Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a really busy work day for me. I got into the office, on foot as usual, early and worked heavily all day.  So much, in fact, that I had forgotten to eat before leaving the house this morning and did not eat all day in the office.

We had an AMA (Ask Me Anything) being run from the office today that I participated in and that took me late into the night.  So no dinner for me either.  Oh well, these things happen.

I got home and the girls wanted me to play Minecraft.  So I played with them before going to bed.

My baby girl Luciana turns six years old today!  She is growing up so quickly.  And she has already lived all over the world and she is still so little.

We made a run to the grocery store to get a birthday cake for Luciana.  Only Liesl and I went, while Luciana was still asleep.  We will surprise her with the cake later today.  We have a busy day planned, already.

In the office today for a few hours.  Then Anton, Max, and I went to Good Wine, the amazing grocery store that I mentioned a few weeks ago, to get drinks.  The bar had a waiting list so long that we decided to eat lunch in another restaurant that is also located inside of the grocery store.

Our lunch was amazing. By far the best food I have ever had or witnessed or heard rumour of from a grocery store restaurant.  Fantastic.

After we had finished eating, seating opened up for us in the wine bar in the back. This is where we had wanted to go all along.  The wine list is quite impressive.  Showcasing what a powerhouse, international city Kiev is.

Good Wine is really something to see.  People get all dressed up to shop here.  Women in dresses and heels, high end sports cars everywhere, men in suits, all just to go shopping for groceries!

After we got home, we broke up the surprise cake that Liesl and I had sneaked off to get this morning and had a little Ciana birthday party ourselves at the apartment.  So we had a little private party at the apartment.  Luciana has had such a wild and interesting array of birthdays over the years.

We are planning a bigger Ciana dinner birthday celebration in two nights.

Monday.  Very little to tell about today.  I walked into the office this morning and stayed very late, working till close to midnight again.  I find that I am super productive in the office here.  It is so quiet and the connection is so good and I have lots of space to myself to just focus and get things done.

Not much time left for us in Kiev.  Only about two more weeks and we will be on our way back to America.  This is our fastest turn around yet.  It is too bad, as we really like it here in Ukraine.  We all hope that we will be back here with great regularity.

Sunday morning on our one quiet weekend here in Kiev.  We are enjoying staying in at the apartment and not having to do anything.  Liesl was up a bit before us hanging out in the living room.

Dominica and I got up around ten when Liesl decided to wake us up.  Liesl spent the morning playing The Escapist on the Steam laptop and watching DanTDM on her iPhone.  Dominica and I continued watching Star Trek: The Next Generation where we are on Season 7, Episode 4 when we started this morning.

It was a very quiet, binge watching Star Trek family day for us.

Saturday.  This is our one “down” weekend here in Kiev as everyone that we know locally is traveling to Italy, Poland, etc. so we have the weekend to ourselves to just stay in the apartment and enjoy some time to ourselves.

Dominica made breakfast.  Oatmeal today.

Our first order of business this morning, once everyone was finally awake and dressed, which meant that we were not going out until the middle of the day, was to head out to the grocery store.  Luciana stalled for a long time so it was close to one when we finally headed out and it had started drizzling.

We had a very successful shopping trip.  Not only did we get the food that we needed, but the girls both behaved well which has never really happened before.  They are normally out of control in grocery stores for some reason.

We tried to buy bread today but found that experience to be a little confusing.  Ukrainian bread is giant in physical size so you tend to buy partial loaves rather than full ones, which requires discussing it with the bakery staff.  But of course, the bakery staff does not speak English at all.  We got lucky and a girl that was bread shopping herself heard us speaking English and helped us by reading some of the descriptions on the bread for us and helping us to order.

We also got lucky that because it was the middle of the day there was a guy that would weigh produce for us and label it which is a major thing for us as we cannot do that ourselves as everything is in Ukrainian and there are no pictures; so when we get to the checkout the cashier has to leave to go weigh things for us which is really annoying for them.

We ate a lot of the bread today.  It was all amazing.  The rumours are true, the Ukraine is one of the best places to be getting bread.

Once we were back home we put on Star Trek: The Next Generation and picked up from where we left off.  We are towards the end of the sixth season and by the end of the night managed to get three episodes into the seventh.  Luciana spent much of the day just hanging out with Dominica and me.  Liesl, as is typical, spent the day hanging out in our room with her iPad.

Liesl and I did a walk to the grocery store for a second trip for supplies, just the two of us, later this evening.

Liesl spent some time playing The Escapist, today.  She loves that game.

We had a nice day.  We got to relax and we managed to get a bit of work done as well.  I did some testing of stuff in the lab today that was pretty valuable, did some writing, etc.

Before bed I did my DuoLingo practice.  I’m on a ten day streak now.  Getting back into the habit.

I talked to Jeremy today and got him moved to openSuse as his desktop now.