Sheep Guarding Llama

Tonight Dominica and I spent a lot of time talking about our fall plans.  We are all over the map (more literally than that expression normally implies) in what we are thinking that we want to do this fall.  We have kicked around returning to Romania, Sicily, Piemonte, the Sud Tirol, Trieste and more.  We are having a really hard time narrowing down where we want to be and even what our goal for this cycle is going to be.

First thing this morning I woke up to the sound of the voice of the owner of the house.  He was over with the fuel oil company getting the tank refilled at the house and measuring the fuel levels, checking on things, etc.  Turns out that he is flying to France tomorrow to pick up a sail boat and will be sailing back from northern France to Crete for the rest of the time that we are here and won’t return to Crete until weeks after we have left to go on to Romania.  So this is literally his last day to check in on us.

This ended up filling out morning.  We did a bunch of cleaning since people were in the house, that needed to be done anyway so kind of worked out.  I took out loads of trash, walking them down town.  I had to spend a lot of time with the owner figuring out the fuel oil situation.  Our oil usage, which was almost entirely in January, came to well over six hundred dollars, which is crazy.  Fuel oil is insanely expensive in Greece due to the economic hardships hitting the country.  One of the many things that is currently crippling them.

Once he was done at the house, we ran out as a family to do grocery shopping and to get cash.  We need to max out two cash withdrawls to be able to cover the fuel oil costs so we got our maximum for today and plan to get the rest tomorrow.  So that ate up all of our morning and early afternoon, it was an incredibly busy day without us having planned for it to be at all.

Once we were done with all of that it was back to the house and I was busy posting and writing for the rest of the day.  No real time to hang out with the family.

Monday morning.  Got up in the late morning.  Not sore at all after having slept on the floor again last night.

Had a mostly busy writing and posting day.  Got a bit done.

Dominica came with me to the corner store this morning.  Getting her to shop with me twice a month is a victory. Considering that I often go more than once a day, it is surprising how seldom she will accompany me.

Dominica made a bowl of egg salad today, it went perfectly with some amazing local bread that we found at the store this morning.

Luciana got up and talked me into doing a little racing with her today.  We have now earned all of the race courses and a few extra songs and racers in Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing.

We forgot to get olive oil while at the store earlier today so I returned to the corner store later in the afternoon to pick that up so that Dominica could fry up dinner later.

Tonight Dominica made calamari for Luciana again like she did last night.  Luciana says that this is the best calamari that she has ever had.  Maybe that is because it has been months since she has had any, but it was quite good.  Dominica fries it in a pan on the range.

We watched a few shows on travelling in Romania while we ate dinner this evening.  Hard to believe that we will be on our way north to Romania is just three weeks!  Dominica has spent a lot of today working on travel arrangements and we bought our flights on AegeanAir for getting up from Athens to Bucharest today.  We are going to take the overnight ferry from Chania to Athens to catch the flights there.  We are getting a four bed berth on the ferry, which should be really cool.

The girls talked me into playing a video game with them late this evening.  It took a bit to pick one out.  We started with one of the Mystery PI hidden object games but those have no story and while they enjoy the hidden object puzzles they do not like ones that are timed.  Even though we had lots of time they felt that it was too stressful to have a time limit and wanted to play something else.

We settled on the Fairytale Mysteries 2: The Beanstalk which we just bought about a week ago.  Liesl has been looking forward to playing this one.  We got in a good hour, at least, and more likely two or three.  We all snuggled as we do, while Dominica read in the living room, and did our best for the girls to take turns controlling the game.  I just sit and watch, I never really get to play although there isn’t much to do in this style of game.  Luciana always gets frustrated trying to control the game but doesn’t want to be left out as Liesl controls it.

We had a nice time and got the girls shuffled off to bed at two thirty, although both of them were awake until four thirty, at least.  Dominica banished them to their own room tonight.  So they were up in bed watching videos all night since the wireless works in that room (but not in ours.)

I had meant to go to bed with everyone else but ended up getting some work done and catching up on SGL and updating some NodeBB code and more until nearly five in the morning.  I was very productive.

It is Sunday and today we got Dominica to join us for a second day of video game marathons!

Dominica and I hung out together for a bit this morning.  Then, after we had finished up our coffee and had a quiet morning we fired up Dear Esther and did a straight play through of it.  I did all of the game play and she just watched.  Actually she just listened.  After about five minutes of the game she was acutely aware that the first person perspective of the game made her not feel well to her stomach and so she had to just listen and when we came upon a new scene I would stop moving and tell her to look while it was motionless.

I really liked Dear Esther as an experiment in story telling and literature.  It is an amazing work of art and well worth experiencing.  So sad, but incredibly well done.  We are very glad that we took the time to go through it again. The girls joined us too to nearly the entire thing, so the four of us were all camped out on the bed together.  It prompted good discussions about loss, sadness, suicide, etc.  A very tough game, indeed.  There is no doubt why it is considered so seminal.

We finished up Robin’s Quest today.  All four of us played it together.  That’s a great game, one of my favourite hidden object games ever as it doesn’t deal with anything creepy, nothing dead or undead, no occult, no adult themes… none of the things that so often plague hidden object games. It’s a totally “normal” adventure game taking place in England.  It’s goofy and shallow and the title character has been, true to hidden object form, turned into a woman but besides that the themes and topics and gameplay are one hundred percent family friendly and great for kids.  The girls were even introduced to scrolls and sun dials from the game.  So after another hour or two on this one we managed to wrap up yet another full game this weekend!  That’s at least three, already!

Next up was Bookworm Adventures which Dominica and I played for just a little while.  It’s good and we are making good progress on book two but I was just not into it that much, today.

Next up was Puzzle Agent which is pretty awesome.  It is made by Telltale Games, from whom we have loved pretty much everything that we have tried.  This one really makes us feel like we are playing a 1960s cartoon (like Rocky and Bullwinkle) but filled with puzzles.  The story is ridiculous and totally entertaining.  The puzzles are mostly good but do suffer from ambiguity and I’m pretty sure accuracy problems that make them not nearly as good as they could be if they were more polished.  The same kinds of issues that my dad found with many of the puzzles in the Blue Toad Murder Files.  But we had a good time and we can tell that this game is going to be a winner.

The girls had enough of video games and did a bit of playing on their own in the living room this evening.  They would come in from time to time to check on us.

Our final game for the night was Dominica and I playing Lost Horizons which is an adventure mystery game with strong Indiana Jones overtones (including era, themeing, location, flying map style, and more.) where you play a pilot from Hong Kong (cough… Temple of Doom) who has to fly in an old junker to Tibet (cough… Raiders) with the daughter of his old partner (cough… Raiders) to stop the Nazis (cough… Raiders) from getting some ancient artefact and take over the world in 1936.  The game is incredibly polished and has a little feel of Casablanca about it as well.  We only played a little bit, but what we have seen is excellent and a lot of fun.  I am really looking forward to getting some time to really get into this game.  The characters, story and locations are very fun and I can see why people clamoured so much for a sequel (which we also have in our library.)

The girls insisted in sleeping in the bed again tonight, so I am on the floor yet again.  We were all in bed rather early, though, for us, which was good.  Before falling asleep, Liesl climbed down onto the floor with me, she was very sad that I was sleeping alone.  She fell asleep seconds after snuggling with me on the floor with her head on my arm.  So while I had no space, was unable to move and was sleeping on a hard floor, at least I had snuggles.

I got up this morning and was awake before anyone else.  I opened up the house and went into the game room and made an attempt at playing Dear Esther which I have been wanting to play for some time.  I had tried it out and done maybe half of the first chapter some time ago, just to see how the game was.  This was my first time with time to actually attempt playing it.

I got about an hour in when Liesl and Luciana woke up and came into the game room to join me.  They watched me play for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes and really enjoyed the “game” even thought there is no game, just a walking simulator as I walk around a Scottish island.  They felt that the graphics were so nice that it would be fun.

Both girls really wanted to get back to playing Final Fantasy III today so they talked me out of stopping Dear Esther about a quarter of the way through the final chapter. So I stopped playing so that we could switch and discovered that we were minutes away from completing Dear Esther and that none of it had saved and that I was going to have to play the entire game, again, from the beginning now.  Impatience rears its ugly head once again.  That was a lot of wasted time.

We got back into Final Fantasy III and this was our day.  Nearly all of it.  We played for almost ten hours!  Liesl stayed with me for the entire day.  Luciana put in a solid two hours, probably, at the beginning and then came in and out throughout the day to keep up with what was going on but not watching the game continuously.

We made really good progress and made it through the first two large sections of the game.  Liesl was really into it and had a great time.  She really followed the story and did a great job at understanding all of the battle mechanics.  I think that we are going to have a good time playing the Final Fantasy series together.  We own so many of them.  At this point on Steam we own three, four, four part two, five, six, seven, eight, we are waiting on nine to release which is due very soon, and the three parts of thirteen.  Eleven and fourteen are not real games so they can be ignored.  The only ones that we don’t own are one, two, ten, ten part two and twelve – none of which is yet available on the PC.  My guess is that one and two at the very least will be remade and rereleased very soon as next year is the thirtieth anniversary of the series and with nine coming soon, fifteen due to be made soon and the anniversary coming up this is a huge opportunity for them to get a lot of sales in.  It would be a huge lost opportunity if they didn’t get the last five titles done for the PC.  The first two are just “old” and need to get released.  The ten and twelve series are from the Playstation 2 (and we own them on that) and likely need tons of work to make them viable on the PC.  Likely they have to completely reword the graphics, engine and more to get them ready for release and they are anything but small games so doing so is likely an insane amount of work.  But I can only imagine that they would sell like crazy, too.  If they don’t release them on the PC they have nowhere at all to sell them with the PS2 long off of the market now.  They need to release them or the opportunity is simply lost.

After ten hours on FF3 neither Liesl nor I was prepared to take much more.  We beat the big salamander boss and shut it down moving on to Supreme League of Patriots that the girls and I have been playing.  We did not have too much left to do on that before wrapping up episode one.  So that is another game wrapped up and completed!  The girls liked that one all of the way through.  They miss a lot of the humour as it is a weird mix of super heroes and political humour.

We played a little bit of Puzzler World, too.  Not a lot, just eight puzzles or so.  Ciana did the fitwords, Liesl did the sudoku and link-a-pix.  That game is huge so a little here and there is a good way to tackle it.  We always save the few game types that Dominica enjoys just in case she ever decides that she is going to join us.

For our final game of the night we moved on to Robin’s Quest which is a Robin Hood themed hidden object game, one that I had gotten to test out when we were still living in Texas and is one of the first couple hidden object games that I ever tried out, but only played for less than twenty minutes so had never actually gotten into.  Both girls really enjoyed this one and we easily put in two hours playing it.

Liesl does an awesome job of controller the main game.  Like other games she learns her way around so quickly and can navigate the whole game without any problem and she is pretty good at nearly all of the puzzles.  Luciana is really good at the hidden object portions and likes to control those.  So we play as a team effort.  It works great.

So my day was spent on the right hand side bed in the game room with my daughters snuggling with me all day.  It was an awesome day.  We played tons of stuff and had a great time spending time together.  This is just about a perfect day.  We all had a lot of fun.  And Dominica got to spend the day on her own in the living room reading a book which is what she wanted.  I don’t think that she even came into the gaming room all day.

Tonight Luciana decided that she really wanted to sleep in the bed with Dominica and Liesl so I got kicked out and had to sleep on the floor beside the bed.

Friday.  Today we decided to make a “stay in all day” day.  We had planned to do a grocery trip today but no one, except for Luciana, felt like going out.  (This ended up turning into an experiment in “how long can we go without a real trip to the big grocery store.”)

Today is exactly one quarter of a century after the great ice storm that devastated western New York when I was in high school.  It was my sophomore year at York Central School and we ended up having two weeks off from school due to the incredible amount of ice causing the power to be out at the school for that whole time.  We lost one third of all of the trees around the area.  That was the storm that would instantly change the woods of my childhood.

At the time, in 1991, the storm’s impact was one of fallen trees, dangerous roads and no school.  But now, as an adult looking back on it, it was the moment that the woods that I had grown up knowing “disappeared” to me.  Ever since I was really little, going into our woods was a normal thing.  I can remember the paths, the meadows, the ponds and more so well, even today.  There was a whole field of black eyed susans hidden back there and I knew exactly how to get there.  I knew every path, including deer paths that led through the northern fringe of the wood and had wide open areas that went along a field and would sneak you into different points along the big pond that was hidden deep in the woods.  I had camp outs, picnics, parties, horse rides, wagon rides and more back in those woods.  They were a huge part of my childhood.  When I think of myself being young, those woods feature prominently in my memory.

After this storm, the woods were gone.  Not that they did not exist, but they were changed.  The trees came down and the paths were blocked.  Nothing looked the same and everything changed.  Because the ice storm was in March it would be a long time before the woods would have been entered again and by the time that it was, nothing was similar.  It never recovered.  We never really got it back to the way that it was. And nature takes over so quickly.  In no time the paths, meadows and copses were dramatically changed.  It seemed minor then, so we didn’t go into the woods like we used to.  But over time the behaviour changed.  What used to be the place for afternoon walks was sort of gone.  Not gone in a dramatic “you can never go in there again” sort of way, but just enough that you never did.  And as we stopped using it, nature took over more and more.  The paths that we used to mow grew over, first with weeds them with trees and eventually disappeared.

I got up and started writing but Luciana was up soon and asked if I would play some games with her. So we started the day with Goat Simulator and Sega All Stars Racing.  At this point we have managed to earn all but the final course in the game.

Most of the day was spent writing, but I did knock off on the early side to get more time with the kids.

The weekend sale on Steam is from Square Enix with all of the Final Fantasy games on sale.  We already have nearly all of them, but the exciting news is that the classic Final Fantasy IX has been announced for the PC and will be available in the next three months.  They are slowly getting all of the titles re-released, which is pretty awesome.  Next year is the thirtieth anniversary of the series.

I played some Final Fantasy III with the girls tonight.  They wanted to do something together so we climbed into the game room as it is Friday night and Dominica did not feel like playing a game with us but wanted to just read in the living room.  Luciana had seen Final Fantasy V‘s icon on Steam that has chocobo racing on it and said that she wanted to play that.  I talked them into trying FF3, which is the oldest of the FF titles that is currently available on Steam, so that we could “start from the beginning” instead.  It took a bit but once I fired it up and they watched the intro they were hooked.  Like really, seriously into the game.  They were so excited and had a great time playing it for more than an hour.  This is their first time really playing a JRPG of any sort.

It’s been most of a decade since I last played FF3, I had played the remake (on which this version is based) on the Nintendo DS handheld system.  This is way better.  The graphics have been updated and playing on the big screen is so much more comfortable.  And some stuff has been added, like the intro that looks like a full budget movie.  FF3 was originally from the old 8bit Nintendo NES circa 1990 and was not released in the US for a very long time, it was one of the FF titles that was held back for non-US customers only for a very long time.  So my play through on the Nintendo DS was my first time ever.

We had a great time playing together, the girls made me promise that we would get up and continue playing this one tomorrow.