August 30, 2018: Portal Knights

I slept for a solid nine hours last night!  Guess I needed that.  This morning was not as bad as most have been this week.  But it was still a jump out of bed and work like crazy all day long kind of morning.  We had thirteen network outages for one client today, for example.  That’s rather a lot and keeps us way too busy dealing with stupid things rather than getting to actually be productive.  I am really happy that this is a semi-holiday weekend as I could really use the time to do some catching up this week.

Today, Steam had Portal Knights on sale.  It’s been on the wish list, but was not a game that I had thought very much about.  But since it was on sale at a pretty good reduction today, I took a peak at it and boy am I glad that I did.  Taking a closer look, this game seems like the perfect mix of things for the girls.  It has both local and network multiplayer options, which is exactly what they need, and it seems to take the best of Minecraft, which they love, and adds in adventure and Action RPG elements to make it a really involved game, plus the graphics are vastly superior to Minecraft.  It is also a fraction of the price and not made by an evil company like Minecraft, is, which really tries to hurt its customers at every turn.  Portal Knights looks amazing, so I splurged and spent the $8 to get it for them on sale.

I worked until about seven.  Then for dinner tonight it was tuna steaks with a fresh lime, ginger, garlic, and olive oil reduction that was excellent; boiled potatoes; and green beans.  It’s been about four days since I realized that Dominica must be sensitive to the carrot family as well as the onion family that we already knew, and since that time, with careful avoidance of carrots, her incredible digestive issues of the past few years have remained completely at bay.  This is a very good sign, a huge breakthrough.  We were talking to doctors about things like cat scans and sonograms and possibly having to go to Mexico for surgery.  And suddenly, with a little dietary control, there is at least a possibility that everything is okay!  It’s way too early to celebrate, but she is feeling the best that she has since we were in Africa, so this is pretty major.

The girls started playing their new Portal Knights game around dinner time and they were both so excited.  That they can play together, on the same screen, is a really big deal for them.  They like being together and have so few video games that allow for that.  They kept running in to tell me how great the game was.  Ciana told me that she was having the most fun evening ever (although she says things like this awesome.)  Still, it is a good sign.

The game is very involved and the girls were learning it at an incredible pace.  There is so much to do in it.  They are hoping that their cousins will get it, too, so that they can play online with each other, too.

Dominica and Paul went out to the Fox and Hound for some darts and pool, their usual.  It’s so nice that I don’t have to do that stuff, so not my thing.  Then they got Sonic on the way home, which is good so that I didn’t have to really see the ice cream.  I’ve avoided it for so long, now.

Since the kids were so tied up with their new video game, that meant that I neither got to hang out with them, nor that I got to play my own games, so I took the chance to do some lower priority work that needed to be done and did many hours of website maintenance work.  It was good, as it really needed to be done.  And I was able to do SGL updates while I did it, for a change.

When I put them to bed, Luciana said that this was her favourite game of all time, and she plans to spend all of her free time tomorrow after school playing it, too.

I ended up staying up till after three in the morning.  But I got a solid seven hours of web update work done, which was important.  One fewer thing to worry about.  I did loads of documentation and got a server that was heavily overburdened fixed and ready for several new workloads which are due to be moved to it very soon.  There is always so much work to do.  It is never ending.