Sheep Guarding Llama

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!

I got up early this morning and got in maybe an hour or two on Skyrim before anyone else got up.  Once the kids were up, they decided that today was going to be a family video gaming day.  So that is what we settled in to do.  Dominica was already playing Age of Empires 2 before the kids were up, too.

This afternoon, after a very long time trying to get this to happen, I finally got the girls willing to try playing Nancy Drew!  This is very exciting.  We own basically the entire series of Nancy Drew games, definitely all of the ones that are available on Steam, and a year ago Dominica and I tried one of them but did not finish it (yet).  I wanted the girls to enjoy them to decided to start with a more recent entry in the series, one from 2010 that is well rated.

So with Liesl at the controls and Luciana snuggling and all three of us on the couch we started playing Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water’s Edge.  Both girls loved it. This is a big hit around here.  We played it all evening and into the night.  This one is really spooky and keeps the kids on their toes.  Liesl took to the game very quickly and was able to control it and get around really quickly.  This is awesome.  We are very excited that if they enjoy this that there are so many more great games in the Nancy Drew universe for them to play.  These are the kids of games that we really like them spending their time on.

This particular Nancy Drew title includes an introduction to other types of puzzles like Sudoku (which Liesl has played for a year now) and nonograms which she is just learning about which is great because she is getting into more things that we think that she would enjoy but is unlikely to pick up and play on her own without some prompting.

Ah, the weekend has started.  One of my projects for today was building an ERPNext server for Danielle so that she could do some testing on that.  Not the simplest of things to build so that took a bit of the day, I had actually started on it last night and did not get a chance to get it all up and running until today.

It’s Saturday but I worked pretty much all day.  So much to do and no time in which to do it.  I was really in the office pretty much all day.  But the plan is to have plenty of time with the girls tomorrow, as it is Sunday.  This month has just been way too busy.

Friday.  Only two weeks left until Dominica is on her way back to the US.  Lots to be done before she leaves.

Dominica has started working diligently on doing web design and is learning WordPress and some theme management.  I’ve been trying to talk her into working on this kind of stuff for years but it has never worked.  Now she is making progress and seeing some real success so it is encouraging her to really work on it.

Liesl watched Trolls again today, of course.  She loves that movie.

After a long day of writing we decided that tonight would be a family movie night.  Liesl and Luciana have been asking to see the new movie Trolls since it was in the theatres and it is available now on Amazon so we decided that they have wanted to see it for so long that it would be a good purchase.  Twenty dollars, still, but we buy movies so seldom these days it really is not a big deal.  We get fewer than ten movies a year, I would guess.  Maybe a lot less.

We all enjoyed the movie.  The girls loved it and we thought that it was cute.  Well done, good actors, fun story and great music.  Liesl is going to be watching this one over and over, I can tell.