January 21, 2026: Ice Cream Success at Home

Mostly just a work day. More work on getting my storage project working. Always the first stage goes so far then fixing the little problems takes forever. Project name is currently Freehold, but I think it needs to be like Freehold Cloud or Freehold Storage.

As always, ended up being a decently busy day, but not terribly. But due to lots of problems with my tooling today, it was not very productive.

I continue to be really happy with my as-of-yet unnamed Chat application. We’ve had it in production for an entire week now and it is really getting smooth. Having it installed on mobile is making all of the difference, we really are back to parity with RocketChat which we were generally happy with previously. That’s very excited to have one of my software platforms get put into production so quickly and to be working so well.

This afternoon after some toxic troll got a little too much community sympathy I decided that my time spent on the Expat forum on WhatsApp just wasn’t good for my mental health and while I definitely feel that a lot of people appreciate my time on there, the amount of time and work that it takes to keep the group moderated and to deal with the inevitable, and often paid, trolls who are sent to make it unpleasant just isn’t worth it. I hate that I can’t be there to assist people, but they can post on my YouTube channel and there are other people to help them. It’s unfortunate that a tiny few had to ruin it for everyone, but the other option is heavy moderation and that would make me feel bad and people to be upset with me. So the only good answer was to recuse myself. And much like leaving Facebook and Twitter, it’s a weight lifted.

Tonight Luciana and I finished making the peanut butter ice cream and jelly custard that we prepped last night. This is definitely our best success yet. We’ve made ice cream before but we weren’t too impressed. And we’ve gotten making frozen yoghurt (froyo) down pretty well and make that regularly. But the peanut butter ice cream was very good, better than any ice cream we’ve managed to buy in the country thus far. And the jelly custard was, acceptable but weird. Jelly is just a bizarre concept for ice cream and it didn’t work that well. When mixed with the peanut butter, it was okay. But I feel that the custard aspect of it was very good. The texture was excellent. I want to try that with vanilla.

The girls played Hades (Liesl) and Animal Crossing (Luciana) while I did some work late night on Freehold before finally going to bed around one in the morning.

January 19, 2026: Improved a Little

I slept a good, solid fourteen hours last night. It wasn’t good sleep, but it was long. Me and my pile of dogs. They are very good nurses, always there when you don’t feel well. I wasn’t 100% when I finally got out of bed, but I was much improved.

Unfortunately Luciana got to be the one that was sick today. She thinks that it came from eating too much pizza yesterday because she was so excited about having made her own pizza that she had five pieces and focaccia pizza is quite big.

It was a very busy day for me today. Since I got sick while working yesterday I was extra backed up on work today. Plus I slept through all of the morning. So today was focused on trying to get caught up on work since I lost so much time yesterday and this morning.

I did get to eat some more of Luciana’s pizza from yesterday today.

This evening the girls and I got a little time to watch The Expanse and they are loving it. We are well into the second season now.

January 18, 2026: Terrible Migraine

Luciana and I have had a plan all week to make home made pizza together today, we are getting good at picking out ideas and waiting the whole week to execute on Sundays. She actually looks forward to us not have a cook in the house so that we can have the kitchen and do a project together.

My morning started with a power outage at the office in Belize City, so I had to hop out of bed to deal with that a little early in the morning.

Most of my day was spent in my office working away on the new chat application that we are building this week. I’m feeling so good about this one, it is amazing that we’ve gotten so far, so fast.

In the early afternoon Luciana and I spent an hour or so together in the kitchen prepping our dough for our pizza plans tonight. We are making focaccia pizza

All day I was feeling a little under the weather. This morning it was a little cough and phlegm. But in the evening, probably around five, I was in a meeting and it turned into a serious migraine (there was never a fever so it seems that that was all that it was) and it was so bad by six that I couldn’t continue the meeting and was getting nauseous from the pain. So I had to jump out of the meeting, took the dogs, cranked the air conditioning and went to bed.

I slept for two hours before Luciana woke me up to have some of the pizza. It turned out really well. I had two pieces and then returned right to bed. Luciana ate five pieces, which will be a bit much for her by tomorrow.

I slept the rest of the night in quite a bit of pain. We were unable to find any Ibuprofen around the house so I had to endure without any medication.

January 18, 2022: House Shopping in Leon

We have decided that we really need a house in Leon. We are there so often and being at the beach so much is wearing on us. Not because it is the beach, but because it is our business and living at your own business, especially one that runs twenty four hours a day is exhausting. Living with your staff always there popping in to talk to you, always in your business, no lock on the door, even guests just randomly popping their heads in thinking your bedroom is the bathroom, and the constant music thudding from teh bar next door: it wears you down over time.

And we like being able to go out in Leon. Going from the beach is expensive and tiring. So we have started to look at having a place in Leon to use part of the time.