February 24, 2017: Day Four with the Kids

Friday.  I’ve been sleeping a bit more this week.  Having the girls sleep downstairs with me always makes me fall asleep faster and sleep longer.  So it was nearly eleven when I got up this morning.

The Internet came back on sometime during the night.  It was down for two or three hours when I last checked during the night.  No idea when it returned.

This morning I am finally caught up on SGL updates.  I would have been caught up last night, but with the Internet down I could not post the last several that I had completed.

Another bright and sunny day.  This whole week is set to be very warm.

For the first time since we’ve been in Noto we managed to make it to the fruit truck that comes by every morning.  We are a little used to this from life in Nicaragua and love having food come right to the door every day.  The fruit truck guy was really nice and we bought bananas, yellow apples, red apples, kiwi fruit, oranges at Luciana’s request and he said that on Monday we would have strawberries, too.  Seven Euros for a lot of fruit.  Both girls came out with me and thought that it was great fun picking out their food.

I worked on getting more games working for the girls on Steam today.  Finally after a really long time we have Oozi working, which Liesl has been waiting to play again for well over a year.  It is a great platformer and one of her favourites.  Garrett started playing it too and their accounts connect online to show each other their mutual progress in the game as a sort of “ghost” character.  It is really neat.

Luciana got the game “My Town: Hotel” on the Kindle Fire this morning.  She is enjoying that a lot.

Lots of Internet problems today.  The network just kept going up and down which makes it really hard to be generally productive, even as a writer.

The girls opted to spend a lot of the day alone downstairs.  They both have their long periods of just wanting to be on their own.  The spend a lot of time just playing with toys like their Shopkins and Twosies in the living room where they often have them set up on a blanket in the middle of the room.  They are their most popular type of toy for most of the past year.  Shopkins especially have been super popular as both of them revel in their imagination games.

Around five Luciana came up and played a Lego video game for a while.  Then later on Liesl came up and played Psychonauts which she has been anxious to play since we were in Houston at Christmas and she had a chance to play it with Garrett. She loves this game.  It is from the same studio that made Broken Age, one of her other favourite games.

The girls video gamed in the office until pretty late.  Then I made fish sticks for dinner by request and we went down stairs and watched the atrocious movie Spy Kids 3 which was a 2003 gimmick movie for the early release of 3D in theatres. It was like a Tron trainwreck of special effects.  It was loaded with huge cameo appearances, which was interesting, but the movie itself was terrible and clearly was just phoned in by the writers and the main actor.  How so many huge names were willing to be involved I have no idea.  So awful.

Then we finished watching Journey to the Center of the Earth which is a pretty decent movie and was perfect as it triggered no end of questions about how compasses work and how volcanoes work and learning about Mt. Etna, which is our local volcano here on the island.  We pulled out a compass and played with it, too.  And Liesl is excited to find a magnet and try building our own compass, too, as a project.

After the movies we watched a few YouTube videos about Mt. Etna and this week’s FailArmy episode and were off to bed.  We read two chapters in our Nancy Drew book, Luciana fell asleep again right as we were finishing the second chapter, but if we only read one she complains that it is too short.  I’ve read about the differences between the 1930 original book and the 1959 revision that we are reading.  It is very interesting how the social pressures of the time changed and how the Nancy Drew we know today is quite different than the original character.  Interestingly, the 1930 version will enter in the US public domain in just eight years.  The video game, which we have not played yet, that is named after and loosely based on this book is set in 1930 like the original book, but unlike the version that we are reading which is very much in the late 1950s.