Wednesday. It’s been one week since our kitten was killed. The girls are still very noticeably sad. But there is improvement. Having the other two kittens in the house all of the time helps. They know that they are safe, and they have a distraction, but also a reminder.
The dad cat that we call Cruller is slowly getting braver. He comes closer and closer and meows at us all of the time. Fritter, the very pregnant mother, is still here daily for her supply of kibble. She remains very affectionate. She’s a very good cat.
Tomorrow we have to spend the day in Managua getting the girls’ passports renewed. It’s our first time going to the embassy. We had to do lots of paperwork today to make sure that we were ready and I spoke with the embassy on the phone: they call to check that we’ve done all of our paperwork ahead of time.
I recorded several videos today getting ready for the time away. No live stream tomorrow as we will be traveling all day.
I ended up with the time to do a live stream tonight so just did one. We talked a bit about the forum. I’m very excited about that. I didn’t get a chance to talk about it a week ago, it went live just a few hours before the Chocolate Milk incident happened. But I built the open source forum package A Parliament of Owls last week and we’ve been using it for an Expats of Nicaragua forum group that replaced our WhatsApp group that we’ve had most of the last year. So far, I like it so much better. It’s so much more chill. People can’t just hop on and spam and cause problems with the community the way that they could before.
We used it to replace MangoLassi / Republic of IT as well. Those have been running on NodeBB since March, 2014 and it has served us well, but recently its MongoDB database has become untenable and the application has gotten so slow and it needs a lot of maintenance. It seemed problematic to try to keep maintaining, so we moved that entire platform with 800,000 posts, millions of users per month, hundreds of millions of object requests and twelve years of activity over to APOO and so far, it is working great. It’s got better spam control, everything renders so much faster and while there are fewer features, things are far better tuned for our real world needs. The site is busy again and fun to use.
We’ve got about fifty people on the new Expats forum already which is a lot considering it is so new. The old ML site we eliminated as many accounts as we could and have about 1,550 remaining. It’s hard to believe that MangoCon was ten years ago, too!