Category Archives: Softball

New DVD Player

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We’ve had our Sequoia for only three years and the button that turns the DVD player on broke. This isn’t too big a deal for myself and Jennifer, but for Abby, Emily, and Isabelle it’s the end of the world. We try not to spoil them and have the TVs on all the time, but if we are getting on the Interstate and going down to the Maitland / Winter Park area (about a 20 minute ride), then we go ahead and indulge them. Well, we decided we needed to go ahead and get it fixed. Realistically, it only needed to get fixed before we go back to Texas in December. Talk about making the trip go a lot smoother. Jennifer got it priced at Sound Advice, a store that specializes in putting in that type of equipment. It’s also the place where I recently bought my HDTV. It actually turned out not to be too much to fix. Just around $200. I was expecting a lot more.

Today was another softball game for myself. We got crushed by a team representing Florida Hospital: 15-2. They went up on us by about 13 runs in the first inning. When you get beat that bad early, it’s hard to come back. I batted fine. I went 1 for 1 with one walk and one run. Our games have been rained out a lot, so this was the first time I had played in about three weeks.

New President of EA Sports

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Vacation Bible School is getting more stressful for Jennifer as they keep adding more and more kids. They are now over 400 kids and the crafts she’s in charge of are going fast. She doesn’t want to get into a position where she has to tell one of the kids that there isn’t enough supplies for them.

Today it was announced that Peter Moore is now President of EA Sports. Recently Electronic Arts split into four separate labels or brands: EA Sports, EA Games, EA Casual, and The Sims. Each label will have a president who reports directly to the CEO of the company, John Riccitiello. EA Sports was the only label which didn’t have a president. Peter Moore comes from Microsoft where he was head of marketing for the Xbox. It’s good that John Riccitiello recognized that we needed someone from the outside to give us a different perspective on how to take our games into the next decade of gaming. I’m closing in on my seventh year at EA and it’s been pretty much the same thing: each year there is a packaged good that we sell: Madden 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, etc. How long can that be sustained? Are there better methods? Hopefully Peter Moore can help guide us in the right direction. It will now be interesting to see if this changes how the reporting structure works between studios. We’ll have to wait and see.

Today was another softball game this time against the QA department. We ended up losing 13-3. We were leading after 1 inning, 2-0, but after that our bats went away and they started getting in the runs. I went 1-2 with an RBI for hitting. They were playing with a “rover” in the outfield. I was able to plunk it right between the gap in the outfielders, but beyond the reach of the rover.

NFL Head Coach Released

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Today was the big day. NFL Head Coach was released to the public. It’s now available in stores, so go out and buy a copy. We got our copies of the game and took a team photo. I’ll be updating my site for the game soon with up to date screen shots and information about the features in the game.

I’ve been playing softball again. Unfortunately because Head Coach has been Finaling, I missed a few games. Also, our team isn’t doing all that great. We lost again tonight making us 0-5. Because I’ve missed most of the games, I only got to play the last half of the game. I went 0-1 with a fly out to left center field. I made one play hit to me at second base.

Today’s picture is from Isabelle’s party back in Lindale, Texas. She was getting help opening her parents from Abby and Emily.

The Christmas Program

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I left work early to attend Abby’s Christmas program up at church. She had learned five songs over the past few weeks and this is the first time I’ve heard her sing with a group where the audio recording wasn’t singing along with them. It was a struggle to get her up there to sing in the first place. Right before they were going to start, one of her teachers came out carrying her while she was crying. I took her and she told me that she was scared. I tried to explain to her that she was a good singer and that there wasn’t anything to worry about. She just wasn’t going to do it, so we started to leave. We retrieved Emily from the nursery and started to leave the church grounds when Jennifer asked her one last time if she wanted to sing. Jennifer even bribed her with going to “Burger Cheese” afterwards. She finally gave in. We rushed back in where the kids were assembled to sing. Too late. The program had started and all the kids were about to start singing. The teacher that brought her out earlier saw her wanting to go up and escorted her up there. Once up there, Abby just sung with all of her heart. There were several times that I even heard her over the other kids. When it was over she asked, “Can we go to ‘Burger Cheese’ now?”

Tonight was the last softball game of the season and it was against our inner-work rivals: the EA Sports team. Well, it was a tough battle, but we lost: 10-3. It was actually a very close game and we just had one inning where we flubbed a few plays. I ended up 1 for 2 with a walk and a run. On my first at bat I was hit in the hip with the ball by the third baseman while trying to reach first. I shook it off and it’s okay right now, but I will probably be feeling it in the morning. We ended the season in the cellar with a record of 1-7. Oh well, here’s to next season.

Jennifer forgot to bring the camera to Abby’s Christmas program, so today’s picture is just another one from Thanksgiving. I call this picture, “Won’t you go ahead and take the picture already?”

Squirrel in the Attic

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I was awaken this morning, not by the pitter patter of little feet, but to the scritch scratching of little claws. The squirrel which took refuge in our attic during the hurricanes is back. This time it sounds like he is exploring more as you can hear him on one side of the house and then scratch, scratch, scratch, he’s on the other side. Jennifer checked into getting someone to come out and “take care” of the squirrel, but needless to say, I can find about 250 reasons why we are going to handle it ourselves. I just hope it is a squirrel. I don’t want to get up in the attic and suddenly I’m face to face with a pack of wild raccoons. I’m going to wait until this weekend so I can see where he’s coming in and plug up the hole.

Today we once again lost in softball 17-10. The bats were just not there, especially mine. I when 0-3 with three fly outs. I also think we aren’t aggressive enough in our base running. We had to call in one of the guys that was hurt recently because we were low on men. He wasn’t used to our wimpy base running style and he ended up stealing home. We should probably sit him down and tell him to not be so aggressive in his base running like the rest of the team. My fielding went fine, there wasn’t many hit my direction, but I did help turn a 5-4-3 double play.

Today’s picture is of Abby and me at her 1st birthday party. This is in honor of Abby’s 4th birthday which is on Friday.

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.

The Thrill of Victory

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It has been a long hard road, but the curse was finally lifted when we pulled off a victory in softball tonight, 13-10. We were behind most of the game, but we kept up with them never being more than four runs back. Finally in the bottom of the sixth inning we had a rally once we realized that we needed to let their pitcher actually pitch to us. Invariably he ended up walking a lot of us and we let him loaded the bases with walks. Then, when I got up to bat, they decided I was too much of a threat and switched out pitchers. I let the new pitcher walk me and that scored one of our runs during our rally. In actuality I wasn’t doing all that great batting, going 0 for 3 with 2 RBIs and a walk. Going into the seventh inning, all we had to do was hold them and we did a 1, 2, 3 inning to seal it and take home the victory.

Today’s picture is of Jennifer’s pumpkin carving that she did for Halloween.

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.

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.

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.