DuoLingo Streak: 14 Days
Saturday. I woke up at nine thirty this morning. Had a great night of sleep. The kids both slept in our room last night; Liesl in our bed and Luciana on the new IKEA couch at the foot of the bed. She was very excited to get to be the first one to sleep there and looked like she was very comfortable. It had to be a world better than sleeping on our ancient, broken Target furniture that has been what was there until this week.
I did some SGL journaling this morning. Then went out to mow before it got too hot. While mowing, I believe that I noticed that new neighbours have moved in next door to the west. We never got a chance to meet the old neighbours, although I saw them once during a power outage, but only for a second and only from a distance when the neighbour beyond them had waved to them and told me who they were. I have not seen their cars recently, but there is a new, white, Dodge minivan that has been next door recently and what appears to be a new family there. It is a rental property, so this is not surprising.
Big SodiumSuite news today is that the very first bit of Mac OS support is now available. It’s a manual install at the moment, but a simple, working manual install that we will likely have worked out very soon. This is huge as that was the last, major operating system hurdle to SS monitoring adoption.
I spent some time playing XCOM with Liesl. Back to the game that I am playing, rather than the one that she has been playing. We have been stuck on a super hard alien abduction encounter in Chicago that we have been trying to get through for at least a month, easily more. Any time that we try it, our forces have gotten killed. Today, we were able to get through it in just two tries!
I had a bagel with peanut butter for breakfast. I discovered that Dominica accidentally bought crunchy peanut butter instead of creamy. So I have a jar to myself now. I don’t prefer crunchy but like it about the same. Liesl will not eat crunchy; she does not like the texture.
Luciana asked to go to the splash park today. It is nearing the end of summer and the park is going to close in a few weeks for the season. We figured that it made sense to go today, especially as it was a pretty warm day. It was nice when I mowed this morning, but was ninety five by the time that Luciana requested the trip.
We stayed at the splash park until it was time for them to close. We did not get there until decently late, maybe around five. But were there a couple of hours and did not leave until after seven. The girls had a great time and requested that we return tomorrow. The park was quite full. Being the end of summer, a weekend and a really warm one added up to the park being extra popular.
We made the unusual decision that we would go to IKEA for dinner tonight. We were just in the mood for their food and the girls just love going to IKEA in general. So we figured that it made sense.
IKEA is up in Frisco, which is not that far of a drive, just a few miles. We got there at seven thirty and did dinner first. Dominica had the salmon dinner, the girls both had pasta, and I had the salmon wrap which turned out to be fantastic.
We did a little shopping, but mostly just let the girls look around as they just love the whole idea of furniture shopping and how there are little apartments built into the store. They had a grand time, again, even with it being less than a week since the last time that they were here.
We were at IKEA until they closed, of course. We bought two throw pillows and some play fruit for the girls to go with their other play food.
We got home and Luciana spent about forty five minutes playing Slime Rancher, and Liesl came in with Dominica and me to watch two episodes of Cheers before we all climbed into bed and I spent most of the evening reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
We read from about ten until around one in the morning. We have perhaps eighty pages, out of two hundred and twenty one, left to go. I am trying to read quickly enough to be able to get to the end of the first book in the series before I leave for Arizona on Monday evening. It is a lot to read by then, but I think that we can just make it if we read again tomorrow like we did today.
I am really enjoying these long, family reading together times. The girls love to snuggle while I read and they get really into the stories. And I have not read this book in so long, I forgot how good it is. The movies of the first two books were so awful and so truncated that there is so much of the subtle parts that I have forgotten about. Luciana is anxious to watch the movies now, but we are going to make sure that we finish the book, first.