Today is the first day of Carnival here in the Orthodox party of the world that uses the older Julian calendar system. It throws everyone off back home as everyone is used to the Catholic calendar where Carnival is already over.
Worked all day, lots of writing and posting. Early this evening, Liesl and I walked down to the corner store to do some quick shopping. She was excited to go for the walk with me.
We made it barely to the corner and the street (the little old alley that is) was filled with a dozen loud teenagers, all in full Halloween costumes (they even said Happy Halloween) who were clearly headed from one party to another. They stopped and talked to Liesl. She was quite shy, though.
Luciana has gotten into our Sega and Sonic All Stars Racing game on Steam and we did several races this morning. We have figured out how we get points and how we can use them to get additional courses and stuff. Both girls are enjoying that a lot. We have so few local co-op games, finding a new one like this is a really big deal.
The costumes were far more like those from my childhood and nothing like what you would see in America these days. The costumes were what I would call traditional and most had full face masks.
Dinner today was giant, chocolate filled croissants. They are a Greek thing. They sell them absolutely everywhere. Every grocery store, every gas station, ever stand. It’s like the standard snack food. They come filled with chocolate, hazlenut creme or even a strawberry cheese blend. They are always individually packaged and unlike in places like Spain or France they are not normally made locally but are made up on the mainland and sealed. A surprising thing to be so standard, and from so many vendors, in Greece. But boy are they cheap and delicious. You can get a normal one for a Euro and this enormous ones for about a Euro sixty.
Dominica and I each had one of these and called it dinner. The lady who runs the corner store told me that Greeks put them into the oven and warm them up before eating them. So I heated them up tonight and they were even better than usual.
Dominica and I decided to spent the evening playing some video games. The girls both decided that they wanted to just hang out on their own without us, so this worked out easily. Liesl was watching videos and Luciana playing Minecraft most of the evening.
Dominica and I put in Bookwork Adventures, which is a cheesy but fun word puzzle game, the second in its series, and ended up playing for about four hours! We managed to complete the entire first “book” of the game which is the one that takes place in classic Greece. It made for a nice “evening.” It made the time pass really quickly and without realizing it we were up until four thirty in the morning!!
While Dominica and I were playing games, maybe around midnight, I heard a lot of wind rumbling the house. I ran and looked out back and for the first time in two weeks at least, we had a significant amount of rain. Sadly, the windows in the car were down, so Liesl and I threw on shoes and coats and ran down to the centre of town to roll up the windows on the car. It turned out to be pretty dry, but we were not. We were quite wet by the time that we got back to the house.
On the way back up to the house, from my Facebook update… Liesl and I got caught out in the rain. It was a cool, light rain. We were down making sure that car windows were closed. On the way back in a dark, narrow allow between old stone houses, while looking at the dark ground…. we were both completely blinded like never before as a singular lightning strike hit so close that even with the reflected light making to the ground between the buildings and bounces back at us, both of us has full optical nerve saturation and saw nothing but white. It’s been ten minutes and my eyes are still sore. Dominica was in the house and could not believe how loud it was. We must have been within 100m of the strike. I’ve never in my life had lighting take my vision completely out like that.