Sheep Guarding Llama

Friday.  I was slow getting up this morning.  Then I worked on testing out CloudWays web hosting today, we are looking for something more powerful and robust than A Small Orange, which has been good but is not all that great for our specific needs.  It uses cPanel and is way too slow and cumbersome for us.  We want something faster, leaner, and with more simplified controls.  cPanel sounds nice and easy, but when things really come down to it, it is convoluted, complex, and just generally in the way of getting work done.  It is meant for people that don’t understand what is being done and because of the weird attempts at renaming and abstraction, it is far more difficult to use than it should be.  So CloudWays is active on MangoLassi, so who better to start auditioning?

I also worked on some Digital Ocean to Vultr migrations today.  Vultr has dropped their prices and is half that of Digital Ocean now.  So very much time to migrate!  Each machine moved either gets double the resources for the same money, or the cost cut in half.  Pretty sweet deal.

Dominica made egg salad sandwiches today for lunch.  So I just ate at my desk while I worked.

Our time here in Italy is rapidly drawing to a close.  I cannot believe how fast the time has flown by.  Maybe it is because I am getting older, but I suspect that it is because we have become so accustomed to traveling.  But it really feels like this seasonal cycles go by so quickly.

Thursday.  Still really sick today.  Bronchitis and pneumonia, they take their toll on you.  It is easy to get worn down when I am like this.

I worked this morning, then later in the evening I took the kids down to the playground for a while to get us all some fresh air and exercise.  We made it down while the city is all out for the evening stroll.

We’ve hit that time of the year when suddenly the off season converts to the shoulder season all at once.  Downtown has been empty basically the entire time that we have been here and now, all of a sudden, there are people everywhere and all of the businesses are open.

Pretty sick and getting terribly behind on SGL updates.

Wednesday.  So my week or two of bronchitis finally caught up with me and it is noticeably moved to being pneumonia today.  Just great.

Our fruit and veggie guy stopped by today and we really stocked up.  We have lots and lots of produce now.  We love having produce delivered to our door, it’s a great way to live.

We had pizza at home today.  I hung out with the kids for a bit.  Luciana demanded that I video game with them tonight.

Got to bed early tonight.  Not feeling well at all.  Very sick at this point.

Tuesday.  Started the day by cleaning the house.  We have a house keeping coming to clean today and, of course, we want the house clean before she arrives.  Once the house was ready, I walked to the market to get food stuffs for us.  We have to go roughly every other day.

I got back and the kids were awake.  So to get them out of the way I took them down to the central playground in the city for a while in the middle of the day so that the housekeeper could do her thing.  Just made things easier.

After the housekeeping Dominica and to my office and we worked together for a bit.

This afternoon the rain came back.  It rains here a lot.

I had a conference call for a bit today.  Really hard to do calls from Italy, the calls never work or the power goes out or the Internet cuts out.

Vultr changing their pricing structure to today was my day to go around and resize all of the servers that I have so that I can leverage the new pricing.  Since I already have them, I can’t reduce the price, but I can double the RAM allotment.  So it is something.

I had to do a bunch of work on the Zimbra server today.  That kept me occupied for much of the day.

The kids were busy playing “Woodle Tree Adventures 2” today.  They enjoyed the original and this one is two player, so way better.

My bronchitis is still awful today.

Monday.  Back to “work” again today.

Tonight the girls and I played “Mortimer Beckett and the Spooky Manor” which turned out to be a much harder hidden object game and less adventure than any of us had guessed.  It was decent, but definitely not what we were expecting when we started it.

Our time in Italy is rapidly drawing to a close.  We will not be here all that much longer.  It is hard to believe that this cycle is Europe is nearly done.  we have not had the experience that we were expecting.  We thought that we were have more resources and more free time and would be able to do many more things.  It has been a good experience and we are very glad to have been here.  But it is not what we were expecting.

Time always flies when we are doing these three month cycles in a country.  It seems like you have unlimited time when you first arrive.  And within a few weeks you already know that time is vanishing faster than you can react to it.