Category Archives: Family

The Cookie Debate

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Hooray! I’m posting an entry two days in a row. Today Abby was off from school because of President’s Day, so Jennifer had set up a play date with a friend of Abby’s. When they arrived they were informed that everyone was sick, so they decided to go to the park instead.

Abby and Emily are getting quite funny together now that Emily is talking more. Today at the dinner table Abby wanted a cookie for desert and Emily was telling her no. The exchange went something like: “Mommie, can I have a cookie?” Emily would respond, “No cookie”. Abby would say “Yes” and then Emily would say “No”. This went back and forth until is escalated to screaming “Yes” and “No” at the top of their lungs and the parents had to step in and break it up.

Today’s picture is from Abby’s singing at church yesterday.

All the Engineers One Can Handle

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Another week that went by quick because I was so busy at work. I have found that our team is way too big for me to handle. Even with the number of people split amongst myself and the new Development Director, I still have sixteen software engineers that report to me. I’m working so hard on day-to-day problems, it’s hard to get to keep up with everyone’s schedule much less any long term planning that needs to be done. Looking at the work load it looks like six to ten engineers is the maximum number of people one should have to help. Beyond that, and you start losing issues and the product starts to suffer.

Tonight I met the girls at Quiznos for some dinner. Abby and Emily sat at a table all by themselves and ate their dinner. Emily has started talking a lot more. She’s started saying “Yes” instead of just nodding her head. She also says, “I’ll be right back” and holds up her index finger. Today’s picture is of Emily wearing her Dora the Explorer backpack. She’s started putting it on all by herself and walking around the house saying, “Let’s go”.

Getting Rid of the Body

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Once again another busy week at work and at home. Jennifer has been working very hard at Hanna’s Closet, the consignment sale fund raiser for her mother’s group at church. The sale ended up selling $26,000 worth of merchandise, 40% of which will go to the church group. The other 60% goes back to the people who put the items into the sale. She had fun, but it was a lot of work and she’s glad it’s over with.

One of our fish died this week. I’m not sure if it was Nemo or Dory. After Abby left for school, I was asked to “get rid of the body” so that she wouldn’t notice. She actually did notice later on that afternoon when she got back from school. When she was told that the fish had died, she was very apologetic for feeding the fish too much the other day. We thought this was pretty funny, but told her that it wasn’t her fault.

We just got back from going over to the Meador’s house to watch the first half of the Super Bowl. Greg was my boss on Madden NFL 2005 and just recently left Tiburon as well. So, now my boss and my former boss have left. Both of whom are moving to Austin. What’s wrong with this picture?

Late Nights and Slumped Shoulders

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It’s been a week since my last entry and boy has it been a busy week. As predicted, last week was pretty hectic at work. It was the end of our second milestone and I ended up working late every night. The last night I was there until 5:30 a.m. It’s funny now that I’m a manager, you would think I would have nothing to do and have no reason to be up there except for moral support, but our with our new Development Director’s help we are trying to get our schedule under control. Right now, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be settling down any time soon. I think if we could just get our schedule for the rest of the year nailed down we would be in a better position to take on the day-to-day problems. As it is now we are trying to do scheduling in the midsts of handling the day-to-day problems. Very difficult.

This weekend wasn’t very fun at home because Emily had a fever and kept throwing up. It’s never fun to have one of your kids sick. You can really tell when they aren’t feeling well because they stop acting the way they normally do. In the case of Emily, she would mope around with her shoulders slumped down and a pout on her face. Once the Tylenol would take effect, she was up and bouncing around again, but those times were few and far between.

Jennifer was busy Sunday and will be busy the rest of the week working on “Hanna’s Closet”. It’s a giant consignment sale of baby clothes, toys, and furniture that she’s been helping to set up at church. She will be up at church every day this week with the final sale on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Today’s picture is of Abby with her baby. She actually had me go get the camera to take this picture. She’s been telling me lately that she wants to be a “mommy” when she grows up instead of a “princess”.

The Drawing on the Wall Incident

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One thing that I forgot to mention that happened yesterday was that Abby, for some unknown reason, thought it would be a good idea to take a crayon that she found and start writing on nearly every wall in our living room. She thrust the crayon into Emily’s hand and wandered off waiting for the yelling to begin. Jennifer found Emily with the crayon in her hand and started to survey the damage. It was readily apparent that Emily wasn’t the one who decided to do some artwork on our walls. The lines were out of her reach and there were people’s faces drawn on the windows in our living room. A tale tale sign of a four-year-old not a two-year-old. Anyway, a lot of yelling and spanking happened and Abby was sent off to her room. Today Abby surprised Jennifer by apologizing for drawing on the wall.

Abby stayed home from school again today because of her sore throat. Right now we are to the point where we don’t know what to do with her. She won’t eat because “her tummy says that she’s not hungry” when it’s time for dinner, but once dinner is done she complains that she’s hungry. It almost sounds like an excuse not to eat what we are having for dinner.

I finished the Joel on Software book I picked up while on vacation in Houston. This was by far one of the best software management books I’ve ever read. I’ve been a fan of Joel’s site for years and you can pretty much read the entire book online by reading all of the articles on his site, but it was nice to re-read the articles in book form. He really gets down to the basic foundations of building a successfully software team. It isn’t some whiz bang method like Extreme Programming or some other crazy method. If you don’t have the basic methods he describes, you don’t have a good foundation to support your software project. Anyway, if you are in the software industry, I recommend this book highly.

Today’s picture is another one from our trip to the Houston Zoo. This time it’s Emily on one of the zoo animals on the merry-go-round.

Abby’s Tummy Problems

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It’s been another busy week at work and next week is the last week of our second milestone, so it will probably be even busier. Abby hasn’t been feeling well this weekend. Her throat has been sore and we took her to the doctor on Friday, but they said it wasn’t Strep Throat. However, she’s been very weepy all weekend and she keeps saying that “her tummy tells her she isn’t hungry.”

We finally found a Mongolian BBQ restaurant and went there today. It was closer into town, near downtown, and took us a while to get there. We might start going there after church on Sunday since it would be closer going from there. It was pretty good and I thought it was comparable to the one we used to go to in Houston.

Today’s picture is from when we went to the Houston Zoo. The girls had fun riding the merry-go-round which had different animals to ride.

Too Cold for the Park

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I had the day off from work today and so we decided to go to the park this morning even though it’s been pretty cold here the past couple of days. The high temperature today was 58 degrees, which obviously isn’t cold for most of the country, but it’s cold for here in Central Florida. Also, it’s pretty cold when last week the high was in the 80’s all week long. Anyway, we were there for only forty minutes before it became too cold and we headed to Chick Olé for some indoor playing.

While talking to Jennifer’s sister on the phone today, Abby admitted that her fish were named “Nemo” and “Dory”, so that puts to rest what the name of the fish are. I suppose my arguments against naming them after herself and her sister actually were having an effect.

I finished Ratchet & Clank today. This game was okay. It wasn’t stellar, but had its challenging moments. What I didn’t like about it was that I had to collect a certain amount of money in order to kill the last “boss” creature to end the game. I got online and found a cheat in order to collect a lot of money so I could win. When you have to resort to that type of tactic in order to finish the game, then there’s a flaw in the overall design, in my opinion.

Today it was announced that Electronic Arts has paid ESPN for exclusive rights to their brand. This effectively deals a one, two punch to our biggest competition Sega/Take Two who had their ESPN line of sports titles for the past two years. The exclusive NFL license killed their football game and now our ESPN license has killed pretty much all brand recognition that they built up. All I can say is: “It’s good to be the king.”

Today’s picture is of Emily playing a little soccer (with a basketball) while we were at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Houston.

The Shelf Life of PC Games

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We got out and did some shopping at Best Buy today. I’m about to finish Ratchet & Clank so I wanted to get the next game I was going to be playing. I received Half-Life 2 as a gift, but I hadn’t played the first one so I went in search of a “Collector’s” version of Half-Life. I was able to find one and found out the reason it’s hard to have old versions of PC games still on the shelves. PC games age rather quickly. I had a tough time getting the six year old game to run on my modern PC. When Half Life came out, 3D video cards were in it’s infancy. It’s funny because you usually don’t have the same problem with console games. If the console is still running, you know that a game bought twenty years from now will still run on that system. In fact, you still see the original Nintendo and Super Nintendo for sale in video game stores today even though both systems are over ten years old now.

After Best Buy we went over to Chuck E. Cheese. We usually try to avoid the place on the weekends and we were reminded of the reason why. It was crawling with people. And for some reason, they redesigned the place in order to cram it full of more people. Instead of having a place where you dine and a place where you play, it’s all inner mixed now. It made it real awkward trying to help Emily play Skee Ball and a few feet over a family is eating pizza. As you can see from today’s picture, Abby got her picture taken by a contraption which makes a “sketch” of the person posing for the picture. She was very proud of the picture and has made me hang it up in her play room.

It’s a Girl?

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It’s been a week since my last post so I guess I’m going to have to do a week in review. The biggest news this week is that we went to our first ultrasound appointment for the new baby on Friday. The nurse couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, so we are pretty much going with the assumption that the new baby is a girl. This is the third time that the first ultrasound has ended in “I can’t really tell”, so I think it’s a pretty safe assumption. We are a little disappointed since we were hoping for a boy, but I guess I’m destined to be in a house full of women.

We did get some fish. Abby says they are named “Abby” and “Emily”, but we are holding off officially naming them. I’ve tried convincing her to name them “Nemo” and “Dory” or “Shrek” and “Fiona”, but haven’t had much luck. So, for now they are called “the Fish”.

The reason for the lack of posts is that I’ve still be working really hard at work the past week again. It’s starting to get a little easier as more and more of the project starts coming together, but it’s still really chaotic. My new boss has come up to speed rather quickly even with the programming staff having doubled over the past two weeks. There’s still going to be a rough couple of weeks as we try and plan the entire project while finishing up our second milestone.

TiVo is amazing. At work, Tom and I were talking about this particular television program, Mr. Show with Bob and David, on Wednesday. It was on HBO in the 90’s and I wasn’t a big fan of it, but I knew of the show and the two comedians who were on it. Last night my TiVo recorded it. How does it do that? Apparently TBS is showing syndicated versions. Amazing. I set up a season pass.

Today’s picture is of Abby who fell asleep with her chair turned upside down. She doesn’t take naps anymore and she usually paints or colors while Emily takes her nap. However, sometimes if she’s had a fun time at school that day, she can’t help but curl up and doze off. We just thought this was a weird way to fall asleep.

Abby the Fish

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Abby has been asking for a pet lately. We knew we couldn’t get a dog because we would have to build a fence in our backyard. Both Jennifer and I are allergic to cats. So, we settled on some fish. We told this to Abby and now for the past few weeks that’s all we’ve been hearing from her. How she would “really like a pet fish”. So, we decided to go get a fish tank with the money the girls got for Christmas. We got a small five gallon and put it in the kitchen. I asked Abby what she wanted to name her fish and she said, “Abby”. I said, “That will be confusing.” “Nope. I want my fish named Abby,” she replied. So hopefully, we will be getting “Abby the fish” on Monday.

Today’s picture is of Abby helping Grandpa pain a shelf. Yes, she’s wearing a plastic bag over her clothes.