It is Monday after a nice, relaxing weekend at home in which we did effectively nothing. The theory is that we are going to be heading down to Costa Rica at some point this week but we do not know what the plan is yet. Paul and Karen are supposed to be arriving today but we did not hear any news all day so we do not know what the status is at this point. We are just hanging loose ready to head down there whenever we get the chance.
This morning I tried to help Dominica with her laptop. That darn Lenovo just never works no matter what we try to do with it. We always have issues with drivers, weird hardware or something. Now it will not allow games to go into full screen mode and she has a lot of games that I have gotten for her from Steam and GOG that she wants to try playing but she is not able to because they show up so small that she can not even see them most of the time. I’ve gotten her a collection of hidden object games that I think that she will really like but she has not had a chance to try out at all.
The “new” thing that has arisen in the world of casual gaming and hidden object games is that they are now commonly making them more in the vein of traditional adventure games with voice acting, great graphics and a strong plot or story telling but having hidden objects as the puzzles rather than dialogue (a la Back to the Future) or inventory (a la Ankh) or puzzles (a la Myst.) Dominica has never gotten to play one of these new styles and the hidden object genre is very heavily focused on the female audience and I am pretty sure that she will really enjoy many of these games and very often they are extremely low cost as well. Law & Order Legacies that we are working on playing through is actually a mix of dialogue and hidden object challenges which she did not notice until I had pointed it out.
After the girls were done with school we all walked uptown to go grocery shopping as a family. We do not do this very often because it is such a production to get everyone ready and walk all of the way up there so that everyone is hot and then we shop and have to get the girls back home while carrying all of those groceries. It is actually easier when I do it all on my own and have to carry everything back alone, but it is nice to get to have everyone go up there too. It is a bit fun and the girls love to grocery shop. It is amazing to me that Dominica used to ever be able to grocery shop without me – she does not use lists and forgets almost every item on them. I’ve been the primary grocery getter for the family this year, at least since March, so I have my systems now. Before Spain it was always Dominica getting the groceries, but I can not figure out how she was doing it from how she does it now. It is a bit funny that I have become the family grocery shopper at this point. I do at least eight perfect of it.
This evening was an early family game night, starting before seven! Tonight it was Liesl taking the controls as we played Episode Four of Back to the Future: The Game. We did not complete the fourth episode in the series but we did make some serious headway on it and there were plenty of challenging bits for Liesl to tackle and she did an amazing job. This is a game that she is able to play nearly as well as we can for the most part. She is such a good gamer and so good at game navigation. We broadcast the game on Steam, which I have set up to do automatically, but I have no idea if anyone watched. I did not get any feedback tonight. Luciana snuggled and watched the game for a while but requested to be taken to bed and tucked in long before we were done playing.