadn’t changed in the thirteen years since I’ve been there. On Tuesday, we drove down to Natural Bridge Caverns. Abby has really been into geology lately, so we wanted to take her there so that she could see all the different rock formations. All the girls enjoyed it even though it was quite a hike. Afterwards, we were all tired and piled back into the Sequoia and headed back home.

This was a momentous week because it marked Jennifer’s return to the workforce. We signed the girls up for day care and so it was a little nerve wracking making sure Abby and Emily knew they had to ride the bus from school to the day care. Abby said it best when she said she was both nervous and excited. I told her there’s a word for that: anxious. Everything went fine they made it to day care and Izzy’s getting used to new friends to play with during the day.

Saturday also marked Emily’s first soccer game. When you are in Kindergarten, it’s three-on-three with no goalie. So, it’s was pretty simple. Emily could really run, but she always hesitated getting into the middle of the fray. She got a few good kicks in and they ended up winning 9 – 5. At the end of the day Emily asked me why today was different than the other days she went to soccer. She didn’t really get the concept that that was a game and that they were playing another team. It was pretty cute.

I have some good news. This past week, Jennifer got a job with Coverings, Etc. as a sales person. They specialize in engineered stone surfaces, specifically recycled or as they put it "eco-friendly". She’s pretty excited about it and will be going to sales training in Miami next weekend, leaving me with the girls for three days. It’s a commission job, but we think it’s a pretty good opportunity.

This week we moved our cell phone numbers to ones in Houston, so we no longer have our Florida phones. With this change, I upgraded to an iPhone. I’m still getting used to the interface and I don’t really enjoy using iTunes. It’s just too hard to use. I suppose it takes "Mac thinking", which I don’t have.

This Christmas I had most of my family give me gift certificates to Amazon so that I could buy their digital book reader, the Kindle. However, I was going to hold off until the new "Kindle 2" came out so that I could get the latest design. Well, I got impatient at the end of January and decided to go ahead and order it. I was disappointed when it turned out that it was on backorder for over a month. This week I got the good news. The reason it was on backorder was because they were waiting for the "Kindle 2" to come out. I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I would be getting the latest version of the Kindle in a couple of weeks.

After a few requests from friends, I bowed to the peer pressure and went ahead and bit the bullet. I created a Facebook account. I always figured, why would I need a Facebook account with my own family blog, but I now see the advantage. Just like I use Twitter, it’s a way to connect with old friends. In a week I now have 41 "friends" from people I know from EA, family, UT, and high school. It was cool seeing pictures from some people who I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.

For Valentines Day, we decided to take advantage of living in the same city as Jennifer’s parents. For the first time, we sent the girls over their the grandparents while Jennifer and I went out to eat. We went to our favorite place, The Melting Pot, which we discovered while in Florida. It’s a fondue restaurant, where you cook your own meal right in front of you in a boiling pot. It’s really good and very filling. When we got home, the house seemed pretty desolate. It was almost too quiet with the girls and the dog gone. I guess we’ve just gotten used to them in our lives. It seems weird when they aren’t there.

I can’t believe a month has gone by without me updating Frenchville. It seems like it was just Christmas and now we are rolling into February. Of course we celebrated Emily’s birthday. We decided to keep the celebration small and asked her what she wanted to do. She decided that she wanted to go to the Houston Zoo, so we asked her cousin Kinley if she wanted to go and we headed into town even though Poppy had warned us about the monkeys who fling their poo. It was a little on the cold side and by the end we were really tired from walking around so much, but Emily enjoyed seeing all the animals. We got there right as they were training the elephants so we got a special show as they explained how they train them.

Another momentous occasion during the month of January was that Izzy got her first haircut. She’s three and a half and she was finally getting her haircut. It was getting a little wild on the side. Now that it’s cut, it still does cute curls, but they are a little more under control.

The past few weeks Emily has been working on getting Girl Scout Cookies sold. She went door-to-door in our neighborhood, got on the phone and asked relatives, and even made me take it up to work. I usually don’t like doing that sort of thing, and I did catch some flack from some of the guys, but in the end that put her over the sixty boxes she needed to sell in order to get her cookie sell patch.

A question I get often is how the guitar lessons are going. I actually stopped lessons back in October right after the hurricane. I used the money I got for my birthday to fund the lessons and, at the time, our house still wasn’t sold in Orlando. It was hard to justify spending $100 a month on that. At the beginning of the year, I found a good site, justinguitar.com, which has free online lessons. I decided in the end, all you really want to do it learn how to play songs you know. That’s the real motivator. So, he suggests for beginners just spending 15 minutes each day learning cords, transitions between cords, and then working on a song. I figured I can spare 15 minutes a day, and I’ve been pretty good about it so far. I’ve been working on the following cords: C, D, A-minor, G, and E-minor. And then working on "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd. The calluses on my fingers are starting to return and I’ve gotten almost through the intro. Like I said, working on music you like and the fact that you can spare 15 minutes a day has really helped.

Finally, we have been attending a new church here in Sienna Plantation called The Harvest United Methodist Church. It’s a small church without a building, they are meeting in the middle school which is here in the neighborhood. They have land right across from the middle school and are planning on building eventually once they have enough money. We never thought we would like a small church, but we’ve really been enjoying the fact that we are meeting other people here in the community. Today was a pot luck breakfast, so we brought up some breakfast tacos and enjoyed some of the other treats brought by some of the other families.

That’s pretty much January in review. I’ll try not to make it so long between updates.