Monthly Archives: October 2004

No Singing

Posted on by
Reply

We went to church this morning with the expectation that Abby would be singing. We were getting her ready to go into the church and she collapsed into a heap crying. She didn’t want to sing. She enjoys singing, and has sung in front of the church before, but I think we sprung it on her too soon. Last time we talked about her singing in front of the church several days in advance. This morning we told her as we were driving to church. Bad parents.

Besides the church incident, there wasn’t much going on today. The Astros came back and won their game against the Cardinals to tie up the series 2-2. Only two wins away from the World Series.

Longhorns & Astros Win

Posted on by
Reply

Today we didn’t do much that was out of the ordinary. We went to our usual Saturday morning breakfast. Abby went to one of the neighbor’s 2nd birthday party. Emily wasn’t feeling too good so she and I stayed at home and watched the Longhorns and Astros.

The Longhorns were victorious today over Missouri 28-20. Overall I didn’t think they looked all that great. Their passing game was horrid, with Vince Young throwing two interceptions. Perhaps I’m still bitter over the loss to OU.

The Astros were also victorious over the Cardinals 5-2, but the Cardinals are still winning the series 2-1. Clemens pitched a great game all the way into the seventh inning, which is where the Astros pitching was failing in the last two games. Beltran is awesome. He has had at least one home run in every game against the Cardinals. Hopefully the Astros will be able to sweep the Cardinals at home and then win one more in St. Louis to go to the World Series.

Mickey’s Not So Scarry Halloween Party

Posted on by
Reply

Today we went and toured the RDV Sportsplex for a new place to go work out. Tiburon is moving to a new building in December which is directly across the street from the place where the Orlando Magic train. This gave them an opportunity to bring their gym up to the level of other EA studios. Currently Tiburon subsidizes our YMCA membership, but this will end once the deal with the RDV starts. It looks like we are going to cancel our YMCA membership and I’m going to join the RDV by myself since it is going to be pretty expensive for the kids to join.

Tonight was our trip to Disney’s Magic Kingdom for Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party. The kids get to dress up in their costumes, ride the rides, get candy, and watch some fireworks. This year Abby was a Rose Princess and Emily was a Mermaid Princess. The weather turned out to be great as it is starting to turn cooler. The fireworks show was amazing as we had a good spot right in front of Cinderella’s Castle. Abby and Emily both had fun, but the evening was pretty much a bunch of errors for the parents. First we got a quarter of the way to Disney World and we realized we forgot the tickets, so we had to turn around during rush hour traffic and go back and get them. The kids got tired of wearing their costumes and we brought Emily’s clothes, but we didn’t bring any for Abby, so we had to buy a T-shirt and shorts from the gift shop for Abby. Then, I forgot to put the kids’ juice in the ice chest, so this led to buying some juice in the park which ended up spilled in the bottom of the stroller, getting everything wet. Besides all that, overall it was a great night. Emily passed out in Jennifer’s arms around 10:00 so we started taking turns riding some rides with Abby and then headed home around 11:00.

We Live in a Swamp

Posted on by
Reply

We started out the day by going to the zoo. Even though the Central Florida Zoological Park is less than six miles away, we never found the time to go during the summer. Although it’s nice that there’s a zoo so close, this particular one wasn’t anything special. For one, the hurricanes were not kind to the place. Another realization happened while at the zoo: we live in the middle of a swamp. Their idea of a “nature trail” was a board walk through algae infested swamp water. Today’s picture is one of the creatures that inhabited the “nature trail”. This alligator was huge and looked like he could eat a poodle whole without getting any fur in his teeth.

Later, I joined the girls on their normal Wednesday activities. They go to church for what is called “Kid’s Connection”, which is a couple of classes, doing crafts and playing games. Afterward, we ate dinner there as well. We have a chef as one of the members of our church and each Wednesday he prepares a giant dinner for anyone who wants to sign up. Today was a salmon dish, which neither Jennifer nor I are real big fish eaters, so the meal was “so so”. I ate some of the salmon and declared it to taste like chicken with a little fishy aftertaste.

Today was also another softball game. We once again lost, this time 17-5. We had a real big first inning batting in our only five runs, but the other team crushed us in a big fourth inning. My batting wasn’t too great going 0-2 with a ground out and a fly out. I had two balls hit my way. One I flubbed and it squirted into the outfield. The other one I grabbed up, but the batter was arguably safe at first. From my perspective he was out, but the ump said Tom, who plays first base, hadn’t gotten to the base yet.

The whole Carbone gang showed up with Tom to the softball game. So, I got to meet Tommy, Simon, and Olivia. If I would have known everyone was going to be there, I would have convinced Jennifer, Abby and Emily to come to the game as well. Some of Tom’s friends from Utah were also in town and came to the game as well. I found out where all the hits on the Frenchville counter are coming from as everyone kept telling me that they were regular readers of the web site. Thanks for reading. It was nice seeing everyone in person, as I’m a regular reader of Carbone Family.

I’m up late tonight watching the Astros and the Cardinals play the first game in the NL Championship Series. I forgot to report that the Astros were finally able to beat the Braves in the post season and have advanced to play the Cardinals. Unfortunately, they lost the game 10-7. They were leading in the first couple of innings, but the Cardinals had a big sixth inning that the Astros couldn’t recover from.

I’ve added a Google search to the side of the web page. It allows you to search Frenchville for stories with certain keywords. It uses the Google search engine, which doesn’t crawl Frenchville all that often, so it might not be able to pick up keywords for recent stories. I did a search on “sequoia” and it didn’t pick up any articles. It also allows you to do Google searches for the entire web directly from Frenchville.

I Poopie

Posted on by
Reply

Abby has the whole week off from school so I took the whole week off from work as well. It’s been nice just being at home and hanging out with the family. It’s like having a nice long extended weekend.

Yesterday there wasn’t much to do because it rained all day. For dinner we packed up into the Sequoia and went to Chuck E. Cheese’s. The kids enjoyed running wild. It’s like this place has become the only restaurant that we can take the kids to.

Today we started by going to work out at the YMCA. Later on, I stayed home with the kids while Jennifer ran some errands. It’s amazing how communicative Emily has gotten. Today she walked up to me and said, “I poopie”. I said, “All right, let’s go change your diaper.” She walked off to her bedroom and started to climb up onto the diaper changing table herself. I suppose the next thing I need to do is train her to change the diaper herself.

Today’s picture is more from Sunday’s putt-putt excursion. This is pretty much how the game went, Abby and Emily running around trying to get the golf balls into the hole.

Putt Putt

Posted on by
Reply

Today we went and played putt-putt golf. Abby did pretty good for her first time playing. Emily didn’t do too bad either. We had a huge group of seven people ahead of us who we deemed “The Slowest People in the World”. Emily really wasn’t equipped with the patients to wait for them to play.

Fifth Anniversary

Posted on by
Reply

I finally got to drive the new Sequoia today. We went to our usual Saturday breakfast and then we went shopping for Abby a new car seat. Her current one really dug into the Camry’s back seat and we want to get a new one that doesn’t mess up the new truck.

The Longhorns once again couldn’t defeat OU. They lost 12-0 and it was the first time that they had been shut out since 1980. They really didn’t look that good at all. It appears that they still haven’t learned to tackle. Their offense looked very one dimensional: either Young would hand off to Benson or he would keep it. It wasn’t until the forth quarter that a wide receiver caught the ball.

The Texas loss was very disappointing, but was made better by the Astros beating the Braves to go up in the NL Division series 2-1. If they win tomorrow, they will be advancing to the NL Championship for the first time ever.

Tonight we celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary by going out to eat at The Melting Pot. We left the girls across the street with Jane, Lucas, and Connor. We called for a reservation earlier in the day, but they said that they were booked solid. Since we weren’t in a hurry we decided to go ahead and go to the restaurant and take our chances. It turned out that we were seated immediately anyway and in a very secluded booth which was off by itself. So, we had a great dinner and reminisced about the last five years.

Friday Night Lights

Posted on by
Reply

Today started out the morning with the whole family sitting in the new Sequoia watching the first part of Toy Story. We wanted to give the new TVs in the truck a test run. While watching the THX intro to the movie we realized that we have a better sound system in our new truck than in our living room. The sound moved from speaker to speaker and sounded really good.

Today at work we celebrated Tiburon’s Tenth Anniversary with a happy hour at the end of the day. We had drinks and appetizers and they had all of Tiburon’s old games setup so that people could play them. I was able to meet one of the founders of Tiburon, Jason Anderson, who I’ve only talked to over e-mail. He left Tiburon to start his own company, Budcat, right before I joined Tiburon. They’ve been one of our external developers and I help field some of their questions as they worked on the PC version of Madden NFL 2005.

Finally, Tiburon paid for us to go see Friday Night Lights, a high school football movie that takes place in Texas. It’s the story of Odessa Permian High School and their fight for the football championship in 1988. I didn’t really think it was a very good movie. The characters were pretty weak and way to stereotypical. The only good thing about it was it’s portrayal of football in a small Texas town was pretty accurate.

New Sequoia

Posted on by
Reply

The dealership called today and our Sequoia had arrived. So, we left the kids across the street at Jane’s house and we went off to pick up the truck. It was a several hour ordeal, as is always the case when you purchase a car. Afterwards, we walked out with our new Sequoia. Of coarse, I haven’t driven it yet as Jennifer drove the truck home. As you can see from the picture, the Sequoia barely fits into the garage. We might have to do some rearranging so we can fit both cars. I had to say goodbye to my Chevy Blazer which I bought when I graduated from college. I also had a Chevy Blazer in high school, so I’ve been driving a truck for 16 years and now I have to get used to driving a car every day. I will be posting more pictures of the Sequoia for the next few days.