The Shelf Life of PC Games

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We got out and did some shopping at Best Buy today. I’m about to finish Ratchet & Clank so I wanted to get the next game I was going to be playing. I received Half-Life 2 as a gift, but I hadn’t played the first one so I went in search of a “Collector’s” version of Half-Life. I was able to find one and found out the reason it’s hard to have old versions of PC games still on the shelves. PC games age rather quickly. I had a tough time getting the six year old game to run on my modern PC. When Half Life came out, 3D video cards were in it’s infancy. It’s funny because you usually don’t have the same problem with console games. If the console is still running, you know that a game bought twenty years from now will still run on that system. In fact, you still see the original Nintendo and Super Nintendo for sale in video game stores today even though both systems are over ten years old now.

After Best Buy we went over to Chuck E. Cheese. We usually try to avoid the place on the weekends and we were reminded of the reason why. It was crawling with people. And for some reason, they redesigned the place in order to cram it full of more people. Instead of having a place where you dine and a place where you play, it’s all inner mixed now. It made it real awkward trying to help Emily play Skee Ball and a few feet over a family is eating pizza. As you can see from today’s picture, Abby got her picture taken by a contraption which makes a “sketch” of the person posing for the picture. She was very proud of the picture and has made me hang it up in her play room.

It’s a Girl?

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It’s been a week since my last post so I guess I’m going to have to do a week in review. The biggest news this week is that we went to our first ultrasound appointment for the new baby on Friday. The nurse couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, so we are pretty much going with the assumption that the new baby is a girl. This is the third time that the first ultrasound has ended in “I can’t really tell”, so I think it’s a pretty safe assumption. We are a little disappointed since we were hoping for a boy, but I guess I’m destined to be in a house full of women.

We did get some fish. Abby says they are named “Abby” and “Emily”, but we are holding off officially naming them. I’ve tried convincing her to name them “Nemo” and “Dory” or “Shrek” and “Fiona”, but haven’t had much luck. So, for now they are called “the Fish”.

The reason for the lack of posts is that I’ve still be working really hard at work the past week again. It’s starting to get a little easier as more and more of the project starts coming together, but it’s still really chaotic. My new boss has come up to speed rather quickly even with the programming staff having doubled over the past two weeks. There’s still going to be a rough couple of weeks as we try and plan the entire project while finishing up our second milestone.

TiVo is amazing. At work, Tom and I were talking about this particular television program, Mr. Show with Bob and David, on Wednesday. It was on HBO in the 90’s and I wasn’t a big fan of it, but I knew of the show and the two comedians who were on it. Last night my TiVo recorded it. How does it do that? Apparently TBS is showing syndicated versions. Amazing. I set up a season pass.

Today’s picture is of Abby who fell asleep with her chair turned upside down. She doesn’t take naps anymore and she usually paints or colors while Emily takes her nap. However, sometimes if she’s had a fun time at school that day, she can’t help but curl up and doze off. We just thought this was a weird way to fall asleep.

Abby the Fish

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Abby has been asking for a pet lately. We knew we couldn’t get a dog because we would have to build a fence in our backyard. Both Jennifer and I are allergic to cats. So, we settled on some fish. We told this to Abby and now for the past few weeks that’s all we’ve been hearing from her. How she would “really like a pet fish”. So, we decided to go get a fish tank with the money the girls got for Christmas. We got a small five gallon and put it in the kitchen. I asked Abby what she wanted to name her fish and she said, “Abby”. I said, “That will be confusing.” “Nope. I want my fish named Abby,” she replied. So hopefully, we will be getting “Abby the fish” on Monday.

Today’s picture is of Abby helping Grandpa pain a shelf. Yes, she’s wearing a plastic bag over her clothes.

Happy Birthday, Emily!

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Sorry, but I’ve been so busy at work lately that I haven’t had time to put an entry into Frenchville. However, I had to get an entry in for Emily’s birthday. We celebrated her birthday in Houston last weekend, but today was her actual birthday.

We are still trying to get everything unpacked from the trip. Abby and Emily have been riding their new scooters around. I put the Barbie Jeep back together, but there isn’t any room to store it in the garage. I had to put it on the back porch and the girls have to go off roading in order to get it around the house and into the front yard. Hey, it is a Jeep after all.

Three Events While on the Road

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We made it back home all in one piece. That drove from Houston to Mobile and then to Orlando is way too long. We drive from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. both days. Abby’s new statement was that she was “tired of this trip”.

We had three events all happen while we were driving for the past few days. First, we were called around 2:00 yesterday while driving through southern Louisiana, by our alarm company. The alarm on our house was going off and they asked if they should send the police. We told them yes and then we called one of our neighbors. We didn’t hear anything back from the alarm company, but our neighbor walked around the house and said that everything was okay. We found out from one of our other neighbors that the police did come to our house, but didn’t see anything wrong. Once we got home, everything seemed to be in order.

While we were strolling through Mississippi, the “MAINT REQD” light came up on the dashboard. Our car is only a couple of months old and just has over 5,000 miles on it. When I noticed the light we had 5,003 miles on the car. Even though Jennifer went ahead and got the oil changed right before we left, I figured it was just a light to remind one to get their oil changed. Once we got to our hotel in Mobile, I used their Internet connection to confirm my suspicion on Toyota.com.

Finally, today while driving through Florida, I was called by one of the managers at work to inform me that my boss had quit. I don’t know the reason why, and may never know. So, my life at work just got more complicated. I guess I will know more of the fallout tomorrow.

Longhorns Win Rose Bowl!

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Happy New Year! We spent the switch to the new year here in the Central Time Zone asleep. I guess roasting all the marshmallows made us a little groggy.

We went ahead and celebrated Emily’s second birthday while we were here in Houston. Abby and Grandma made a cake with sprinkles on top, of course, and some more homemade ice cream as well. We sung “Happy Birthday” and she blew out her candles with some help. She was much better than Abby on her second birthday who cried when we started singing.

What a great showing by the Texas Longhorns in the Rose Bowl today. They defeated Michigan in the last seconds of the game and showed everyone that they did belong in a BCS game. Vince Young and the offense looked great. It was the defense that I wasn’t too happy with. The secondary kept giving up the pass over the middle and it was getting very frustrating. They marched down the field in the last seconds and kicked a field goal two win with two seconds left in the game. Very exciting. HOOK ‘EM HORNS!

National Treasure

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Today Jennifer and I once again escaped from the kids and went to see the movie National Treasure. Nicolas Cage plays a character who’s family holds the secret to a treasure which was hidden back when the United States was founded. It was a pretty good movie, very exciting. Jennifer and I both recommend it.

Tonight we “celebrated” by roasting marshmallows on an open fire. We were making s’mores, but the girls didn’t want to try them. Abby said “no thank you” and they ate each of the ingredients separately.

Mongolia Found

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Today Jennifer and I swung by our favorite Mongolian Bar-B-Q place in Clear Lake and had lunch. It tasted just like it did when we were last there four years ago and the restaurant didn’t look like it had changed a bit. We did some shopping and went by Jennifer’s old Home Depot that she used to work at. There was actually someone who still worked there in her department who she got to talk to. It was amazing that she were still there considering Jennifer hasn’t worked there in five years.

When we got home, Grandma, Jennifer, and the girls made homemade ice cream. Grandma started experimenting with eBay for the first time and bought an electric ice cream maker. The ice cream was great. They doubled their recipe and it only made about a dozen scoops. This was supposed to be a “trial run” and we are going to try more ice cream tomorrow. This time quadrupling the recipe.

EV1.Net Houston Bowl

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It’s been much warmer this week in Houston than it was when we were in Shreveport last week. That has allowed us to do much more outside, if you haven’t noticed. There’s also much more to do as a family here in Houston than in Shreveport. So, today we headed to the Houston Zoo. This blew the doors off of the Central Florida Zoological Park, which we went to in October. There was so much more to do and see. We saw monkeys, elephants, lions, and went to the petting zoo. Today’s picture is from a playground which was in the children’s zoo area.

After the zoo, I headed off to meet George at the EV1.Net Houston Bowl where Colorado was taking on University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). You would think we would be rooting for UTEP, since it would be a sister of Texas, but we were actually going for a fellow Big XII team, Colorado. We figured it would be embarrassing to have a team from the WAC to beat the Big XII. It was actually a really good match up. UTEP stunned everyone by going into the lead early and kept it well into the fourth quarter. Colorado kept up and then went ahead with about seven minutes left in the game. UTEP tried to come back, but their office was pretty one dimensional: passing only. It ended up being a pretty exciting game and it was fun to go to Reliant Stadium again.

Visiting with George & Heather

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Today we headed down to Galveston to go to Moody Gardens, where there’s a series of glass pyramids with different types of environments that you can visit. First, we traveled under the sea into their aquarium. The girls were amazed looking at all the sharks and penguins and Abby got to touch a star fish. After the aquarium, we traveled through a rain forest. When we entered there was so much humidity, it was like being back in Florida. Jennifer’s glasses and our camera fogged up. Emily met some birds and when she would say “hello”, the birds would squawk in response and she would laugh.

For dinner we went over to George’s new house. He and his wife, Heather, just moved into a townhouse near downtown. It’s not in a very good part of town, but George is now only about twenty minutes from work. The neighborhood is slowly being converted into a a bunch of new townhouses, but until then they have to put up with a shack across the street. They will probably make a ton of money on their townhouse once they are ready to sell. They got in on the ground floor on this area and once it’s all converted over they could probably sell their townhouse for twice what they paid for it. George had a huge HDTV, which was really nice. I guess that’s the type of thing you can spend your money on when you don’t have kids. It was nice visiting and seeing them again.