Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Thursday, in Kiev, Ukraine. Dominica started the day making Turkish coffee, as we still do not have any form of a coffee maker.  She is getting pretty good at doing this, now.  It takes a bit more skill to make coffee like this, but it is actually really good. We had a couple rounds of Turkish coffee before I took the girls to the playground.  They had gone the other day and Liesl has been working on her monkey bar skills and has been wanting to show them off to me.  So I promised that we would make a playground trip this morning since I was going to be home.  Dominica stayed home, just the girls and I went.

There are a few playgrounds in our little courtyard area between the old apartment buildings.  It is nice that there are decent places to walk and play and sit all without needing to even go next to the street, let alone across it.

I took the day off from going into the office, today.  So we got a nice family day at home with time to relax, catch up on some things, go for walks and to the playground and watch movies.  We’ve been going pretty steady for over a week, a day of nothing was very much needed.

This evening at home, Dominica and I watched Zoolander which we have not seen in a long time.  We have always liked that movie and it is available on Netflix here so a good chance to watch it.  The sequel movie has released and we want to see that, but wanted to rewatch the original first.

The second movie, Zoolander 2, was also available on Netflix so, as you can guess, we watched them back to back.  The second one was not nearly as good as the first, but it was okay.  We enjoyed it and are glad that we got the chance to see it while we were here.

Dinner was Ukranian ramen noodles that the apartment.  We are being really fancy today.

Thursday.  We had a raining spring night last night but awoke to a warm and sunny Kiev spring morning today.  A gorgeous day and I am excited to get out for another walk through the city.

Dominica made turkish coffee on the stove this morning.  We do Turkish when we lack a coffee maker.  Max is going to bring is own over at some point for us.

We had three rounds of coffee before I went into the office.  Anton was going past this morning so I just rode in with him.  That gave me more coffee time at home.

I have a secretary at the office that makes me coffee all day as well.  I got a desk today, too.  They brought one in and moved it into Anton and Max’s office.  So I am sitting with them, now.

Tonight, after work, Max and I went out to Barvy’s where Anton joined us later.  Great cocktail list here.  But we could not stay long, barely time for one round of drinks as they close very early.

Max enjoyed his Kiev Mule very much.

Each drink was quite large.

After the bar closed down and kicked us out (we were the last ones there) we went over to a Swedish restaurant and did pickled fish for dinner!

Delish dinner.  Then it was home.  At one thirty in the morning, there was some drunk guy in front of our door yelling so loudly that I thought that he might be yelling at me.  But he was just drunk and lost, I believe.