November 11, 2015: Octodad and a Nice Family Dinner Out

I got up and did some catching up this morning.  Dominica came down and made banana, peanut butter and chocolate smoothies.  She likes these thick, calorie heavy ones.  I prefer lighter, all fruit ones.

The city health department stopped by this morning.  This, of course, put Dominica into a panic as she is always sure that we are not supposed to let anyone into the house.  He was quite official, I assured her.  He was doing the treatment of the house plants for mosquitoes.  No fumigation this time.  The city really takes these mosquitoes seriously.  I am very impressed by how involved they are and the amount of energy and resources that they put into protecting everyone.

This afternoon I did an online webinar with Scale and Spiceworks again, like we did last week.  No disasters this time, though.

I bought some new video games for the girls today.  The big one was Octodad: Dadliest Catch.  It turns out that by total coincidence the girls had asked Dominica for that game on the iPads yesterday but it does not run on theirs because they are too old and it needs newer hardware.  So they were sad but no one had spoken to me about it at all.  So I bought the game for the PC completely on my own and surprised the girls with it.  Everyone just assumed that I had been told.  It was not until later that I learned that they even knew about the game.

I set the girls up with my laptop and they played Octodad together for easily an hour.  It is a hard game for them but they really enjoyed it.  Liesl likes getting to play with the gamepad and Luciana feels like she is really involved, sitting with Liesl while she plays.

It is so awesome that they are into video games.  They do so many interesting things. And they are constantly playing more and more games.

Dominica and I talked about the new Steam Machines that came out yesterday and decided that the new Zotac Steam Machine is better for us than the normal Zotac that we have been planning on getting since September when it was not available.  So we are going to attempt to get that ordered very soon so that it will be waiting for us in Texas when we are up there.

This evening I managed to talk Dominica into going out for a nice dinner.  We have not been out for a nice dinner as a family in a while so this was a very nice change.  It always takes a ton of work to convince Dominica that she wants to go out and then we have to get the kids ready and get everyone out of the door.  It is always a big production.

We tried going to the Hotel Plaza Colon which advertised on their website that El Bar there did tapas and it looked like that would be perfect for us.  We got there and got a table and they informed us that they had no feed whatsoever.  Um, not exactly tapas then, is it?  Considering they are listed as the best hotel in the country by TripAdvisor, it seems odd that they both have no restaurant and spend time advertising that they do.

So we left there and want to the Gran Francia Hotel just past the park on the south east side and ate at El Arcangel where Ryan and I had eaten when he was here.  The girls shared some pasta which they really enjoyed.  Dominica got a delicious meal of red snapper on bananas.  I went for the coconut shrimp.  Everything was quite good.  I got the goat cheese salad too.  We also got dessert – cheesecake.  Luciana ate nearly all of mine.  Liesl took one bite of mine and gagged, apparently she hates cheesecake.  She almost had to spit it out.

We walked home.  It was a nice evening, a little cooler than it has been.  It was so nice having a night out with the family.

We got the kids into their room and into bed on the early side.  Dominica and I watched some video game videos from bed.