Category Archives: Family

Block Party

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Today the neighborhood had a block party. Jennifer spent all morning making cup cakes with Abby helping out for Halloween sprinkles on top of the cup cakes, or as she calls them “pup cakes”. It was nice meeting some of our other neighbors, but we pretty much hung out with all the neighbors that we already knew. A fire truck from the local fire station arrived and Abby got to climb through and sit in the driver’s seat.

Today’s picture is another one from The Picture People. This time it’s the Mermaid Princess sitting alone.

Looking for a New Camera

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Today was a normal Saturday where we try and clean the house and do laundry. I went up to the RDV Sportsplex and joined as part of Tiburon’s corporate membership.

We all went to Best Buy to look for a new digital camera. Our current camera hasn’t been fairing too well. The screen on the back of the camera has stopped working. One of the reasons there wasn’t too many pictures from our trip to the zoo last week was because the camera ran out of batteries. The low battery power indicator is on the screen, so we couldn’t tell it was almost out of power. There wasn’t a camera there that I liked so we’ve decided to wait a little bit. At least our current camera still takes pictures.

Tonight I watched the Longhorns roll all over the Texas Tech Red Raiders 51 – 21. They looked more improved tonight. Vince Young had some good passes down field, which seemed make their offense look a lot less one dimensional.

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.

Another Softball Loss

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Frenchville was down a couple of days ago as I moved the web site to a new host. Our last host was $19.95/month for only 100 MB of web space. I was having to delete some of the old pages because I was going over the drive space limit. The new host, VizaWeb, was only $5.95/month for 1 GB of web space. It wasn’t too hard of a choice. Ten times the web space for $14 less per month. I think I’ll go with that one. We should have plenty of more room for growth.

Today was a big softball game against the other team from where I work. There’s actually two softball teams: Tiburon and EA Sports. I’m on the Tiburon team. So, you can image the trash talking that was going on before the game. Well, unfortunately, we lost 15-11. I had some pretty good fielding as several balls were hit my direction. My batting wasn’t that great. I went 1-3, two fly outs. The last hit was an error on the first baseman, my former boss, the Development Director on Madden. I popped it up again, but he wasn’t able to make the catch.

Today’s picture is of Jennifer and Emily at Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.

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.

Mickey’s Not So Scarry Halloween Party

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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

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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.