Dominica is still sick with horrible heartburn this morning. She went up to League City this morning on her own and spent the morning and afternoon there working on Christmas preparations again, mostly baking and some shopping. I stayed home with Liesl and Luciana. Luciana got up early and hung out on the sofa playing video games like Lego Worlds and Minecraft. Liesl slept in until around ten.
Once Liesl was up, they opened their Advent calendar to get their latest Playmobile toy and then Liesl set about doing her schoolwork for the day. No vacation for her. At least not an organized vacation. We try to get her schoolwork in whenever we can. Less work at once but more steady is better for learning anyway. We just did reading stuff this morning and it was just her and me. I worked with her on study habits and we managed to make her word learning go so much faster. We were able to do in a few minutes what often takes her an hour or more. I am hoping that we can turn this into a trend and speed this process up a lot more. She and her mother butt heads so dramatically over this kind of stuff.
It is hard to believe that we are only here for another nine days in Texas. Time is running out quickly. We have to start our “no more food” policy at the condo. It is time to empty out the fridge rather than to fill it. Just about time to start panicking about being ready to go. Except we have a major holiday between now and when we leave. Eek.
I did some cleaning this morning. The condo is a bit of a mess after having had all of the kids here. Dominica said that keeping the kids really made a huge difference and was extremely helpful. Good thing, as I am exhausted.
Dominica and her dad came down in the middle of the afternoon and picked up the girls. Dominica and the girls are going to stay up in League City tonight and I will see them tomorrow evening when I go up to join everyone for dinner. This way they get a lot more time with their cousins and grandparents and I get time to actually get some things done and some down time as it is a bit overwhelming to have people around non-stop and my weekend was spent watching all of the kids so my normal time to catch up disappeared on me this week.
I did a bit of getting video games tested and working today. I have started a labeling system in Steam that denotes each game as “Working” or “Not Working” to make filtering easier. This way we can view all of our games that we can actually play by simply going to the “Working” list and I can find all of the ones that need me to work on them to get them running by going to the “Not Working” list. Those that I deem unable to get working will eventually get deleted but most just will require some manual intervention, patching, modification or tender loving care of some sort. But I need a method for tracking them. So right now I am going game by game and testing them out to see what runs correctly. That way when other people want to use the Steam Library they just have to filter by Working and they are good to go with whatever shows up.
For dinner this evening I went for a walk down to Subway on 61st next to the CVS just before the bridge over the bayou. It was not a bad walk at all. Very easy to do. I got a tuna salad sub and walked back to the condo to eat it. I put on Mamma Mia which I had been watching last week but had been unable to finish. The ending always makes me cry, it is very emotional the scene where the mother is getting her daughter ready for the wedding and is singing about wanting to freeze the memories and seeing her little girl go.
I enjoyed having a quite evening to myself. I need that regularly and now that we travel so much I rarely have a change to get it. It can be exhausting never getting a chance for quite and time to center oneself.
Work is going to be super slow this week. There is almost no one around both online in the communities as well as in offices. So hoping to have a chance to do some catch up on writing and just get my brain ready for more stuff.
I discovered a guy on YouTube that takes video games and edits them into feature-length movies which sounds awesome. I tracked him down and found his series on the Uncharted series from the Playstation 3. I own all three of those games and nearly beat the first one but do not have access to a PS3 any longer and they were the last games, or only games, that were exclusive to that platform that I had any interest in so I am quite excited to be able to sit down and watch the trilogy as a movie and seeing it all edited together into a movie rather than a play-through is a really interesting idea. So I started watching the first one tonight and it is well done and really does feel like you are just watching a movie.
I stayed up a bit too late tonight. It was about one when I got off to bed. I left the windows and door open tonight, the weather is great and there is no one here but me so no worries about moths or whatever, although I did not see any at all anyway. Without the girls here the lights are not on so things are not attracted to come into the condo. It is a bit humid, we are still in the fog from this morning, but nice and cool. I miss the continuous fresh air that we had in Spain and Nicaragua. I am hopeful that we will be living in the fresh air all of the time once we are in Crete.