Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

I just got a Kindle (e-book reader). Pretty cool! Nice screen (e-ink rocks), light weight, easy to use. But I’ve found the hardest thing is figuring out what books to buy for it! There’s a great temptation to run out and buy all my favorite books for it, but…I already have those books. Do I really need them in another format? Not at the moment. I think the books I’m most likely to buy for the Kindle are the sort of books I would borrow or get out of the library - Dan Brown sort of novels that are fun to read, but don’t really tempt me to re-read over and over. Hmm. Must think about whether I want to spend ~$10 for them now.

I hope a digital library is coming sometime soon. I would pay $1 or so to check out a book for two weeks. I already know Amazon can go in and delete whatever they want to off the Kindle (witness that issue a few months back where they’d sold a book they didn’t have the rights to, so they deleted it from everyone’s devices with a refund). Doesn’t seem a far stretch to checking things out.

So, all that being said…I’m still going to run out and buy some of my favorite books, just because it’s so cool! And there’s also a neat feature that I can email PDFs, HTMLs, Word documents, and things to Amazon and they’ll send them back in the right format to put on the Kindle. Baen Books has a bunch of free books in HTML…this ought to be fun.

~Michelle

It’s been a long time since we updated the blog. Sorry about that. As you will soon see, we have been busy lately. A lot of our free time has been spent on starting to build our new house and preparing our current one for its sale.

We have signed a contract with Meritage Homes, in the Centerpointe subdivision of League City, Texas.

For those who know where we currently are, we are basically moving to the East side of I-45, and north 1 exit. It’ll put us a little bit closer to work, and also closer to League City.

The plan we are building is called the Palestine. The house will be 2680 square feet, which is more than twice the size of our current house. It will have a 3 car garage (R2 and his tools get a garage spot, as does Michelle’s Camry and my Trans Am), and a study instead of a living room (in the front of the house). Here is the floorplan:

Here is a picture of the model of this plan. Note that we are not getting the option of the first and second floor front porch that this model shows, so it’s kinda hard to tell what it will look like. The brick will be red.

We really like the open kitchen/living room area. Here’s a few pictures of that area (from the model).

And last, but not least, here are a couple of shots of the lot. It’s on the road to a cul-de-sac, and on the interior of the neighborhood, which we think is ideal.

We’re looking forward to the new place. The moving and the selling of the old house? Eh…not looking forward to that as much. But there is no gain without some pain.

-Travis

It’s a bit warm here…and I can assure you our weather station is even worse at predicting rain than the meteorologists.

Wow, we haven’t posted in a while. We have all sorts of excuses to offer, ranging from me being increment lead for my group at work to the ease and ubiquity of Facebook. But who cares? Here’s the quick and dirty update:

1. Neighborhood pool opened down the block. Fun, but their system for getting pool tags to residents…could use some work.
2. Street hasn’t flooded lately.
3. Still making slow progress on getting the house ready to sell.
4. Still enjoying the new car.

Anyway, next shuttle should have launched yesterday – hope it launches this week! Houston is getting hot. All still normal…

~Michelle

The weekend before the Relay for Life event, we had the heaviest rainstorm I have ever seen in this house. Folks in the area were reporting 6 inches of rain in the 2-3 hours that it was raining. It was crazy!

Our house is fine, but we were worried towards the end. As you can see from the photos below, the backyard was 2/3 full of water. It was ankle deep at its deepest, and was probably 2-3 inches from coming under the back door. In the front of the house, the street had completely flooded (notice the Ford Ranger parked in front of our neighbor’s house). Michelle went out in the rainstorm to try to find the owner and get them to move it, but nobody was answering their doors.

Luckily, once the rain stopped, it drained fairly quickly. A couple of hours after it stopped we were able to make it out in the Suburban to grab some dinner.

See for yourself the rainwaters.