January 11, 2019: More Nancy Drew

Friday. Had to be up this morning as I had an interview for a VP of Operations position in Plano. I figured that it was not going to amount to anything, but they had reached out to me yesterday and asked me to look at the position as it was potentially such a good fit. The interview lasted all of two minutes before they admitted that I was way over this position and it made no sense to pitch something this junior to me. So a bit of a waste of time. Even worse as I am not job hunting in any way and had little chance of having considered the position even if it had been a realistic fit.

Work was thankfully slow again much of the day today. I had to work a few hours this morning pretty steadily, but by early afternoon things got slow and I had a bit of a breather until around five when I had to work steadily until after seven. So still a decently busy day.

Paul went out to shoot some pool this evening. Kat came over while I was still on the phone working and she and Dominica went out to go to the Spa Castle nearby for a spa evening together. Paul likes going to spas as well, but it is men and women separate there only, so he didn’t want to go and be all by himself. So I was left to hang out with the kids for another night of video gaming.

I made dinner for the girls. First I made homemade pizzas. While I was cooking, Liesl and I watched Family Matters on Hulu and Luciana played a little bit of Slime Rancher. Then I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and some pasta rings for Liesl.

Tonight is another night of Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull. We took over the living room and played for several hours. Liesl controlled as usual, but needed me to handle a few tasks with a mouse and so we discovered how well we can set up having a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse hooked up in addition to the Steam controller. That works incredibly well and having us dual controlling the game really made things so much easier. I was able to set up at the bar with my Chromebook and wireless mouse to the video game system and work on SGL updates, keep up to date on ML and work, while being able to follow along with a Nancy Drew walk through and assist Liesl as needed.

We flew through the game tonight. I do not think that we are even halfway through the game, yet. There is so much to do. I love that these games are so long and involved. It really gives us a chance to get deep into the story and excited about what is happening and to engage with the characters. The length is really good for the girls. They get involved and interested, but don’t get bored or burned out.

Every time that we play these games the girls learn something new. For example, tonight’s gaming taught the girls about what a “card catalogue” is. Since they are so young, the idea of libraries having card catalogues is so foreign to them. It is weird to imagine that they live in a world where such a thing does not exist. As a child, learning about and using card catalogues was a huge part of our childhoods.

Card catalogues are a good example of just how pointless so much of our education was as children. Even if computers had not arisen and taken the place of the old fashioned card catalogue, it was not the kind of thing that we really needed to “study”. Nor was the Dewey Decimal System, another quirk of our era that has no point in my adult life. Kind of like writing in cursive. Even by the time that I was in high school, all of these things had devolved to being vestiges of another era. And what adult, even in the 1950s, found knowing the Dewey Decimal system or library catalogues useful? Those who needed them could learn them in minutes on the rare occasion of their being needed. Even dictionaries and encyclopedias or thesauruses: all things that haven’t been useful since I left school. It was nearly all filler.

One thing that we’ve not liked about this particular game is that it is “too full” of puzzles. Pointless, silly puzzles that really are not a part of the story and do not really make any sense. They get a bit frustrating when they are like this. Luckily we are able to just use a walkthrough and skip many of the puzzles that we don’t like. If we could not do that, we would never get through some of these games.

Paul got home about ten thirty, and went to bed around eleven.

I did a bit more SGL work tonight. More catch up in June. And am all up to date still for January, which is making me super happy. I went back to the post from the weekend and added some additional pictures of the girls from the Harry Potter Yule Ball Party. The City of Carrollton had had professional photographers at the event and took several pictures of the girls at the party. Dominica had checked out the city’s Facebook page today and found six of their pictures up on it. So I put them into the post from that day. Some are quite cute.

Dominica and Kat got back at a quarter past midnight. They had an awesome time at the spa. A fun Friday night outing.

The girls wrapped up their game at twenty till midnight. Then Dominica and Kat took over the living room to have a slumber party girls’ night of movies. I got the girls heading off to get ready for bed.

First movie for Dominica and Kat was Dirty Dancing of course.