November 22, 2014: Liesl Starts Programming!

I was up at eight thirty.  Dominica got up pretty early and cleaned for a few hours.  The house looks much better.  I did some work this morning then cleaned and put in an hour or so playing Space Quest V with the girls.  They were very excited to get to do that.  I would estimate that we are now very close to halfway through that game.  The girls still love it.

Today is a huge day in the Miller house, today we decided that Liesl could try programming for the first time.  I spent some time researching Logo options for Linux and decided to just start with our old, trusty KTurtle option from the KDE project.  So in the mid-afternoon I sat Liesl down and explained what programming was to her, showed her how Logo worked and taught her a few basics so that she could get started making her own first program.  She loved it.  We probably spent two hours working on that today.  Five years old and already programming.  She has me beat by four years.

Dominica is completely addicted to Tropico 4 and played most of the day.  She camped out in the living room and is playing it on her new laptop which is way more powerful than my desktop upstairs so she is able to play a lot of games that we have that my current computer just cannot handle playing.

Overall it was a pretty quiet day.  I did a ton of work on the new XenServer instances that I have now and have FreeBSD, Dragonfly BSD, Linux Mint, CoreOS, SmartOS and more running.  I did a lot of work last night and this morning getting my remote Linux Mint desktop working which is great.  I’m testing on the new NX replacement called X2Go which is really cool and does a great job over low bandwidth.  Now I have regular access to a Linux desktop without needing to run a VM on my desktop at home.

We watched a little bit of How I Met Your Mother and caught up on the latest episodes of The Mindy Project and The New Girl but only just enough while we were eating dinner.  I spent pretty much the entire day working on the lab and Dominica spent most of it video gaming and cleaning.  The girls spent most of the day camped out in the bedroom with me.  They set up some chairs (soft ones) on the bed and floor and used them to make a makeshift slide so that they could slide from high in the room down to the floor.  They are pretty crazy.

We are trying to figure out our travel plans for this week.  We have no idea what we are going to be doing.  There is some possibility that I will be working early in the week, but not much.  There is a much higher possibility that I will be working on Friday.  At this point we really have no idea. We are going up to dad’s for Thanksgiving and Liesl’s birthday party which are both on Thursday.  We think that we are going up on Wednesday but my possible work schedule will determine if we are traveling together or if the girls are going up separately or what days we can travel and who, if anyone, is coming back on Friday.  The girls are planning on going to Frankfort for the weekend after Thanksgiving.  I might be working all weekend or I might be free.  We just don’t know.

Two months of living life in a “we just have no idea how to plan because we have no idea what is going on” is really wearing us down.  It has been so long since we were able to do any type of life planning at all.  It is just horrible.