November 27, 2017: Happy Birthday Liesl!

Our baby turns nine years old today!  How time flies.  She is getting so big, so fast.

I was the first one up this morning.  Luciana slept with us last night because Liesl wanted to sleep alone in the room next to us.  Luciana has been sleeping in our bed all week.

For her birthday, Liesl got Undertale which she has been wanting for a long time.  We are celebrating her birthday tomorrow, but she got this today so that she would have something on her actual birthday.  So far, she loves it.  She is set up in the living room and able to hang out with everyone.

We took an outing this afternoon to go check out the Oculus Rift to see if the kids can use it and if they would like it for Christmas as everyone has been asking for it.  Oculus themselves advertise that the Microsoft Store here in the area is the one and only place that you can check out the Rift, they list it as a demo location.  So we drove to the mall and went to the Microsoft Store.

So it turns out that Microsoft does not honour the agreement with Oculus to allow people to demo the Rift system.  They sell it, but they will not allow anyone to see it.  They used to, but they now have a deal with HP to show off some awful laptops instead – as if people need to demo a laptop to know how a laptop works.  Basically, MS has no faith in the Oculus Rift and wants nothing to do with it, to the point of being willing to make people extremely upset with Microsoft in order to not promote it.  The people who worked at the Microsoft Store were totally unhelpful and even said that even back when they did allow people to demo it, as advertised online, that they didn’t allow children to test it, but apparently don’t put that information online so that they can lure more people into their stores.

Microsoft went ridiculously out of their way today to ensure that we were that much more disgusted with how little regard MS has for their customers and how much they laugh at people stupid enough to buy products from them.  I will certainly never make the mistake of thinking the Microsoft Store might be useful ever again.  What a joke.  Both Microsoft and Oculus lost some big sales today.  We won’t really be looking seriously at the Oculus Rift after this.  The HTC Vive seems a lot more logical, now.

So that was hours wasted and everyone was pretty annoyed by the whole experience.  Unbelievable the lengths a company will go to ensure we don’t do business with them.  They had the systems there, but wanted to throw away the sale rather than just be nice people.

 

November 26, 2017: Liesl’s Last Day of Being Eight

The last day of our Liesl being eight years old!

At nine this evening, when most everyone had gone to bed, Liesl came down and climbed onto the couch with me and said that she wanted to spend the last three hours of being eight to just snuggle with her dad and play Skyrim together.  She is so sweet.

We played for a few hours, then at eleven thirty we got into bed and I read chapters three and four of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  At midnight, I had been watching my phone to know the time, I added in that the characters in the book told Liesl “Happy Birthday!”.  Liesl thought this was fun and Luciana thought that it was so great that tomorrow she will tell Madeline how much she enjoyed that and how special it was and that she expects something similar for her birthday now.

November 24, 2017: Still Waiting on News

Friday. In Houston still for Thanksgiving and Liesl’s birthday.

Really no news here.  I spent the day working, as usual.  There has been no news from the office, it has been radio silence for weeks.  For a company that was ridiculously concerned with trying to get things done on a project by the end of the year, they sure stopped working on the very first day!  I keep getting told that I am “on deck” to head to Qatar any day and that I need to just be ready.  But it is weeks without so much as a peep from them.  This is getting incredibly frustrating.

The kids all play Skyrim any moment that they get.  Something about them all being together, the littles that is, makes them all want to play Skyrim.  And, of course, our Steam laptop is the only one with a copy, so there is not enough to even begin to go around.

November 23, 2017: Thanksgiving

Thursday. Happy Thanksgiving!

Lots of cooking today, of course.  Hung out in the kitchen this morning with Dominica while she was making dinner.

Dominica Making Deviled Eggs

The kids played Skyrim all day.  That is their thing these days.  Liesl, Luciana, and Garrett are all really into it.  Clara will play it, but doesn’t really get it and doesn’t find it very interesting, but plays it because all of the others do.

Big family dinner at the Grices’ new home.  First really big event here.  They’ve barely had time to move in before this one.