Category Archives: Jennifer

Saying Cheese Amidst a Sea of People

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I took the whole week off from work, but today they were having a company photo, so I went up there to participate in that. I missed our last company photo because we were still living in Austin at the time. All 250 or so employees were down in our lobby area while the photographer was up on the third floor balcony. We’ll have to wait and see if you can actually see me amidst a sea of people. We also video taped a “cameo” video for the beginning of our game. We all yelled “EA Sports! It’s in the game!” and cheered.

Jennifer went to the Toyota dealership to see how much money it was going to take to fix the scratch on the Sequoia. It turns out that it will be about the same amount that Jennifer saved by complaining to Rent a Jumper. They are going to have to repaint the area that was scratched. We are going to take the truck back in on Friday and leave it there so that it can get fixed back up.

I put the final touches on the Close Combat: Battle of the Bulge tribute site. This was the second game I worked on and the last while I was at Atomic Games. I’m slowly going through all the games I’ve worked on and getting tribute sites up. The next one will be Madden 2002.

Today’s picture is of Emily playing on the bounce house at Abby’s party.

Bounce House Vindication

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The day started out with Jennifer placing a call to Rent a Jumper to tell them how displeased we were with the bounce house we rented for Abby’s party. She told him it was frustrating enough without the attitude the driver had, which sent us over the edge. The lady on the phone said she would relay the message back to her boss. I figured that was the last we would ever hear from Rent a Jumper. I was wrong. They called back later that afternoon and Jennifer convinced them to give us half the price we were supposed to pay since they we only had the bounce house for half of Abby’s party. So, I will take back what I wrote earlier. Everyone can consider using Rent a Jumper.

All the Frenchville archives are back in operation, even the Abigail Rose French web site, which was the original web site that I started when Abby was born. Pictures from Emily’s birth and our move to Orlando are also in there.

Recovering from the Party

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We intentionally didn’t do much today. The party yesterday was so energy draining, all we could do is sit around the house all day. Abby received a croquet set for her birthday so we went outside at one point and I showed her how to play. It was pretty cute. She would pick up the ball and take it to each gate and hit it through with the mallet and exclaim, “I win! I win!”

Because we were hanging around the house, I had time to work on Frenchville. You will notice that the web site is pretty much starting to look like it’s old self: the Book and Game Shelf have returned; links to personal web sites for the games I have worked on; and archives of all my old entries are now up and going. There’s a few more old archives I want to get back online, specifically, the original “Abigail Rose French” site.

One incident, which I forgot to mention yesterday. While pulling the new Sequoia into the garage, Jennifer scratched the side rear quarter panel. It’s scratched pretty bad, down through the paint. We are going to see if it will buff out, but I have a feeling it’s more than a superficial wound.

Here’s another picture from yesterday’s party. All the kids are around the table getting ready for Abby to blow out the candles. You can tell they are all pretty sweaty from jumping on the bounce house.

Happy Birthday Abby!

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Happy Birthday Abby! This morning four years ago Abigail Rose French was born. We can’t believe we are the parents of a four year old kid. She amazes us everyday. I was cleaning up her playroom tonight in preparation of the party tomorrow and we have a bunch of Abby’s artwork hanging on the wall. I was pruning all the old pictures when I came across a very good painting of a face. I was amazed. Jennifer said that she signed her name in a card at church the other day. It was an A, a backward B and a Y. Close enough. Today’s picture is from Abby’s third birthday party.

Preparing for a Party

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Today Jennifer did more preparations for Abby’s party, which is on Saturday. Calls were made to Albertson’s for sandwiches and a party shop for balloons. Finally, Abby and Jennifer made cupcakes for her class tomorrow. Abby has been calling cupcakes, “pupcakes”. Jennifer says back to her, “Do you see any puppies on the kitchen counter? They are called cup-cakes.”

Today’s picture is of Abby opening presents at her second birthday party.

Fly Away Balloon

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Today Jennifer and Emily went to the store in order to get supplies for Abby’s birthday party this weekend. There, Emily got a balloon from one of the workers. When they got home they were outside and Emily let the balloon go. Emily started to cry and Jennifer tried to explain to her how the balloon flew away. They went inside to put the groceries away and came back outside thirty minutes later. Emily start pointing to the sky and saying, “Fly away balloon”. Jennifer thought it was pretty cute.

Week In Review

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Sorry it’s been all week since I’ve made a new entry. I will have to make it up with this one. First off I would like to make the official announcement on Frenchville that we are now expecting a third child in June. Most of our families know already so this isn’t a surprise to many of our readers, but I thought I would go ahead and make an official announcement on Frenchville because the pregnancy is starting to have newsworthy events in our life. This week Jennifer has been queasy and not feeling well. I had to come home one day this week to help out because it got so bad.

Abby has been having a lot of fun at school as they have been singing Christmas songs. I know this because she will be sitting in her room singing Jingle Bells at the top of her lungs. I had to explain to her the difference between screaming and singing. Today’s picture is of Abby getting ready to slide down a giant inflatable slide at a Fall Festival we went to a couple of weeks ago.

We’ve been having a pretty bad problem with Emily this week. She has been taking off her clothes and diaper. We will come around the corner and she is running around naked. The wost part about it is sometimes her diaper isn’t empty when she takes it off and then we are cleaning poop off of the floor. Fun times had by all.

We lost in our softball game on Wednesday to the top team in the league. We were actually keeping up with them, but ended up losing in the last inning. I did fairly well. I was 2 for 4 and had some good plays, participating in a 6-4-3 double play.

The Texas Longhorns beat Kansas yesterday 27-23, but it wasn’t pretty. Once again the defense had to bail out the bad looking offense. They were down by 10 and had to come back and score two touchdowns in the last five minutes of the game.

First Florida Snake

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Today was my first snake encounter since moving to Florida. Since Florida is essentially one big swamp I expected my first snake to happen sooner and not 21 months since moving here. Anyway, I was walking into our garage to put the garbage into one of our trash cans in there when I noticed a very tiny baby snake sitting there in my way. I picked up a broom and swept it out of the garage. It started heading for the front door and since I really didn’t want it heading toward the house, I picked up a shovel and encouraged it to get onto the shovel. I then carried it into the front lawn and let it go. Since it was a baby snake now I’m worried that his brother and sisters are all hanging out in my garage. Hopefully he was just lost and needed to be shown the way out.

Today’s picture is another one from Halloween. Abby and Emily look over their pile of candy that they received over the night.

Busy Saturday

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Today was a busy day. First, we went to a Fall Festival at church. It’s a fund raiser for their pre-school, which is the school that Abby went to last year. There were hay rides, jump houses, games, and face painters. Everyone was amazed that Emily would go up and down this giant blow-up slide by herself. She loved it and kept sliding down over and over again. As the picture to the right shows, Emily got very contemplative during the hay ride.

Later, we had a baby sitter come over to watch the kids while Jennifer and I went to see a musical, Miss Saigon. It was really good, especially when you have second row seats. I originally saw Miss Saigon on a trip to New York thirteen years ago. Back then I saw it from the second row from the back of the balcony. Makes quite a difference being that close.

This was the first time we had a baby sitter come in and watch both girls since we moved into our house. It’s nice to have a regular baby sitter and we hope to use her more so that we can go out occasionally.

Finally, the Texas Longhorns crushed the Colorado Buffalo 31 to 7. It wasn’t looking too good during the first quarter after Vince Young threw two interceptions. Colorado was actually winning 7-0 after the first quarter. It was good that Vince didn’t panic. He brushed himself off and had two very good solid drives which started the steamroller which ran all over Colorado.

Cotton Candy

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It’s been a pretty normal week and not much to talk about. A typical week consists of constantly cleaning the girls’ play room as seen in this picture. Jennifer says that it seems like she’s cleaning it constantly all day.

Yesterday the girls had a Halloween party at church that they went to. Jennifer said that Abby finally got to have cotton candy. Last 4th of July I promised Abby some, but the place we went to watch fireworks at didn’t have any. All the sugar propelled Abby to the bounce house that was there. It had a giant plastic slide and Abby was jumping straight into the air and roll all the way down.

We continued our losing streak in softball yesterday, with a record of 0-6. We were winning 8-1 after the first inning and we were starting to think if the Boston Red Sox could break their curse, then perhaps we could break ours. We got too confident and we couldn’t recreate the bats of the first inning as we lost 16-9. I actually batted really well: 3-4 with 2 runs and 1 RBI and fielding was good in spite of the infield being as hard a concrete. Maybe next week. At this point I just want us to win one game.