Today I got my Madden 2005 frame back from the frame shop. It is quite big, but it looks great. Framing the box cover and media has been a tradition since I finished my first game. This is the first time I’ve actually done four different versions of a game before, so that accounts for the size. I’m going to take it up to work to show everyone, but it’s so big I don’t think it will stay up on my cubical wall. We will be hanging it upstairs in the office.
On Monday I took off from work and George and I went to Universal Studios. I had never been since we always felt that the girls were too young for Universal and that Disney World was more appropriate for them. By far the best ride we went on was the brand new Revenge of the Mummy ride. We discovered the “single rider” line which allowed us to ride it four times before leaving. Another good area was the Terminator 2: 3D show. I had been wanting to see this since it came out several years ago. We also saw Twister, Earthquake, Back to the Future, and Men In Black.
Today is Jennifer’s mother’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Grandma. Today’s picture is of Abby and Grandma decorating a birthday cake for Jennifer when they were visiting this summer.
Today started off with us all going to Peach Valley Cafe once again for breakfast. The girls are doing better and better each time we go. This time they sat at the table without much fuss at all. Maybe we can start expanding this to lunch and dinner. We’ll have to see, but I’m skeptical.
This afternoon I picked up George from the airport. He’s in town for training as part of his job with PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He came in a couple of days early so that he could visit. I’m going to take off from work tomorrow and we are going to go to Universal Studios.
Today’s picture is from about a year ago when Abby and Emily were better friends. It turns out that Emily has had enough of Abby’s torture as of late. Poppy had given Abby a cycling trophy when they visited this summer. Today Emily took the trophy and whacked Abby on top of the head with the marble base. No blood was shed, and Emily was sorry that she hit her sister on the head.
Yesterday we attended the Madden 2005 Release Party at a bar, Rhythm & Flow, in downtown Orlando. Jennifer finally got to meet a friend from work and his wife, Tom and Tina Carbone. It was good to get away from the kids and go out for a drink downtown. Meanwhile, Abby and Emily went across the street and stayed with one of our neighbors. Jane is a single mother with two young boys, five and four years old, Connor and Lucas. Abby often plays with them in the evenings after dinner. Jane reported that Emily was the best behaved of all of them. She had her blanket and milk ripped away from her, but she didn’t cry or put up a fuss.
This morning I went and played flag football with some of the guys from work again. This time I came prepared, I had Jennifer buy a water jug the other day. One of the main problems last time was warm water. This time I had nice cold water the whole time I was there. It was still extremely hot and we didn’t last very long, just over an hour. I came limping home, I fell twice jamming my knee into the ground and somehow I hurt my ribs. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I was in a little better shape, I wouldn’t come limping home each time I play.
We watched the movie Matchstick Men this evening. It was a good movie starring Nicholas Cage. He plays a conman with an excessive compulsive disorder, who discovers he has a fourteen year old daughter, he’s never met. I thought the movie dragged in a few places, but was overall good. It was a little predictable and I had the movie figured out about half way through.
Today’s picture is of Emily from last summer right after she started crawling. I chose this picture because she is playing with Dora the Explorer, which is one of Abby’s favorite shows. Lately when Emily sees Dora on the television, she says, “Dora!” Now that I’ve seen this picture, I realize that Abby’s has been training her sister to like Dora all along.
Reuters has reported today that my game Madden NFL 2005 has sold 1.3 million copies in the first week of sales. This is defintely the highest selling game I’ve ever worked on. I think Madden NFL 2002 PC sold around 300,000 copies in it’s entire run. Our biggest competitor, ESPN NFL 2K5 has sold just under 800,000 copies in their first month of sales. They came out a couple of weeks ahead of us and their price is only $19.99. Our game is $49.99 and is kicking their ass in one week of sales vs. their one month of sales.
We heard back from State Farm Insurance yesterday about replacing our floors. It turns out that they are going to go ahead and replace the entire floor instead of making us try and match it up. This is great news and Jennifer is already looking at perhaps changing to a different type of wood for the floor and changing it so that it isn’t a floated floor so we don’t have a similar problem in the future. She also wants to get it laid out on the diagonal instead of straight across the floor, which is how our house in Round Rock had its floors.
Today’s picture is another classic picture from when Abby was around the age Emily is now. In fact, we have Emily wearing the same outfit that Abby is wearing in this picture. The picture also shows what our hardwood floors looked like back in Round Rock.
Our friends, Tim and Leslie, who have been without power since the storm, found out that their power won’t be restored until Thursday. Because of this, they decided to go to a hotel and we offered to watch their dog, Madison. The girls have enjoyed having the dog at the house. Emily has been pretty funny around her. When Madison barks, Emily puts her finger up to her lips and says, “shush”.
Abby’s school was canceled again today because there’s still power outages in our county. Because of this, Jennifer and the kids had to once again get out of the house and go to lunch at “Burger Cheese”, also known as McDonalds, so that they could run around and get some of the energy out of their systems.
Today’s picture is of one of the trees on our street which got knocked down during the hurricane. This one was amazing because the tree trunk snapped.
Today we went to church and got to see first hand what Hurricane Charlie did to Winter Park. The area that our church is in is surrounded by large beautiful trees. Once we got into the area, it was pretty bad. The golf course that runs through the middle of Winter Park was covered in downed trees. A cemetery across the street had toppled headstones from the falling branches and trees. We found our church to be without power and we ended up having service in the heat and darkness.
Today’s picture is of Emily right after a bath a couple of weeks ago.
Once the sun came up today it gave us a better picture of what type of damage Hurricane Charlie had done to the area. In our yard, there was just a couple of downed tree limbs, nothing much. We had a pretty pathetic pile of branches compared to some of our neighbors. Up the street, a giant oak tree had come crashing down, laying across a neighbor’s yard. As it got closer to lunch time, the girls were bouncing off of the walls so we decided to go to Chic-fil-a so that they could play. On our way we drove through our neighborhood to see if there was any more damage. In a couple of areas, trees had falling into the screened in porches that everyone has around their pools. We saw a couple of more downed trees, but it looks like most everyone was fortunate that none of the big trees hit their house. The lake near our house had a ton of dead wood trees in it, the hurricane ripped those apart and the lake is now filled stumps.
We found out that our friends that live in another part of our neighborhood had been without power since the hurricane hit last night. Talking to other people we found out that a majority of our county was without power and we consider ourselves lucky that we were only without power for 15 minutes. For some reason around 10:00 this morning, our phone line and Internet connection went dead. It’s been down all day and just got restored.
Hurricane Charles was one to remember. Today’s picture is another one of Charlie as it approached us. We are just glad it grew so much weaker before it hit us. May we be so lucky next time.
At about 2:00 this afternoon we got word that Hurricane Charlie was taking a turn to bring it south of Tampa and towards Orlando. Then at 3:00 it was upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 145 miles per hour and hit Fort Myers, Florida.
As predicted, it tracked right over the top of Orlando and then right over our house. We were hit by three waves of storms. The first was at 3:00 and is seen in the picture moving into the neighborhood. We had another wave at 6:30 and finally the storm right in front of the eye of the storm reached us at 9:00. By the time it reached us, Charlie had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane and the television reported gusts of winds at 70 miles per hour in our area. The wind picked up with each wave with the final wave knocking out the power. Fortunately, we were only without power for 15 minutes. We had just put Abby to bed and when the power went out, she started yelling from her room. We tried to explain that the power went out, but she kept asking “how”. She stayed up with us until the storm had passed and then we convinced her to go back to bed.
Now the eye has passed over us and the back side of the hurricane is pretty weak. We just got finished surveying the yard and it doesn’t look like we sustained any damage. It appears we have survived our first Florida hurricane.
Frenchville 