The day started early with a trip over to the beach. The resort doesn’t border the beach, but they have what they call a Beach House. It’s a small property with a smaller pool and access to the beach. We went down early for a tour of the different creatures that inhabit the beach. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I can’t believe it’s been over a month since I last updated. Since then a lot has happened. We had Halloween where Abby went as an Egyptian princess, Emily went as a cowgirl, and Izzy went as bumble bee. One of the neighborhood mothers had arranged a Halloween block party so we went to [...]

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It’s been a busy past two weeks. A week ago last Wednesday, we were awoken at 7:30 a.m. by the driver of our moving truck saying, “We’re here.” It turns out they were here with our stuff and were here a day early. So, Jennifer and I, threw on some clothes and headed over [...]

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On Tuesday, I headed overseas on a business trip to Frankfurt, Germany. I can’t tell the details of the reason for the trip, but we were heading over there for a potential new project and we had to meet with another video game developer. The trip was 12 hours of flying: 4 hours to [...]

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On Thursday we gave in to the request from our Realtor to drop the price of our house. Another house around the corner from us, which is just like ours, but with a pool, was now just $25,000 more than us. They felt we should drop our price by another $25,000 in order to stay [...]

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It’s been a while since I posted anything. Probably because I’ve been upset since the deal to purchase our house in Orlando fell through. That had a cascading effect of us having to let the house we put an offer on here in Houston pass. The house in Orlando is back up on the market [...]

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The biggest issue Jennifer has had with having to watch the kids all by herself culminated this evening with a stunt pulled by Abby. While taking a shower she decided it would be cool to stand on top of the soap dish. Although still a little girl, soap dishes were probably not stress tested with [...]

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It’s been a while since I’ve written because I’ve been busy at work. I started on this new project right when they were trying to get a demo out to their publisher. So, I’ve been putting in a lot of hours in order to get that out the door. It’s been fine since the girls [...]

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Nineteen days without a TV and one thing is for certain: Mitsubishi has guaranteed that we will never buy one of their televisions again. They have the most incompetent service organization working for them in Visions Electronics. They told us (without ever coming to see the TV) that it was the bulb. We waited two [...]

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I made it safe to Houston and just finished my first week at TimeGate Studios. It’s a whole new game and a whole new company to get used to. A lot to take in over the last week. It funny how you don’t really know what it means to miss someone until you have to [...]

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With the coming of a new job at TimeGate began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Today I hit the road back to Houston leaving behind Jennifer and the girls in Orlando. A man and his dog traveling the country side looking for a good cup of joe. [...]

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While in Houston over the Christmas break, we made a family decision to go ahead and move back to Texas since we missed it so much. Since we both like Houston so much, I looked up the only game company I knew there, TimeGate Studios. It turned out that they had a position that fit [...]

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Today the company I work for, EA-Tiburon, bought everyone tickets to Universal Studios Florida. It was foggy and misty this morning, but we decided to head out anyway. I had visited Universal once before, but this was the first time for Jennifer and the girls. Overall, everyone had fun. However, it wasn’t anything that you [...]

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We finally arrived home yesterday evening from our long two week Christmas trip to Texas & Louisiana. That last day was grueling. We started at 8:00 a.m. Central Standard Time and didn’t get home until 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Basically: sunrise to sunset. Everyone was tired and the girls are very whiny in the back seat. We were [...]

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Two days on the road and we made it to Nana and Poppy’s house yesterday. The drive was fairly uneventful. The first day took us through Florida where we once again stayed in Mobile, Alabama. We found a pretty nice hotel which actually had a suite: two bedrooms and a fold out couch in another. So, [...]

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A week ago Austin bit Emily on the arm when she fell on his back. Since this is obviously as sensitive area for Austin since he had back surgery, his instincts took over and he ended up leaving one puncture on the inside of Emily’s arm. We would have thought nothing of it, but the [...]

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After you’ve been with EA for seven years, they give you an extra seven weeks of vacation which they call the “sabbatical”. That’s above and beyond the four weeks I normally get off and the week everyone gets at Christmas. So, there’s no way I’m going to be able to take off seven weeks all at [...]

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