Sheep Guarding Llama

It is a beautiful sunny morning here in Kiev, but Luciana has developed a couch that is so bad that last night, during the night, she coughed so long and so much that she ended up throwing up!  That is not good at all.  She always seems to get sick when we are out of the country.  (In reality this has only happened a couple of times and is just coincidence.)

Thanks so much to everyone at the Starwind office who went so far out of their way to help out with Luciana today.  They got us a pediatrician who does house calls (they really do this) and had them come to the apartment for us.

While we waited on the doctor, we nursed Luciana, and I got Dominica trained on her new Korora Cinnamon desktop which she is now using.

The pediatrician and assistant came to the apartment, as did the secretary from the office, and they looked at Luciana.  Not a big deal, just a really bad cough.  They are going to run some tests, though.  Everyone was awesome.  We got a prescription and the secretary and the driver went to the pharmacy and got all of the medicine and stuff that Luciana needs.

We would have been in terrible shape if it wasn’t for Anton, Maryna and everyone at Starwind who sprang to action and got us what we needed here in Kiev.

So I was at the apartment all day today, definitely did not go into the office with Luciana so sick.   But with some medicine to help with the cough she is feeling better already.  She never really felt very sick, it was just a horrible cough.

For dinner, Dominica made her own masuman curry, which was quite good.

Monday.  I don’t have many notes from early in the day today.  This afternoon or early evening, depending on your perspective, Anton took the family out to lunch at a cafe called Honey that his wife’s family owns in town.  The food was great and the girls really enjoyed the selection.

The food was all so amazing that I really just have to share it all in pictures.

After food and visiting, back at the apartment we watched some movies.  Dominica and I watchined Zombieland which was okay.  And we also watched The Rundown which is pretty decent.

I finished getting Dominica converted fully over to Korora 25 on her laptop tonight.  It is much improved.  We have turned into a Linux using family.  Pretty much no Windows left now.  Liesl still has it on her old laptop and we have it on the Steam gaming machine.  But that is it.

Tonight, at bed time, Luciana requested that we study Spanish together.  I love it when she wants to do that.

Sunday and Happy Easter. I finally got the Ubuntu 17.04 update on my laptop completed that I had started yesterday.  It is working great.  It was working fine before, but the update is a good one.

Dominica’s Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro has been just awful with Windows 1o on it.  Always has been awful.  Finally got her to try switching to Linux today and got her on to Korora 25 and everything worked great, immediately.  All of the Windows 10 problems that have always been there are just gone.  The hardware works better, the desktop works better, the graphics drivers work better.  No idea why that hardware and Windows work so poorly together.  I mean neither is that great on its own, so together they are even worse.  But still, they should work more than they did.  Constant network drops, constant GPU crashes, and all kinds of other problems.

We lost power at the apartment today.  It went out suddenly with some sound in the hallway.  I went out for a walk and figured out that other parts of the buildings next to us definitely had power and that it must only be us that were out.  So we called Anton and he called the apartment building and got someone to come out and look into it and they found that the electrical box out in the common area of the hallway had shorted out and blown.  So they were able to get it mostly working for us and someone is going to come out and look at it for real pretty soon.

We were without power for about three hours.  Not too bad, but of course we were worried that we’d not be able to sleep if the power didn’t come back on because of my CPAP and what would we do if our phones lost their charges?

We watched a lot of movies today at the apartment.  We watched Mr. Deeds with Adam Sandler.  Dominica and I could not remember having seen it before.  It wasn’t bad.

We talked Liesl into watching The Force Awakens with us.  I did not like the movie much, I saw it in the theater when it had come out, but Liesl had not seen it yet.  She likes Star Wars in general, so we figured that she would be into it.  She was on the fence until Chewbacca showed up, then she was excited and enjoyed the movie.

Saturday.  Our first weekend on our own here in Kiev, Ukraine.  Last weekend was travel and getting shown around.  This is our first real bit of free time with just the family to do our own thing, although only for part of the day.  It was a gorgeous morning when we got up today.  So far the weather in Kiev has been really nice the whole time that we have been here.

This morning I started the day by updating my Asus RoG laptop from Ubuntu 16.10 to Ubuntu 17.04.  Then my next project was setting up blank WordPress sites for Dominica to be working on.  She is doing a lot of web design work now, it is keeping her quite busy.

This afternoon, the girls and I went with Anton and friends to a house party on the left bank.  Dominica was not feeling well and decided that she needed to stay home and could not come with us.  But other kids were going to be there so we did not want our girls to miss out.  I already knew most of the people that were going to be there today, but Dominica did not so between feeling under the weather and social anxiety she was kind of glad that she got to stay home.

The party was in the afternoon and we had a really nice time.  The girls played with the other kids the whole time and were having a blast.  Our host is a restaurantour and took his cooking very seriously.  So there was a myriad of great food to eat and lots to drink.  And it was very neat getting to explore more of Kiev and getting to see real apartments where people live and what life is like in different parts of the city.  It was a really nice, big open apartment in a nice, newer, but less popular area.  I could definitely see myself enjoying life in that kind of place.

It was a fun time.  Anton and Max were there.  And Max’s girlfriend Dasha.  And the guys that I knew from the bar and their families and kids and Anton’s kids.  It was a good crowd.

After the party we came home and had a quiet evening to ourselves at the apartment.  It was a really cool day and a huge change of pace.  Dominica was very disappointed that she could not make it, but it just would not have worked.  She was feeling so sick that she would have been miserable.  She has missed out on nearly everything here in Kiev.

Friday.  We had lots of rain this morning.  A nice spring rain in Kiev.  Our apartment is a good place from which to watch the rain.  We have such a nice fifth floor view in the heavily treed park-like courtyard between all of the apartment buildings.  It’s a great European style view that you never get in the US.

Today Dominica and the girls came with me to see the Starwind offices.  It gave them a chance to get a tour.  Then we set them up in an office so that they could play, while Dominica and I did some work and had meetings.  The girls really liked getting to go into the office and hang out.  A big change of pace for them.

After our afternoon in the office as a family, we all went back home while we had a ride.  Then it was a family evening, just hanging out together at the apartment.