The cold and rainy weather continued on today from yesterday. At no point did we drop to freezing but it was very close and very damp. Aching joints weather. We really appreciate the heated floors on the ground floor of the house. They are just magical.
Today is a holiday back in the States and for whatever reason Dominica decided to give Liesl the day off from school. So today was almost entirely a video game day for her. After a long time of asking for it, and after having played The Sims Unlimited on her Amazon Fire tablet since last night, this morning we set her up with The Sims 3 on our Steam laptop so that she could play the full thing. This took a while to set up but once it was ready it ran really well.
Liesl totally loves playing The Sims 3. She has no interest in the version on her tablet any more. She played for many hours, easily six hours on it. Sadly she spent two hours setting up her first characters and did so so slowly that she never got to a point where she could do an initial save and the game crashed and she had to start over. She was very sad at that point.
Since today was a holiday, the Grice kids were home from school and we managed to get them to install Minecraft Pocket Edition and try out playing it online with the new server. Everyone was able to get on and it worked great except none of us had any idea how things were supposed to work and no one was able to find each other in the huge game world so it did not do what we had expected it to do. We have to learn more about how Minecraft is supposed to work before we try that again. The technology is working great, it is the ability to play the game that we are struggling with. Having a server-based game world is new for everyone. Not one of our kids or their cousins had ever even attempted that before so this was quite new for them.
I did some work today but kept it a little lighter than a normal day. I mostly worked on the obvious follow up project to yesterday’s PocketMine Server. Today I built a full Minecraft Server for the regular Java edition of Minecraft. This was not a hard project at all, but I have never installed Minecraft before so it was a good, if short, learning experience. It is pretty surprising it was how easy it was to set up and how well it ran with minimal resources when a company that specifically tried to sell Minecraft server instances that I dealt with a year ago could not, even with their engineering team involved, get a single working instance up due to an inability to address resource bottlenecks.
Tonight we decided to go out to dinner at the Olive Wood around the corner, again. The food was so amazing on Friday night and while we were there the owner made a point of saying that his mother was going to make stuffed vegetables on Monday and we did not want to skip a night when we knew that the dinner was going to be vegetarian! It was super late by the time that we got out of the house, it was at least eight when we left! It was tough to want to go out because it was late and we really did not feel like leaving the house but we did not want to have them make food for us and us not be there either and did not want to pass up the chance for stuffed veggies. So we made ourselves do it.
It was a cold rain in the dark as we walked down the hill to main street (or whatever it is called.) The taverna was full but immediately people jumped up from tables to make room for us. Having kids has its advantages. We were the only ones eating, most everyone was just sitting around watching the football game.
Dinner was awesome again tonight. Green salad again and the same fried cheese and zucchini fritters. The girls begged for another omelet so the owner made one just for them. We got pom frete tonight which we did not get to try the other night. So good, just how my dad likes them. And then the stuffed vegetables were amazing. Best that I have ever had. We had a decanter of wine as well, with dinner.
After dinner, the same as we had done on Friday night, we had the traditional Turkish and southern Greek after dinner aperitif of raki.
After dinner we walked back home and it was almost time for the girls’ “getting ready for bed alarm.” So they watched a little YouTube on their Amazon Fires and were off to bed. I played maybe forty five minutes of Train Simulator 2016 and was off to bed myself.