Sheep Guarding Llama

I woke up around nine this morning, long before anyone else.  It was a beautiful, bright day. Great sunshine so I got the doors in the upstairs office open right away.   The Mediterranean was glistening from where I was sitting at my desk.

I brought Liesl’s laptop upstairs today and while I was working I worked on getting it loaded up with games on Big Fish that we have.  We always forget that we actually have rather a large library of games on Big Fish that we never play.  Getting those downloaded there means that Liesl can use her laptop to play video games while the Steam laptop is engaged for Steam games, too.  Hopefully this will increase our game playing capacity a bit in the house and might expand the girls’ gaming horizons.  Luciana is always struggling to find games that make sense for her to play at her age and Liesl misses some games that we have on Big Fish like the Dora the Explorer games.

I managed to play a little Skyrim this morning before getting into writing all day.  The advantage of getting up at nine is that I can work nearly half a day, take a break around lunch for a bit, and then go back before most people have even gotten to their desk to start the day.

This evening we spent the evening playing Nancy Drew: The Captive Curse for the whole evening.  We went from basically the beginning to only an hour until the end.  It was as good as the one that we finished the other day, I think, but will not know for sure until the end.  Both girls are enjoying it.  I am so glad that we found Nancy Drew video games and that our girls like them so much.  These are perfect for them.

While we were playing the game tonight, without any warning or provocation a light fixture in the downstairs bathroom fell off of the wall and shattered into the bathroom sink and went all over the bathroom and even out into the living room!  We were all in the living room when it happened and it really surprised us.

Luciana fell asleep on top of me on the couch while Liesl was playing the video game tonight.  Dominica carried her into bed and Liesl and I stayed up gaming until almost four in the morning!  We had hoped to push on to the end of the game but there was just too much needed to get to it, so we had to save the very end of it for tomorrow.

I really like the quirky German black forest setting of the game, though.  It’s fun.  So far, all of us are liking it better than the last Nancy Drew game.

I got up and kicked off the day being productive for about two hours before Dominica and I needed to make a trip to the big grocery store down the hill which is such a huge chunk of the day.  We started with a quick trip to the art supply store around the corner to see about some things for the girls’ school.  That was fast and we found a few things that we needed.  It is across the street from our little local grocery and panificio so not really an extra trip in any way.

We got food from the panificio before going back home.  They had pizza again today, so we got it for everyone for lunch.  The slices are big and today were loaded with peas, mushrooms and salty black olives.  And, of course we got bread and some breakfast treats.  The pistachio cream that they use is amazing.

We dropped everything off at the house and then immediately set out for the big grocery store.  We passed through the city park and Dominica scoped it out for Pokemon Go and it is loaded with stuff, the whole area is.  So the kids are going to love that.

It was a nice day, but we could see a storm coming.  It has rained every day that we have been on Sicily.  I think that it must be a lot like Seattle – not all that much rain falls but it falls all of the time.  So just a little every day.

We got our largest grocery load yet.  The backpack has been instrumental in getting this process to work.  We had a full backpack and two large, full heavy duty plastic bags to haul back to the house.  But we did well and we are getting better and better at this process.  And I think that the grocery store people are starting to know us now.

We got home, had our pizza and Dominica decided that everyone needed a relaxing day so had the kids do a light school day with lots of fun worksheets and stuff.  She spent much of the day working on school planning stuff.

I put in a day working on my Linux Administration Book and other writing and posting tasks.  My plan was to wrap up early and spend a long evening with the girls getting engrossed in our next Nancy Drew adventure.  The girls have been so excited about it, they talked to me about it for easily half an hour or more this morning.  Liesl really wants to go back to the beginning of the series and see it from start to finish, even though she knows that the early games are going to be really hard to do and will look awful.  Luciana is very excited about moving forward to the next adventure in the series which would be number twenty four: Nancy Drew and The Captive Curse.

Dominica made pasta tonight and I ate at my desk.  Something loaded with veggies (verdure) , a tomato (pomodoro) sauce (salsa) and vegetarian meatballs.  It was great.  We are eating so healthily and cost effectively here in Sicily. Still only one restaurant meal since we got here (other than the take away bread items from our local panificio.)

I was doing really well and was planning on wrapping up and was just about to head downstairs when I got an email that there was a server down that needed my attention and instead of getting a nice, fun evening with the kids I got to sit at my desk and work like crazy pouring over logs all evening.  That was not fun, but I really cannot complain as that was most of a day’s worth of billable consulting hours.  I worked until one in the morning!

I refused to completely give up my evening with the girls so even though it was one in the morning I went down and we camped out on the couch for an hour and a half and started our next adventure game.  Liesl wanted to play the 1998 Nancy Drew title and Luciana wanted to break out the laser pointers and do a hidden object game so they compromised on Nancy Drew but the title that Luciana wanted.

So far Nancy Drew and the Captive Curse looks far better than the title that came before it, but it is annoyingly still not wide screen nor scalable which is a bit ridiculous for a game that came out in 2010, as did the one that we finished last night.  They clearly made some improvements, possibly just in the art style, but the underlying game engine is still embarrassingly limited.  They still play like games from the late 1990s.  I can’t tell if even the latest titles have fixed this problem yet.

From what little we got to play tonight, this next video game is looking pretty fun.  The last one was set in Kyoto, Japan.  This one is set in the dark forests of southern Germany.  I am so glad that we have found some games that work so well for the three of us to play together.  This is one of our favourite activities.  Dominica was with us, but as usual has her laptop and watches a show on her own.  So while she is only a few inches away, she does not participate in the game itself.

Got everyone in bed before three, always a challenge.  Tomorrow is Friday, hopefully I will get some time to actually relax at that point?

I did put in some time getting Liesl’s own laptop, which is my old HP Folio 13 that I bought for our 2012 trek around Europe, set up with Big Fish and downloading maybe a dozen games for her.  She has several of her classic Dora the Explorer games on there, some of her time management games and I am hoping that her last adventure with Nancy Drew will have turned her on to nonograms which I find enjoyable.  She has two nonogram games on there now as well.

Today is Wednesday and we had a dark and stormy day here in Noto.

Tonight the girls and I sat down and got a few good hours in on our first Nancy Drew game: Nancy Drew and the Shadow at the Water’s Edge.  We did so well last night on it and are so close to the end that even thought it was very late by the time that we managed to start playing it we pushed hard to complete it.

We didn’t get to start playing until after eleven at night, not very ideal.  And we had to play until about three, but we did it.  The last chapter of the game was quite intense and Liesl had to hide her head a bit and there were some moments where she was too scared to control the character. There were some super hard puzzles and even a jump scare!

At the end, though, the girls loved the game and the game shows a few scenes of the upcoming sequel and they are really excited to play that one now, too.  It took a year from when they first saw one of these games to give it a try, but this has worked out great.  Luciana said that she wants to go back when she is Liesl’s age and play through all of these with me again with her controlling them so that she can play the series, too.  That will likely work out really well as she will not likely remember too much of them by that point.

Overall I have to say that this title was pretty good.  The setting was interesting, the story wasn’t pretty good, the characters were odd, but interesting.  It was very fun to play as a family, a great style of game for that.

Tuesday.  The big news that we heard today is that the Omega Grill, back home in Geneseo, New York, that we ate at just a month ago, has been seized by the State of New York for failure to pay sales tax.  So it is a good thing that we used those gift cards while we could!  The restaurant is completely gone.  That is going to disrupt things just a little bit whenever we are visiting home.  That remains one of the places that we eat at most frequently.  I will miss getting their veggie burger with swiss on rye, I got that the most.  And Dominica and I will both miss their clamboats.  That places was a landmark in Geneseo.  It will do much to bolster the other restaurants around town, at least.  And it was not a good location, so I rather doubt that something else will move into the space, it would not be worth it.  Denny’s and the Geneseo Family Restaurant will be the big winners here.  Moving diners from the “strip” to Main Street is not a bad thing, except that Main Street parking remains a disaster.

Monday.  I was up early today and got some writing done.  Then I took a short break before the girls woke up and before the US people came online and did about an hour of Skyrim.  It was nice to get a short break.

I stopped by the panficio this morning and found that if you go at the right time they have pizza.  Pizza with peas on it!  Who would have guessed that peas on a pizza would be so good.  But they really are.

For dinner, Dominica made a spicy pasta that was pretty good.

This evening the girls were very anxious to return to our Nancy Drew adventure.  So as soon as I was done with my writing for the day we all climbed onto the couch and continued the game of Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water’s Edge.

We did not manage to complete the game tonight, but we made really good progress and I am confident that we will be able to complete it tomorrow with just an hour or two of additional game play.

We all had a lot of fun playing that again. These adventure games are perfect for daddy / daughter game nights.  We love playing them all together and really getting into the game.  We all look forward to attempting to complete this tomorrow.

We have such an extensive video game collection and we often go for so long without really playing through a game. It always makes me very happy when we find one that we really enjoy and manage to actually play through it.  I feel much more accomplished.  If we beat one game per day, it would take many years just to play through the games that we currently own.  We certainly do not play that many.

The girls say that they are really interested in playing through the entire Nancy Drew series, now.  That’s thirty two games as it standards.  Only one of those is currently not easy for us to get.  And one new one is due out in a year or so.  We need to get playing.  If it takes us three days per game, that’s four months of gaming continuously just to play through the Nancy Drew games!