Category Archives: Jason

Blogging from 20,000 feet

Posted on by
Reply

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.

One Week In

Posted on by
Reply

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.

On the Road

Posted on by
Reply

With the coming of a new job at TimeGate began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Today I hit the road back to Houston leaving behind Jennifer and the girls in Orlando. A man and his dog traveling the country side looking for a good cup of joe. Actually, me and Austin we were trying our fastest to get out of Florida and back to Texas. It was sad leaving everyone back in Orlando and I will miss them. Hopefully the house will sell soon for several reason beyond the obvious: being reunited with the family.

First, the house keeps breaking. No major breaks, just little annoyances, which keep digging me deeper in debt. We replaced the carpet and the blinds. Yesterday our kitchen faucet broke and we had to get a plumber out to install a new one. I tried to do it, but the connections were way up behind the sink and I couldn’t get the wrench to twist because of the tight quarters. At first we tried Roto Rooter, but once they got to our house and told us how much it was going to cost, Jennifer turned them away and called a local plumber. They fixed us up and it didn’t break the bank for something so simple.

Second, the neighbors are driving us crazy between our across the street neighbor, Jane, who pealed out backward from the bus stop today; and the old wind bag behind us who loves yelling at the girls telling them to be quiet. The Wind Bag decided to pay us a visit today to tell us what she thought of our kids. Now granted Emily can shriek at a pitch that can hit your spinal cord just right and make your eye twitch, but coming over to my house and complaining that the kids are too loud at 3:00 in the afternoon. What’s the home owners association going to do about that? Are they going to start advertising that our subdivision is not a family-friendly place to live? I doubt it. Wind Bag, go find a nice retirement community, there’s plenty of them. It’s Florida after all.

End to an ErA

Posted on by
Reply

While in Houston over the Christmas break, we made a family decision to go ahead and move back to Texas since we missed it so much. Since we both like Houston so much, I looked up the only game company I knew there, TimeGate Studios. It turned out that they had a position that fit me perfectly: part manager and part software engineer. After much debating with myself and encouragement from Jennifer, I put in my resume. The following week I flew in for an interview and liked what I saw. This past Wednesday, they made me an offer and I accepted. We are going to be moving back to Houston.

This left me with the unenviable task of informing the company I’ve worked for for the past seven years, EA-Tiburon, that I would be leaving, leaving in the middle of production. I didn’t get much sleep the night before, but like a Band Aid, I just went ahead and did it quick. They are all sad to see me go and I thank everyone at Tiburon for all being so understanding.

Tonight we told the girls. The only one who really was sad was Abby. She said that she was going to miss all of her friends, especially our next door neighbor. It was tough seeing her cry. I remember my mom and dad tell us when we were moving away from Houston when I was in the seventh grade. But, I think this is for the best. We’ve really missed being close to family over the past five years and we feel it’s time. I will continue to update Frenchville letting everyone know what’s going on during the big move back. The first step is getting the house sold and that starts tomorrow with a visit from a real estate agent.

Home Sweet Home

Posted on by
Reply
IMG_0072_crop

We finally arrived home yesterday evening from our long two week Christmas trip to Texas & Louisiana. That last day was grueling. We started at 8:00 a.m. Central Standard Time and didn’t get home until 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Basically: sunrise to sunset. Everyone was tired and the girls are very whiny in the back seat. We were all tired from the 16 hours in the car. I’m not sure if we are going to be making that trip again by car. It’s just too tough.

The last week was spent in Houston at Jennifer’s parents house. I went to see the last Houston Texans’ game of the season thanks to my friend George. They won ending their season 8-8, their best record ever. Afterward, Jennifer picked us up and we met up with George’s wife Heather for some dinner at a restaurant.

IMG_0023

The rest of the week was just driving around and eating or looking at places where we used to go. The highlight of the week was Jennifer’s parents taking Abby and Emily to one of the many stables near their house and setting them up with horse riding lessons. They both enjoyed it and will remember that for years to come.

Though the driving was long, we had a nice trip. Thanks everyone for the gifts and for letting us come and visit. I’m anxious to get back to work and the swing of things. I can now say that I’m working on NCAA Football 09 as the Development Director. They announced that there will be an NCAA 09 over the break as a tie in for the Bowl Championship Series. We are about half way through Production and will soon be heading into Finaling at the beginning of March.

One last thing I have to mention is that today is Emily’s 5th birthday. It was 5 years ago today at 1:11 p.m. in the afternoon that Emily was born. We are having her party on Saturday. We always have to have her party on the weekend after because no one is back from vacation on the weekend closest to her birthday. In celebration, we went to have some ice cream after dinner. I will have some more posts and pictures from the actual celebration.

All I Want For Christmas Are My Two Front Teeth

Posted on by
Reply
IMG_0002

After you’ve been with EA for seven years, they give you an extra seven weeks of vacation which they call the “sabbatical”. That’s above and beyond the four weeks I normally get off and the week everyone gets at Christmas. So, there’s no way I’m going to be able to take off seven weeks all at one time, so I’m dividing it up into three parts. I took a week at Thanksgiving. I’m taking two weeks here at Christmas and then I’m going to take four weeks once the game I’m working on ships. So, I started my first week off this week and I don’t have to go back to work until January 9th.

I decided to treat myself to some lunch all on my own today. I went up to our favorite pizza place, American Pie. It was good being free from the kids just eating pizza and reading my book.

Later on in the afternoon it was time to rock. Jennifer went to a hair appointment and since she doesn’t care for Rock Band too much, it was time to get out the drum set and rock. I first looked over to see if there were any new songs to download from the music store. I picked up “My Sharona” by The Knack, one of my dad’s favorite songs. Mainly because he claims to have come up with the melody for the song. I’ve completed all the solo drum songs on “Easy” and now I’ve started going through all of them on “Medium”. Well, it appears I rocked too hard, because I think I pulled something in my ankle. I can barely move my foot around.

In another bit of news, Abby pulled her other top front tooth out tonight. So, she will be getting another visit from the tooth fairy and she will be without her two front teeth for Christmas. She was very exciting when it started bleeding coming downstairs and to inform the entire family. She then spent the next thirty minutes wiggling it until it finally broke free.

Anniversary Dinner

Posted on by
Reply

It’s always easy to remember my wedding anniversary. It’s near Texas-OU weekend. For a while the day of my wedding was the last time Texas had defeated OU. Well, 6 out of 8 times OU has been the victor in this match-up and they won again today beating Texas 28-21. It wasn’t as much of a blow out as I thought it was going to be. Texas was hanging in with them, but in the end McCoy couldn’t pull out a two minute drill to go down the field and tie it up. Like I said, they didn’t look as bad this week. Maybe they can win the rest of the games and go to a respectable bowl this year (hopefully in Florida).

Near the end of the game, we had to leave for our anniversary dinner. We hadn’t been there in a while so we decided to hit The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant. It’s a slow meal so you have plenty of time to talk. It’s our eighth anniversary, so we had plenty to reminisce about. We used to make it our “date” place all the time, but got tired of it. It was once again good and we both looked forward to eating there all week.

While we were there, Jennifer noticed a sign for a “Ladies Night” and that it had sponsors. She talked to the manager and got on the list to display her photographs and to put a coupon in a “gift basket” they are going to be handing out. We’re hopeful that this will start to drum up some business for Storybook Portraits.

Long Week

Posted on by
Reply
izzyrocks

This past Sunday Jennifer left for a photography conference near Fort Meyer, Florida, leaving me with the kids for five days. This is definitely the longest I’ve ever had to take care of the girls on my own. So, I took off the week from work and played “Mr. Mom”. Everything went okay. We went shopping and played a little Guitar Hero II, but all and all it was a pretty normal week, except I was doing everything that Jennifer generally does. This was a rough time to take off from work as we are transitioning from our design phase into our production phase on the project I’m working on. I was able to push things along over e-mail, but I still felt out of the loop.

Emily on new back ground web

When Jennifer got home, she used some of the new lighting techniques she had learned to create a few great pictures of the girls. She also received a new background. She’s starting to get really good at photography. She now just needs to start getting more clients. She’s taken out more ads in the local newspapers. Hopefully, that will pick up some regular clients. She also learned a few marketing techniques at the conference that she’s considering doing.

1464550222_e2c7405148_o

This weekend I worked on giving Frenchville another face lift. You’ll notice the new theme, but there’s a few more new features as well. In the right panel you will notice “On This Date in Frenchville History”. This section will show previous entries over the seven years of Frenchville. In order to get this to work correctly, I had to import all of the older entries from November 2000 – October 2004. I have most of them in, but I’m still working on getting them all in. I think this is a pretty cool feature. You will also notice, that I have links to Flickr. I’m going to start putting all of my pictures up there so that you can see all the pictures I take, not just the ones I’m posting on the web site.

Another UCF Game

Posted on by
Reply

I headed up once again to UCF today for a game against Memphis. We were having a team event for up at work in the form of a tailgate and then had tickets for the game. The tailgate was fun, company paid for the food and our executive producer paid for the beer. We cooked up some burgers and hung out and tried not to talk about work. That sometimes is hard since we do work for a game company.

There was an uproar over the past week because of the water debacle during the Texas game. Since they ran out last week around half time, they quickly installed some water fountains (I didn’t actually see them) and they handed out a free bottle of water as you entered the gate.

I didn’t stick around to see if they ran out of water again this week. At half time the score was UCF 42 and Memphis 0. So, I decided it was time for me to head out. After all, I needed to get back home by 7:00 to see Texas play against Rice. Finally the Horns blew out a crappy opponent. When Fox Sports Florida turned the game over to another one, Texas was winning 58-7.

A Close Call

Posted on by
Reply

Today I spent all day up at the University of Central Florida (UCF) as the Texas Longhorns came into town. We ordered BBQ over the Internet from The Salt Lick in Austin, Texas and I spent the morning cooking it up for our tailgate. Others were in charge of chips and Shiner Bock. We rolled onto campus in the Sequoia with the Rose Bowl playing on the televisions in the back of the truck around 11:00. We found a choice spot under some trees to set up camp and broke out the beers. After a while, we broke out the BBQ and just sat around and talked and ate until it was time to head over to the stadium.

We packed up camp and started our trek all the way across the campus to the new Brighthouse Networks Stadium. This was the first game in UCF’s new stadium. It was a big deal on the news this morning that no water fountains were built in the stadium. They reassured everyone that there would be plenty of water to purchase. Of course, I went down at half time to buy some water: they were out.

Well, overall the game was pretty frustrating as a Longhorn fan. They UCF fans were quite annoying celebrating every single first down (apparently this is a tradition). The Longhorns looked pretty pitiful and I’m not very hopeful when they play Oklahoma in a few weeks. So far they’ve struggled against Arkansas State, TCU, and now UCF. The play calling is very questionable and Colt McCoy is looking very “Simms like”. Not good.