House Selection

This week our house was inspected from the people who are going to buy. This is usually a very stressful part because you don’t know what they are going to find. In fact, we still haven’t heard the exact list of things they want us to fix. The only thing we heard from our Realtor was that “nothing major” was found. So, hopefully, when we finally do get the list it won’t be too painful.

In three weeks we will close on our house and we currently have no place to go. I franticly looked at houses nearly every evening all week. We decided to go with a house that had almost everything we wanted. It has four bedrooms, so that all the girls will have their own room and Emily and Isabelle won’t have to share anymore. It has a three car garage so that we can actually park the cars in the garage and have enough room for all of our extra stuff. It’s on a loop, so that only the people who live in that section should be traveling down there. It’s also only a couple of blocks from the elementary school that Abby and Emily will be attending in the Fall. We put in our initial offer today and hopefully will come to an agreement on it by the end of the weekend. Wish us luck.

Counter Offer

If you were following my Twitter posts, you would have seen that I sent something about waiting to hear back on our counter offer. Well, to catch everyone else up. We did receive an offer on our house on Saturday. It was pretty low and we counter offered, but still haven’t heard anything back. They were waiting to say anything until after Jennifer could find out if she could get more of the hardwood floor, which she can. She informed the Realtors this today, but we still haven’t heard anything. Hopefully, tomorrow.

On Sunday I went to see the Astros play baseball on their first Sunday home game. They were playing the Florida Marlins and they won 5-1. The picture to the right is what my view was of the game. As you can see it was pretty good expect for the giant floppy hat right over the pitcher and batter, which is where most of the action is. I usually had to look around the lady because she wouldn’t sit back in her chair. In the latter innings, she started getting tired (probably neck strain from that giant floppy hat on her head) and sat back so I had a better view. I still had a great time except for getting sunburned on the left side of my body.

Today I got an e-mail back from Jonathan Coulton, a “musician, a singer-songwriter and an Internet superstar”. I e-mailed him a month ago and told him how much I enjoyed his music never expecting to hear anything back. Well, he e-mailed me back saying “thank you for all the kind words.” Which was pretty cool that he had the time to respond to all of his e-mail. Being the “Internet Superstar” that he is, he can also be found on Twitter. He also wrote the song that’s at the end of the game Portal, “Still Alive”, which is now available to download on Rock Band. If you are curious, you can listen to (and purchase) all his music on his web site. I recommend, “The Future Soon”, “Skullcrusher Mountain”, “Code Monkey”, “RE: Your Brains”, and “Tom Cruise Crazy”.

Team Building

Today TimeGate paid for the entire team I’m working on to go to Sweet Mesquite grill and then go see the movie The Bank Job. Sweet Mesquite is a typical Texas grill where you can get a variety of grilled food from hamburgers to BBQ-sandwiches. I had the bacon cheeseburger and fries. I had never eaten there, but it was really good. Afterwards, we went to see The Bank Job. An Brittish film about a couple of regular people who come together to rob a bank. I had never heard of the movie, but it ended up being pretty good. It started out slow, but picked up once the robbery took place. I recommend it.

Belt Buckles are Made of Metal

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Well, I made it back to Houston all in one piece. The day started at 4:45 in the morning (which is 3:45 in Houston) with scraping the family out of bed and getting them to take me to the airport. I gave Jennifer and the girls kisses, took my bags out of the truck and headed out on my trip. The only problem I had was at the security. I was wearing some cargo shorts and I didn’t realize the belt had a metal buckle. Of course it took me three trips through the metal detector and the TSA guy saying, “are you wearing a belt” for me to remember. So, I had to remove my belt. Oh well. After that, the flight went fine. I picked up a Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit from McDonald’s and practically walked straight on the plane which was boarding as I walked up to the gate.

We had someone come and look at the house today. Our Realtors forgot to call us, so they caught Jennifer while the house wasn’t in “showing condition”, but not all that bad. The man looking at the house were from Tampa and they liked the house. The guy is going to bring his wife by to look at the house when they get a chance. We have another showing tomorrow. So, that’s four showings in four days, which isn’t too bad after not showing it at all for two weeks.

Putt-Putt Day

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The plane didn’t actually land until 10:30 last night. The girls were tired, but everyone was in good spirits. We picked up my bags and headed back to the house.

We had two showings of the house today between 10 – noon, so we took off and played putt-putt. Isabelle was pretty funny playing. She would take her first hit and then run after the ball, pick it up and then drop it in hole. She would then put her hands up and say, “Yea!” At the front of the course there is a little pin and you can purchase food for some baby allagators. We couldn’t pass up that deal so we let the girls feed them.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Twitter. It’s basically an online social network where you post short posts of what you are doing right then at 140 characters max. I’ll start posting periodic posts there and I’ve also added it to the left sidebar on Frenchville. You can think of Twitter as mini-blog posts so you can answer the question, what is Jason up to between posts on Frenchville.

Blogging from 20,000 feet

I’m heading back to Orlando this evening to spend time with Jennifer and the girls. I first went back two weeks ago for Easter and Jennifer’s mom was so kind to purchase this trip’s ticket for me after she got one of the Southwest “Ding” alerts and got a pretty good deal on the tickets. It was raining in Houston so my flight was delayed almost two hours. The flight was supposed to take off at 5:10, but we didn’t board the plane until 6:30. Then, we sat on the runway waiting to take off for another 30-45 minutes. You have to love the timeliness of airline travel. Well, now I probably won’t get into Orlando until 10:00. Jennifer probably won’t be in all that great of a mood since she will have to have been lugging the cranky/tired kids around the airport. At least I did have the forethought to call her and give her a heads up that the flight was going to be late. We’ll see when I arrive.

Standing on a Soap Dish

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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 seven-year-olds standing on top of them. The result: the soap dish came crashing down and put a nice hole in the tub. Basically the kids are either messing up the house faster than she can clean it, or repair it in this case. Jennifer was so furious that she had to walk away to keep her cool. She ended up grounding Abby for the rest of the week: no television and she couldn’t go next door and play with her friend. She tried to explain to Abby the cost of repairing things and how no one will want to buy the house if it’s damaged. Abby went to her room and came back out with the money she had been saving up from the Tooth Fairy and Easter, around $50, and offered it to Jennifer to repair the tub. Jennifer told her to keep her money. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for Abby after all.

Welcome and Now Get to Work

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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 are all back in Orlando, but it gets tiring after a while. Well, we delivered it on Monday and today was the first time in a while that I got to go home at 6:00. (Yea!)

Last weekend Abby got her ears pierced. I guess she’s a “big girl” now. She’s very happy and has been very good about turning and cleaning the earring studs. She was really brave and they pierced both sides at once, which was a pretty good idea since she might not have wanted to do the second ear once the first ear was pierced.

One thing I’ve noticed since being away from the girls is that I’m getting more read. I just finished Stephen King’s Cell in just three weeks. This is something that would have normally taken me 2 – 3 months. It was actually a pretty good novel, which might have also been part of me reading it so fast.