Category Archives: Astros

Lazy Sunday

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I didn’t have to go into work today! The phone was silent, so everything must be going fine at work. Although, it’s Sunday, if something goes wrong, it probably won’t happen until tomorrow.

We didn’t do much today. We just hung around the house. I played several games of NFL Street 2 and Abby and Jennifer went to the nail parlor and go get their nails painted. Abby came back with orange toe nails with white ghosts on them.

Isabelle is still not feeling well. We may take her into the doctor’s office tomorrow.

For those who are following the news on Hurricane Wilma. It’s going to the south of us. We will probably get some wind and a lot of rain, but that’s about it. They canceled Abby and Emily’s school for tomorrow, though. I was looking forward to finding out what it was like with a quite house.

I’ve lost the cable to my camera, so I can’t take any of the new pictures off. I’m having to post a picture which is a couple of months old. I’m going to go to Best Buy tomorrow and see if I can find a replacement cable.

The Astros lost again in the second game of the World Series. They came back and tied it in the ninth after giving up a grand slam, but they gave up a home run in the bottom of the ninth. The series goes to Houston for the next three games. The rain and the cold in Chicago has looked like miserable playing conditions. At least Minute Maid Park has a roof.

I finished The Drawing of the Three today. Even though I’m having a great time with The Dark Tower series, I decided to pick up The Da Vinci Code for my next book. A movie is currently in production and I would like to have the book read before the movie comes out. Dan Brown became popular with this book, but I read Digital Fortress and Deception Point before reading this one. I enjoyed both of these books and since this one has had so much press (both good and bad) I’m sure I will enjoy it as well.

I’m Back

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I can’t believe it’s been exactly a month since my last entry in Frenchville. It’s been a wild ride at work. A whole lot of extra hours for many days in a row. It’s been: go to work, come home for dinner (sometimes), go back to work, come home and go to sleep. It’s finally letting up. We aren’t done completely (I had to go into work for four hours today), but it’s slowed down. I don’t plan on going back in for the next two weeks unless I’m called in.

Let’s see. Month in Review…

We were having our shower re-tiled since I found water underneath the old tile. We had door problems, but that finally got resolved and we are back into the shower in our bathroom.

Abby and Emily finished up their swim lessons. They are both now “expert swimmers”. I haven’t actually taken them swimming yet, so I don’t know how well they are doing. Next week we are planning on going camping at Disney World. They have a swimming pool at the camp grounds and we will probably be swimming there.

The whole family had coughs and more recently fevers. Currently Isabelle has been sick. She’s had a pretty bad runny nose and you can tell she’s been pretty miserable.

The Texas Longhorns defeated OU and then took on Texas Tech and crushed them today. We went ahead and bought tickets to the Rose Bowl, where the National Championship is being played this year. Hopefully the Longhorns can keep up their winning streak alive. The tickets include a tour of Pasadena and tickets to the Rose Parade. Jennifer has always wanted to go see the Rose Parade and so we got the tickets as our anniversary gift to one another.

The Houston Astros have finally made it to the World Series for the first time. I remember watching them against the Mets in 86 and of coarse last year against the Cardinals and making it one game away from the Series. It’s too bad they lost tonight’s game, but hopefully they can come back and win the next four.

It’s good to be home and to finally have a couple of weeks off. Now that I have more time, there will be more and more entries in Frenchville.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

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Wow. That week went by fast. Not much writing last week because it was the end of another milestone for the project I’m working on. Extra time was necessary over the weekend in order to pull it all together.

Even though I was working a lot this weekend, I was able to escape for about four hours to go see an Astros Spring Training game against the Braves. This is the third Spring Training since I moved to Florida and I just couldn’t let another go by without going to see the Astros considering that they practice in South Orlando. So, Tom and I headed out to the ball game. The weather was great and it was nice to go to a baseball game again. I haven’t seen one since moving away from Houston.

Besides that, nothing much happened over the week. Jennifer has been getting quotes from painters in order to paint the house and the girls have been their rambunctious selves. Hopefully, I can get back into the habit of writing again on a regular basis. It’s easier to write about events on the day that they happened instead of trying to do these “week in reviews”.

The Rose and Mermaid Princesses

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Well, my Astros were not successful at making it to the World Series. They put up a great fight and once again I’m watching the NLCS go to a game seven where the Astros were not successful. The last time was in 1986 against the Mets. Hopefully they will be able to retain Beltran and Clemens and try at again next year.

A couple of days ago the girls went to The Picture People and had their picture taken in the Halloween costumes. Today’s picture is of the Rose Princess and the Mermaid Princess together.

We’ve had a couple of problems with Emily taking off her clothes after she goes to bed. We go into the girls’ rooms to check on them when we go to bed and the last couple of days we’ve discovered Emily buck naked, cold butt up in the air. Well, we had the same problem with Abby when she was Emily’s age. The solution: put some tape over the weak Velcro tabs on her diaper so that it’s tougher for her to open up her diaper.

No Singing

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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

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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.

We Live in a Swamp

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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.

Fifth Anniversary

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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.

Astros Win, Tiburon Loses

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Today was a good day for baseball and a horrible day for softball. The Astros defeated the Braves in the first game of the National League Division Series 9-3. Roger Clemens pitched a great game with seven strike outs in seven innings pitched.

Tonight was our third loss at softball as we were crushed 16-2. I went 2-3 fielding. I bobbled one ball hit my way, but two others ending with outs. I also went 1-2 batting. The other team had a huge inning where they scored 14 runs. We weren’t really doing anything wrong, they were just laying down good hits.

Borie

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Tonight Jennifer went to a scrapbooking party with some of the women from church, leaving me with the kids. Once she was gone, Emily sat down and watched TV while Abby and I kick around this little toy soccer ball. Once Emily went to bed, Abby and I went upstairs and she watched me play a new game I got the other day Sly 2.

I’m currently watching the Dodgers and Giants play baseball. I was surprised the other day when I saw that the Astros were suddenly in the lead of the National League Wild Card race. The Giants and Astros are tied for the wild card spot and the Astros won today so if the Giants lose, the Astros will be the sole owners of the wild card spot with two games left to play.

Today’s picture is of Emily with a Dora backpack. Emily has become obsessed with watching Dora the Explorer. This is amazing because Abby didn’t really start liking that show until she was around three years old. She doesn’t quite know how to say “Dora” yet, so she says something more like “Borie” when she sees Dora on the TV or when she dances to the theme song.