I awoke early this morning to the sound of the girls rifling through the baskets that the Easter Bunny had left for them. He was pretty generous this year, for the first Easter away from our house in Orlando. The biggest gift being new ceramic piggy banks for each of them. Once they were loaded up with some candy, we had some breakfast and headed to church.
The church service today was supposed to be at the Sienna Plantation amphitheatre, but had to be moved to the Middle School because of weather. Instead of an open field, a school gymnasium had to serve as the field of (egg) battle. The combatants were split into two age groups, Izzy being on the top edge of her’s and having an advantage. When “go” was shouted, chaos ensued as with blinding speed kids ran to every corner of the gym. I fortunately had taken cover in a spot where there were no eggs. They were all limited to ten eggs and had no problem accomplishing that goal. During church service, they were able to go through their spoils and find out exactly what goodies they would be playing with, or if they were lucky, eating.
I have some good news. This past week, Jennifer got a job with Coverings, Etc. as a sales person. They specialize in engineered stone surfaces, specifically recycled or as they put it “eco-friendly”. She’s pretty excited about it and will be going to sales training in Miami next weekend, leaving me with the girls for three days. It’s a commission job, but we think it’s a pretty good opportunity.
This week we moved our cell phone numbers to ones in Houston, so we no longer have our Florida phones. With this change, I upgraded to an iPhone. I’m still getting used to the interface and I don’t really enjoy using iTunes. It’s just too hard to use. I suppose it takes “Mac thinking”, which I don’t have.
This Christmas I had most of my family give me gift certificates to Amazon so that I could buy their digital book reader, the Kindle. However, I was going to hold off until the new “Kindle 2” came out so that I could get the latest design. Well, I got impatient at the end of January and decided to go ahead and order it. I was disappointed when it turned out that it was on backorder for over a month. This week I got the good news. The reason it was on backorder was because they were waiting for the “Kindle 2” to come out. I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I would be getting the latest version of the Kindle in a couple of weeks.
After a few requests from friends, I bowed to the peer pressure and went ahead and bit the bullet. I created a Facebook account. I always figured, why would I need a Facebook account with my own family blog, but I now see the advantage. Just like I use Twitter, it’s a way to connect with old friends. In a week I now have 41 “friends” from people I know from EA, family, UT, and high school. It was cool seeing pictures from some people who I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.
For Valentines Day, we decided to take advantage of living in the same city as Jennifer’s parents. For the first time, we sent the girls over their the grandparents while Jennifer and I went out to eat. We went to our favorite place, The Melting Pot, which we discovered while in Florida. It’s a fondue restaurant, where you cook your own meal right in front of you in a boiling pot. It’s really good and very filling. When we got home, the house seemed pretty desolate. It was almost too quiet with the girls and the dog gone. I guess we’ve just gotten used to them in our lives. It seems weird when they aren’t there.
I can’t believe a month has gone by without me updating Frenchville. It seems like it was just Christmas and now we are rolling into February. Of course we celebrated Emily’s birthday. We decided to keep the celebration small and asked her what she wanted to do. She decided that she wanted to go to the Houston Zoo, so we asked her cousin Kinley if she wanted to go and we headed into town even though Poppy had warned us about the monkeys who fling their poo. It was a little on the cold side and by the end we were really tired from walking around so much, but Emily enjoyed seeing all the animals. We got there right as they were training the elephants so we got a special show as they explained how they train them.
Another momentous occasion during the month of January was that Izzy got her first haircut. She’s three and a half and she was finally getting her haircut. It was getting a little wild on the side. Now that it’s cut, it still does cute curls, but they are a little more under control.
The past few weeks Emily has been working on getting Girl Scout Cookies sold. She went door-to-door in our neighborhood, got on the phone and asked relatives, and even made me take it up to work. I usually don’t like doing that sort of thing, and I did catch some flack from some of the guys, but in the end that put her over the sixty boxes she needed to sell in order to get her cookie sell patch.
A question I get often is how the guitar lessons are going. I actually stopped lessons back in October right after the hurricane. I used the money I got for my birthday to fund the lessons and, at the time, our house still wasn’t sold in Orlando. It was hard to justify spending $100 a month on that. At the beginning of the year, I found a good site, justinguitar.com, which has free online lessons. I decided in the end, all you really want to do it learn how to play songs you know. That’s the real motivator. So, he suggests for beginners just spending 15 minutes each day learning cords, transitions between cords, and then working on a song. I figured I can spare 15 minutes a day, and I’ve been pretty good about it so far. I’ve been working on the following cords: C, D, A-minor, G, and E-minor. And then working on “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. The calluses on my fingers are starting to return and I’ve gotten almost through the intro. Like I said, working on music you like and the fact that you can spare 15 minutes a day has really helped.
Finally, we have been attending a new church here in Sienna Plantation called The Harvest United Methodist Church. It’s a small church without a building, they are meeting in the middle school which is here in the neighborhood. They have land right across from the middle school and are planning on building eventually once they have enough money. We never thought we would like a small church, but we’ve really been enjoying the fact that we are meeting other people here in the community. Today was a pot luck breakfast, so we brought up some breakfast tacos and enjoyed some of the other treats brought by some of the other families.
That’s pretty much January in review. I’ll try not to make it so long between updates.
I can’t believe it’s been over a month since I last updated. Since then a lot has happened. We had Halloween where Abby went as an Egyptian princess, Emily went as a cowgirl, and Izzy went as bumble bee. One of the neighborhood mothers had arranged a Halloween block party so we went to that for a while before making it about half way around the block doing some old fashioned door-to-door trick-or-treating. We both went out with the girls this time and just left a bowl of candy at the door.
Emily has started Girl Scouts and was officially added to a new Daisy troop. She received her sash and one of the following weekends went and helped put together food boxes for needy families for Thanksgiving.
Also in that past month, we now have an 8 year-old in Abby. Since we don’t know too many people yet, we just made it a family affair. Mom and Dad drove down from Shreveport, Jennifer’s parents and sister joined us at the Incredible Pizza Company for pizza and games. Can’t believe that Abby is already 8 years-old. One of Abby’s gifts was tickets to the Nutcracker here in Houston. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Abby, Jennifer, and Jennifer’s mom headed downtown and watched the ballet. Abby was looking quite the young lady in her new dress.
The following weekend was Thanksgiving and we had all of Jennifer’s family over for Turkey. Jennifer started the bird cooking in the morning and was ready by dinner time. Our dining room set is so stuffed into our rent house that we had to turn it length wise so that it was sticking out into the hall in order to get everyone around it. It was nice having everyone over. It’s one of the reasons we moved back to Texas so that we could get together with family more often.
Another week back into the grind. Nothing major happened. I started out the week with a slight cold and since my company does make a distinction between vacation days and sick days, I decided to go ahead and stay home. That didn’t really help my situation at work, just making me more and more behind for the week. Looking like I’m going to have to put in a few extra hours in order to catch up.
On Thursday was mine and Jennifer’s 9th wedding anniversary. Can’t believe it’s been 9 years. It’s gone by fast. We didn’t do much for the anniversary. I stopped by Target and picked up a bouquet of roses and we stayed at home watching Survivor with the kids. We had purchased our anniversary gifts the weekend before. The Xbox 360 Wireless Network adapter for me and a cutting machine for scrap booking called the Cricut for Jennifer. Here’s to hoping that our house sells in Orlando before our 10th anniversary so we can do something just a little bit more exciting.
We were awaken at 5 a.m. By yelling from upstairs. Emily had thrown up. We think she either ate too much junk food at the block party or was too cold up in her room. Fortunately it was contained t her bed. So, we sent Emily to the shower and rolled up her sheets and threw them in te laundry room.
At lunch time we headed out again. We ate at a local Taco Cabana and then waited for around 30 minues for gas. Afterwards we headed to HEB, but they didn’t have anything parishable. We got a few things and headed home.
At around 4 p.m. One of our neighbors mentioned that the subdivision wanted us to start conseving water. They were afraid that the sewer system was going to start backing up. We also got word that the kids’ school was now canceled until Monday. We took this as the last proverbial straw and started packing thr car. Five hours later and we were at my grandparents’ in Lindale. It nice to be in civilization again.
The second part of the big move back to Texas is underway. The first part was me going ahead and moving to Houston to start a new job at TimeGate Studios. That was back in February. Now, four months later, we are driving once again from Florida to Houston. This time as a whole family. Tonight we are in Mobile, Alabama. Now that school is over, we’ve decided to get back together as a family. We are going to be living with Jennifer’s parents until the house sells in Orlando.
Jennifer spent most of the week packing up. On Wednesday, she went and got our camper out of storage and took it by the mechanics to get it checked out and see if it was in good enough condition to get dragged all the way to Houston. They serviced the wheels and it all checked out. Thursday was spent packing up clothes and putting them into the camper.
I flew in last night and Jennifer and the girls picked me up at the airport. This morning, we finished cleaning up the house and packing the rest of the stuff we figured we needed. We pulled out of the driveway at 11:00 this morning and headed out. We said “bye” to the house. It would be the last time the girls saw the house.
We arrived at our hotel in Mobile, Alabama around 6:30. It was an uneventful, long drive. We had to fill up the truck three times at $75 each. This was the first time we made the trip since Isabelle was potty trained. Every hour or so, we would hear a “I need to tinkle” from the back seat and we would either search out the nearest gas station or rest stop. We felt we would never make it. Izzy didn’t make it to the potty on our last stop at gas. I went to get her out of the car so she could run in and tinkle and it turned out she had already done it in her pants. She said, “I sorry, Daddy.”
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.
Nineteen days without a TV and one thing is for certain: Mitsubishi has guaranteed that we will never buy one of their televisions again. They have the most incompetent service organization working for them in Visions Electronics. They told us (without ever coming to see the TV) that it was the bulb. We waited two weeks and guess what, it wasn’t the bulb. They plugged in the bulb and drove off. Within a few minutes, the television was shutting itself off again. They then said it must be a sensor (again without really looking at the TV to diagnose the problem) and said they would be back the next day. They never showed up. When Jennifer called them today: their phone had been disconnected. Mitsubishi, whether they know it or not, has this company representing them. I consider them an extension of their brand. And if they are that incompetent, then how am I supposed to have confidence in their company? Jennifer called Mitsubishi and complained. First they called Visions Electronics because I suppose they didn’t trust Jennifer when she said that their phone had been disconnected. They then put her in touch with another company which proceeded to tell us it was a fuse again without really coming to see the television. So, we are once again in a waiting game while the fuse is ordered. As stated before, will probably never order a Mitsubishi television again just based on their level of customer service.
I made it safe to Houston and just finished my first week at TimeGate Studios. It’s a whole new game and a whole new company to get used to. A lot to take in over the last week. It funny how you don’t really know what it means to miss someone until you have to do it for a long period of time. I really miss Jennifer, Abby, Emily, and Isabelle. I will be flying back to see them in a few weeks, but the time can’t pass fast enough. I know this has been though on Jennifer. The three little terrors nipping at her heels while she has to try and keep the house cleaned up just in case that last minute house hunter wants to jump in and see. It’s hard to say “no” because you know that person who just drops right in might be the ticket that sells our house in Orlando and reunites us. Anyway, next time to see us wish us luck, because it’s only been a week and I don’t know how we are going to last very long.
Frenchville 