Sheep Guarding Llama

We had thought about leaving for Palermo today, but I was getting so much work done that we decided that it would make more sense for us to wait until tomorrow so that I could focus on work stuff today.  It is Thursday and overall pretty slow, which was great because it allowed me to focus on my work of converting some stuff from traditional server scripts to SaltStack, which went great.  By the end of the day I was able to get an entire NextCloud 11 deployment on Fedora 25 setup which worked beautifully and was able to build a full production server with zero effort, automatically, by the end.

It was a busy day of work for me, but not much else was going on.  I was upstairs in the office for nearly the entire day.  It felt great having a quite day to do real engineering work.  I had a lot of fun.  It’s been a while since I have been able to get into real engineering work in this way, very hands on.  Feels good to be doing hard core system design work for the team.

I put in a very full day, going from first thing in the morning until pretty late at night.  Late in the evening Dominica came up and we put Star Trek: The Next Generation up on the projector so that it could run while I was still working.  That worked out really well.  I was still quite productive, but we still managed to hang out.

We have been all packed for two days, so really nothing to do to be able to leave tomorrow for Palermo.  We are planning on taking the bus in the morning.  It is about five hours travel time to get to Palermo on public transportation.  A good chunk of that time is because we have to get from Noto to either Siracusa or Catania before going on to Palermo.  Our city is far too small to have direct connections.  If we lived in Siracusa, even though that is not really much closer to Palermo, it would only be about four hours of public transportation to get there.  And from Catania, even less as there would be no transfer at all.  There is a price to be paid for being rural.  That’s a huge vote for living in Catania – it is a decent sized city on its own and it sits directly on the main line to Palermo making it absolutely trivial to go back and forth between the two cities, both being cheap and being fast.

Wednesday.  Got up this morning and worked for two hours before anyone else in the house woke up.  We all went to bed at the same time last night.

I went to the stores this morning around the corner and got lucky with the bakery having my favourite bread today.

Our power went out again today because Dominica used two appliances at once and that kills the main breaker every time.  Not the best wiring in this house.

Lego Words finally went to final release so I worked on downloading that today and after a long time was able to let the girls play it which they did this evening.

The girls also started playing The Book of Unwritten Tales again tonight.  They played it before but they were so young when they did that neither of them remember it at all.  So they are getting a full second play out of the game.  It’s one of my favourite.  A classic for them.  This is one of the handful of games that really make Liesl into a gamer.

Tuesday. Started the day with heavy rain.  So much rain here in Sicily. It’s not Transylvania rain levels, but it rains often.  Way more often than I would have guessed.

I was busy doing website setup work this morning. I’ve been putting in a lot of time getting websites built while Dominica does website design.

The kids were studying Italian history today in home school.  They had a good morning of school but it devolved into screaming later on in the day.

Dominica made pasta for dinner tonight.  The girls played Child of Light on Steam tonight up in my office where we have the gaming system set up with the projector.

We are finally heading off to Palermo this coming weekend.  So just wrapping things up here in Noto before heading out for a few days.

Monday.  Another bright and really warm day in Noto, Sicily.  After taking yesterday off to watch Star Trek: TNG we have a lot to do today so we made it mostly a busy day of work.  The girls are back to school today, although it was a light day and not a full one.

Dominica did more website work and her first banner ads today.  She is adding more and more to her graphic design portfolio.  And it only took an hour or less from the time that she made her first banner ads before we got our first inquiry from them for services!  Apparently the new site works.

Our next door neighbours here in Noto are having their tile roof replaced.  So we have a roofing crew right on level with our second floor so it is quite loud here.  But interesting to watch them working on a house of this style.

Dominica made breakfast this morning and I made a trip on foot to the corner store.  And laundry going on today, too.

Tonight, Dominica made pumpkin risotto for dinner.

I slept in late this morning not getting up until about noon.  I had been up late last night working on platform issues for ML so needed some time to sleep.  Dominica made open face egg sandwiches for breakfast this morning.  Very delicious.

This evening we watched more of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the kids.  They have been enjoying it so far.  It has been a long time since Dominica and I watched these.  Such good stuff.  They didn’t watch with us all evening, but were in and out.  They found something that they liked on YouTube and watched that for a bit.

Not a lot of updates written, we’ve been very busy with working and life planning and we have started falling behind on being online.