Sheep Guarding Llama

Wednesday. It’s been one week since our kitten was killed. The girls are still very noticeably sad. But there is improvement. Having the other two kittens in the house all of the time helps. They know that they are safe, and they have a distraction, but also a reminder.

The dad cat that we call Cruller is slowly getting braver. He comes closer and closer and meows at us all of the time. Fritter, the very pregnant mother, is still here daily for her supply of kibble. She remains very affectionate. She’s a very good cat.

Tomorrow we have to spend the day in Managua getting the girls’ passports renewed. It’s our first time going to the embassy. We had to do lots of paperwork today to make sure that we were ready and I spoke with the embassy on the phone: they call to check that we’ve done all of our paperwork ahead of time.

I recorded several videos today getting ready for the time away. No live stream tomorrow as we will be traveling all day.

I ended up with the time to do a live stream tonight so just did one. We talked a bit about the forum. I’m very excited about that. I didn’t get a chance to talk about it a week ago, it went live just a few hours before the Chocolate Milk incident happened. But I built the open source forum package A Parliament of Owls last week and we’ve been using it for an Expats of Nicaragua forum group that replaced our WhatsApp group that we’ve had most of the last year. So far, I like it so much better. It’s so much more chill. People can’t just hop on and spam and cause problems with the community the way that they could before.

We used it to replace MangoLassi / Republic of IT as well. Those have been running on NodeBB since March, 2014 and it has served us well, but recently its MongoDB database has become untenable and the application has gotten so slow and it needs a lot of maintenance. It seemed problematic to try to keep maintaining, so we moved that entire platform with 800,000 posts, millions of users per month, hundreds of millions of object requests and twelve years of activity over to APOO and so far, it is working great. It’s got better spam control, everything renders so much faster and while there are fewer features, things are far better tuned for our real world needs. The site is busy again and fun to use.

We’ve got about fifty people on the new Expats forum already which is a lot considering it is so new. The old ML site we eliminated as many accounts as we could and have about 1,550 remaining. It’s hard to believe that MangoCon was ten years ago, too!

It was almost three in the morning when I managed to fall asleep after having driven to Managua and back in the middle of the night. Marcela had not yet gotten in to see the doctor by the time that I was home and getting into bed with the dogs.

I actually was up decently early considering how late I was out last night. I got up around seven and got right to work. There is so much to do. I’m very busy with work and it’s feeling a bit overwhelming. I had been looking forward to an evening of hanging out with Liesl and Luciana last night as we had planned, but I had to drive to Managua instead so a night of relaxing turned into a very exhausting night instead.

Today I pretty much had to camp out in the office. I’m working on several projects in parallel. It’s exhausting, but I got a lot of good work done today at least.

The girls hung out all afternoon playing video games together. We are really hoping to get a Steam Machine this year. We’ve been limping as far as video game machines here for a long time now.

Luciana has not felt that she could handle watching The Expanse again, because it is so heavy, or playing Dungeons & Dragons all week because she’s so sad about Chocolate Milk.

I worked until very late.

Monday. The kittens are still thriving and happy in Liesl’s room. They’ve never had so much attention and so many toys as they do now and they seem to be very happy with all of the soft surfaces to sleep on. They’ve taken over.

Very busy work day today. I’ve got so many projects in motion, it’s absolutely crazy. I’m feeling a bit exhausted.

The girls moved into the game room this afternoon and hung out together all afternoon. Liesl played Hades on the computer while Luciana used the Nintendo Switch to play Animal Crossing while they snuggled with the dogs.

Marcela was feeling really sick today, as she has been for weeks. I went down to check on her and to bring some food down. We tried to watch a movie but only made it about ten minutes before she needed to go to the hospital. She basically has a cough so strong that she coughs until she vomits and because that’s been going on for three weeks it’s just become a pattern and she can’t keep food or liquids down for any length of time. So she is just getting weaker and weaker from lack of nutrients. She’s not sleeping great, either.

So we finally got out the door around eleven and run to Managua to get her to her hospital at Militar. Thankfully that is on our side of the capital. Roads were clear and traffic was really moving so it took just over an hour and a half to drive her to the hospital. I went it and got her checked in and made sure that she got through triage and then left her and got back in the car and raced back home so that I could arrive before I fall asleep.

It was just a little after two or two thirty in the morning when I pulled into the house. The girls couldn’t believe that I was back already and thought that I hadn’t even gone. They thought that I would be gone all night. I made great time.

I’ve been reading “So You Want to Be a Dungeon Master” via Audible while driving, which really helps to keep me awake.

The kittens, Orange Juice and Chemæra were snuggled on the bed with Liesl when I popped in to check on them first thing this morning. They are so adorable. It’s at least a good start to our project.

The kittens ended up staying all day. They mostly sleep in the daytime so it was easy for them to just nap away in the extreme comfort of Liesl’s room with giant cat tree, comfy bed, extra dog bed on the floor, and air conditioning. They’ve never had it so good.

I worked most of the day, there is a lot to be done. I drove Marcela to her church to pick up a care package, and then we stopped by La Colonia and I got the cheese that Luciana and I need to make our homemade mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner tonight.

The girls came out to run errands tonight. We stopped by Marcela’s house and they played with Happy (her kitten.) Then we went over to April and Ava’s house and hung out for most of an hour. We talked D&D, Mothership, and played a little Family Feud. Then we stopped by the pharmacy and I stocked up on expectorant (Luciana and I are both still quite sick.) Then we swung back to Marcela’s and dropped off some medicine for her.

Back home, Luciana and I cooked up mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. It turned out pretty well. Then the girls and I settled in to watch Disney’s Zootopia and Zootopia 2 back to back. Not my favourate movies, but they are watchable.

It was a full day of the little kittens living in the house and it went well. They seem to be happy and have no interest in leaving. They are safe in there and we are planning on installing catios for them, there are spaces where the old air conditioning units were (before we installed the modern ones) so those old rebar cages should work just fine.

It’s going to be a challenge, but these are awesome cats. We are hopeful that they will work out.

This morning Marcela’s family surprised her by showing up from Managua. They were already on the road to León when they told her. So she asked me to take her to Maxi Pali to do some last minute shopping so that she would have groceries in the house. So we ran over to Laborio to hit the supermarket.

It was a decently quiet day, but we are so concerned about the safety of the kittens that we basically have the dogs on continuous lockdown and we are scouting the yard all of the time to make sure the cats aren’t out there.

It was a very hard day. Not only is everyone still super sad, of course, and Luciana and I are still quite sick, but trying to keep the dogs and cats apart is exhausting and clearly isn’t a solution. The cats show zero fear of Clive, even after what happened, and freely came into the yard seemingly to see him! Thank goodness I had him on a leash, they came right up to him. He was terrified, as he had been every time that they were in the yard. I’m convinced he sees them as a threat that he doesn’t understand and only killed Chocolate Milk to “protect the perimeter and the family.” Because that’s what he does. Not because he’s hunting them or anything.

So we have a major issue trying to keep the yard free of kittens. By late evening, we had to lock the dogs up completely as the kittens not only invaded the yard for an hour or two before sunset, but once it was dark they just came into the house and took it over. They went all over the house all evening playing all over and having a great time. We couldn’t let the dogs out in their own house all night!

We didn’t play with the kittens in the house, but they wanted to be there. Even when we’d leave and go into a room with the dogs for hours, when we’d come out they’d be lurking somewhere. They have declared it their new home.

Knowing that there was zero possibility now of keeping the dogs and kittens apart, we took to drastic measures and moved the kittens into Liesl’s room. We made a make-shift cat litter box out of a cardboard box and we set them up with food, water, and toys. They are super happy and played and played until exhausted. Then they climbed into bed with Liesl and spent the night near her feet in a little kitten pile. It’s so good to see them happy and together as siblings, but also a heart breaking reminder that the third is gone and they will always seem to be incomplete to us.

It looks like we have more housecats now. These cats took to being in the house with zero prompting. It’s wild how much they just wanted to live indoors.