May 6, 2002

Dominica and I are playing substitute parents today to Madeline and Emily. We have them all day to ourselves. Let me tell you, I am not cut out to have kids. They are too much for me. I discovered today that I am not able to feed an infant.

Lots of television, that is what we did today. In the evening, Min and I went out to see Spiderman. We had a good time, the movie was pretty good. Min liked it a lot more than I did but she is a comic book fan. After the movie, we tried to get some dinner at Lupe Tortilla (Yes, Loopy Tortilla) but they had closed just before we got there. We thought that Loopy would think that that was hilarious.

We are planning on taking the girls to the aquarium tomorrow. We will see if we can pull off a trip.

I actually ended up working a fair amount today. The phone was ringing off the hook for a lot of the morning.

May 5, 2002

Today we went to the Houston Zoo. I also got to see downtown for the first time. Houston is the fourth largest city in the US and it is really noticeable when you fly straight from Atlanta to Houston.

We had a good time at the zoo even though it was 98% humidity and 95 degrees. Hot, hot, hot. But the zoo was nice. Not as nice as Cincinatti but pretty nice all the same. The kids were pretty tired by the time that we decided to leave.

May 4, 2002

My first actual day in Texas. This is my first time seeing Texas in the daylight. Dominica and I spent most of the day catching up on some sleep that we needed after traveling all day yesterday. Dominica and Francesca spent the afternoon catching up while Bennie and I went out to he bar and shot some pool. We did some Italian for dinner. That was about the entire day for me. I am exhausted. The time change doesn’t help anything either.

Loopy called me today all excited about his new computer. He finally has it all together. That is three people who have them done now. Josh and I will have ours together soon. Loopy is very excited. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him since he has been playing anything new on his yet but he managed to score more than a 9600 on performance tests by overclocking his machine just a little bit. I can’t wait to try out some new games on it.

Bennie (Francesca’s husband) and I headed out to the pool hall to shoot pool for a couple of hours and get some drinking in. We won’t have much chance to see each other while Min and I are down here since he has to work all week. We had a good time. I am surprised that I am still able to shoot pool at all. It has been a long time since I did that at all. I haven’t shot any pool since the days of Eric and I playing at Classic Billiards in Greece.

May 3, 2002

Today we flew to Houston. That was pretty much our entire day. Dominica and I hit the road around noon to head up to Rochester to catch our flights to Houston. We got to the airport around 2:00 pm just in time to discover that our 4:30 flight, which we were already early for, was delayed until 5:10. Well, that didn’t seem so bad. Once we got to the terminal after having dinner at Philip’s European, we discovered that our flight was delayed until 6:00 because of a storm in Atlanta (where we were making our connection.) We finally got on the plane and flew the two hour trip to Atlanta.

Upon arriving in Atlanta, we were directed to the incorrect gate for our flight were they informed us that our flight was currently boarding at the furthest point in the terminal from where we currently were. So, we ran the length of the terminal just to discover that they had decided that, due to extreme delays, that they would no longer be updating their schedules and everyone had to just sit tight and listen for a boarding call! So, we sat. We finally boarded the plane and prepared for the 55 minute flight down to Houston.

After flying for about an hour, I looked out the plane’s window and noticed New Orleans glowing beneath us. Since NO is not on the flight path between Atlanta and Houston, I knew that this was going to take forever. The flight ended up taking two hours instead of less than one. So, it ended up being a very long trip. But we finally arrived. Houston was not as hot as I expected it to be.

Before we left this morning, I got the opportunity to download and play Microsoft’s new Dungeon Siege. DS is MS’s newest RPG and let me tell you, it is really exciting. The graphics, sound and gameplay are all really amazing. I just played the demo and I can’t wait to get the full game. It is going to be a lot of fun.

May 2, 2002

I finally got the third letter to the editor up on the site. It has been quite some time since we had the last one. You can thank Anne for being the first person in quite some time to actually write something in depth to us. I also managed to get some things updated in the letters section so that it looks a little bit more like the rest of the site.

For the last few weeks, we have been going to Friendlys an abnormally high amount. Why? you ask. Because we have discovered an amazing new sandwich there. We call it the Thanksgiving sandwich but it is officially the Roast Turkey and Stuffing Supermelt. But you are a vegetarian? Yes, but, we supstitute mashed potatoes for the turkey. So, the sandwich has mashed potatoes, cheese, stuffing and cranberry sauce. Yup, thats right. Doesn’t sound all that interesting, but you have to try it. Sara and Dominica first came up with it and told me about it. So I had to go and try it. They were right, it was amazing. So Loopy tried it and then Tim did too. About two nights ago, Nate and Miranda each tried some of one of our sandwiches and they both fell in love with it. So, Nate and Bob went to Friendlys to see if they preffered it with turkey or the mashed potatoes. The sandwich is so good that I even wrote to Friendlys about it to let them know that we really liked the sandwich and that they should add it to their menu as a vegetarian option.

If May keeps up like this, we may manage to outpace April. Scroll down through April while you have the chance and see how much we have written. Wow, what a busy month.

Dominica is feeling pretty good today and so we are planning on heading out to Houston tomorrow afternoon. We leave Rochester at 4:30 and will arrive late in Texas. It is expected to be VERY hot while we are down there. In the 90’s all week. We are returning on Wedneday. I won’t have a high speed connection while I am down there but I will do my best to be writting updates diligently on my laptop and updating the site when I am able to. If I can get online with AOL (yes, I have AOL on the laptop but I am not the one paying for the service or the laptop) then I might be able to keep the updates current. I am going to be spending as little time outside as I can since it will be way to hot for me to handle. We are planning on checking out the Houston Zoo and the Aquarium. I am a big zoo lover. Nate and I managed to hit the Cincinatti Zoo about two years ago and had a really good time there. Strangely enough, a girl that we saw at the zoo (just a visitor like us) wound up being our bar tender when we went out on the town with Zach that evening. We thought that that was a pretty big coincidence.

Canadian FlagMiranda headed out today to travel back up to sunny Canada. She called a little bit ago for Loopy. I am assuming that that means that she has successfully arrived at Natalie’s house. She was planning on stopping there to break up the long drive back to North Bay.

Tim wanted to go to Friendlys tonight with Min and I which would have been twice today for us and we woudl have gone except that Min’s back is still bothering her and she can’t push it the day before flying. So, Tim and I went on our own and brought Min back some food from McDonalds. I think that Friendlys is really starting to love us.

I forgot to mention… Loopy filed his tax return this year using Turbo Tax and they completely screwed it up. First they charged him for doing State and Federal when he only wanted State since he had already done his Federal. Then they didn’t include all of his earnings because the company that he worked through was owned outside of New York. I bet one out of three people work for a company that is owned out of NY. Even big NY companies like Kodak are owned out of New Jersey just to save some money. My company is out of Delaware. Loopy works out of the Rochester office. So that really screwed him up.