Sheep Guarding Llama

I was up at nine this morning and Dominica just after ten.  I think that our schedules are improving.  Liesl had asked Dominica to get her up and not let her sleep in today, too, because she did not want to miss too much of the day by oversleeping because she has a tendency to sleep through her weekends and be sad that they are then gone.

The weather is nice today, again, sunny and breezy.  Other than some big wind storms at night a couple of times we have been under great weather for a couple of weeks straight now.

Liesl has really figured out the Castaway Paradise and is dedicated to playing it at least a little every day.  She made level fourteen today and opened the last arch to the last part of the game that she has been walled off from.  Her last major gateway to break through is the “VIP” gateway at level fifteen.  She is very excited to get to that point.

Tonight Dominica and I played Highrise Heroes for a while, we were hopeful that we were going to be able to make a run on finishing the game but found that the levels at this point are way too hard and we cannot complete it tonight, we had to call it a night with four levels left.  It was exhausting and we had to do many of the levels that we had over again.  We had gotten stuck around level fifteen the other night because we simply could not complete the time challenge.  But tonight I played it alone for a while and figured out that we could eliminate the time challenge to make the levels easier (but capping our score.)  So we did that and it let us move forward, while still being super difficult.

After that we started playing The League of Supreme Patriots tonight which is a well made, very off the beaten path point and click adventure game.  It took us a while to figure out the puzzle system and the girls insisted on controlling the game themselves which did nothing to speed things up, and pretty soon Dominica had fallen asleep anyway, but we had a good time playing it and look forward to the season.

Nothing fancy today.  My week, which I had originally thought was likely to be on the slow side, had turned out to be overly busy and I needed some time to just have downtime today.  Which I did, and it was nice.

I was up at nine thirty this morning, a big before Dominica and long before the girls.

I ended up having a rather busy day all day working on getting some projects done.

I did manage to wrap up in the early evening, probably around seven or seven thirty, and spent the evening hanging out with Dominica.  We have been excited about this week’s release of the Netflix original series Fuller House for months.  We were in Galveston this past fall when I saw that it was being advertised on YouTube.  It is the “nearly three decades later” continuation of the  mid-1980s ABC Television show Full House that we both loved when we were kids.  It’s amazing as they got the entire original case (except for the baby who wasn’t a real part of the show anyway, so nothing is lost) back together including the entire family and almost all of the ancillary cast.

We had been joking that the release of Fuller House was my fortieth birthday present as it came out the day after I turned forty.  The star of the show is almost exactly my age as well, turning forty herself in just a few weeks, so it makes the show that much of a connection for me as it was always about someone exactly my age.

So tonight we binge watched the entire first season of Fuller House, all thirteen episodes of it.  It was great.  The first episode was pretty much nothing but an homage to the original show but after that they started to go in their own direction, although the show is designed and handles well picking up exactly where the original left off.  In many ways, you feel like you never stopped watching it even though the original has now been off of the air for twenty one years!

We had a great time.  Watching Fuller House was a huge trip down memory lane.  We really enjoyed it.  It kept us up rather late, but we’ve spent a whole season (or over two decades depending on how you look at it) for this to come out.

Well, it happened, I finally turned forty.  Hard to believe.  Well, not really.  The reality is that I have been feeling like I was in my forties for at least the last four years if not longer.  So the fact that I am now actually forty does not really seem all that weird.  Not weird at all, to be honest.

The thing that is probably strangest to me is that I remember my dad turning forty. I might have memories of my parents’ birthdays prior to that one, but none stand out in my mind.  But my dad turning forty felt like it was a big event.  And if I was old enough to remember that and am now at that age myself… that is the biggest thing that “feels odd” about being this age.  I am now, for the first time, at an age that seemed like a big deal for my dad to be turning this age.  And that, of course, was thirty years ago this coming June.  Of the time that I was a child, at home with my parents, the majority of it was spent with my dad being in his thirties!  I am already past that age.  Of course, for me, the majority of the time with my children will be in my forties, but the significance is not lost on me.

I had originally thought that I would have a mostly relaxing day today, but it turned out that there was some pressing projects that had my name on them so I ended up actually having a rather busy day until late evening and got very little time to relax.

Liesl made sure that I had a Swiss cake roll available, my favourite kind with vanilla filling, to have as my birthday cake.  She is very thoughtful.  We did not end up eating it, though.  I was never in the mood for any cake.

Mostly my birthday passed with little mention, as it normally does.  I got hundreds of happy birthdays on Facebook and such, but as I don’t go in for any kind of celebration, it is all but unnoticed here.  Dominica had wanted to go out and do something for my birthday, but the day was long and there was not a good time do to it tonight.  So we decided to do it tomorrow night.  Today is Thursday, anyway, not a great night for going out to dinner.

There is a weird thought.  My thirties are over.  Turning forty tomorrow is not nearly as weird as thinking that my thirties have come to a close.  All of those things that I needed to do “in my thirties” have to have been done or else, well it is just too late now.  I mean, for the most part, that worked out as planned.  I worked the “big decade of my career” as the thirties normally are.  It was certainly a major decade for me from that perspective.  I had two kids.  I moved from Geneseo to New Brunswick to Newark to Peekskill to Irving to Carrollton to Peekskill to Friendswood to Canar to Rio Hato to Granada to Prines during my thirties!  Twelve homes in ten years, pretty much maintaining my “moving every nine months” after that I have been doing ever since I was eighteen.  And it is only accelerating now that I have hit the end of that decade.

My twenties were my crazy years.  No stability, crazy jobs.  But the thirties were more traditional.  I started working at CitiGroup just days into my thirties and a long, stable career was the hallmark of the decade for me.  Eight years with CitiGroup!  So hard to believe that I was at one place for so long!

Today was actually a rather busy day for me.  I did not get relaxing time as there was a lot of writing and research projects for me to be focused on and so I was pretty much engaged on that all evening.  Not much time to hang out with the family today.

Woke up on my own at a good time this morning.  Got up and wrote for a bit, gave Luciana her morning antibiotic.  We have to take her back to the hospital today to get the lab results that are waiting to verify that we are using the right medication.  Should be a quick trip and we hope to get that amazing pizza again while we are there.

The trip into Rethymno went pretty well.  Although finding parking was a little challenging being the middle of the day.  We figured out that the hospital had free parking, though, just nothing written in English so that made it a little harder than it would have been.  I am sure that if we could read Greek that we would have known right away, but we don’t so….

We stopped into the ER’s paediatrician clinic but had to wait as the attending doctor was busy making the rounds.  We waited for a bit and then they had me go down and get the lab results for Luciana that we had been waiting on.  Then, since they just need to read the results when the doctor returns, we decided to have Dominica and Luciana wait there while Liesl and I went on to the pizza restaurant so that we could get the food ordered and be ready for when Dominica and Luciana could join us.  The food is all freshly made and easily takes half an hour so we figured that this would save us a bit of time in the long run.

Liesl picked a table outside and we ordered our food.  The same veggie pizza that we had the other day, French fries and pasta with cheese for Ciana.  We had a nice time just sitting outside together, although the pizza place is on a side street in the city so the only view is of a cafe next door, the side of the hospital and a few automotive repair shops.  Not an exciting spot, but a nice neighbourhood.

The food came and Liesl and I were able to eat before Dominica and Luciana made it out to join us.  It had taken some time because the doctor was busy on rounds for a while and then had gotten a second opinion on the test results from another doctor before letting them go.  It is worth noting that this entire visit, even using the ER and the lab again, cost absolutely nothing and was all covered in the less than seven Euros that we spent last week!

So the results are that we have been using the right antibiotic and that Ciana does in fact just have a UTI and nothing serious and no surprises.  Everything is as they thought on Friday, this was purely a double check process to be totally sure that everything was well and that nothing had been missed.  The hospital is a little concerned that she has had two UTIs and is not even five years old yet so they want to do more tests once she is all better and done with her antibiotic series.  So they have asked us to come back sometime next week so that they can do a sonogram to look at her kidneys – an extra step that would normally just be skipped in the US.  We continue to be very impressed with the healthcare here (and some Canadian friends living here have told us that the Greek healthcare is excellent as well, even compared to higher Canadian standards!)

Dominica said that the timing was perfect as the food was just the right temperature for her to sit down and eat as soon as she arrived.

After our meal we decided to take a little drive as the sun was out, the day was beautiful and we were already twenty minutes away from the house.  We have seen so little of Crete that we wanted to at least get to see a little bit of it.  So we decided to just drive east out of Rethymno on the main road, the same one that we had taken on Friday night, and see where it went.

Outside of the city we hopped onto the “highway” which is a funny thing to call it.  The biggest highway in all of Crete, the GR90 / E75 that connects the three biggest cities together in a straight line is smaller, by a bit, than the “highway” that I grew up on back home.  It is a two lane highway with moderate shoulders.  At some times it does not even have a centre line.  The fastest speeds that we saw posted are only eighty kilometres per hour, although people were routinely driving around one hundred and ten.

We made it about two thirds of the way to the capital before it started getting a little darker out and we knew that we would not get to see much more if we kept going and the girls were anxious to get back home.  So we turned around and drove back to Prines.  At least we got to see a little bit of the Crete coast line, which was gorgeous.  This was very much Crete as we imagined it, nearly desert-like rocky hills spilling down into the Aegean.  It was a nice, if short, drive.

We got back home and I set to trying to catch up with all of the work and posting and stuff that I had missed while being away for the most of the day.  It was probably after six when we were finally back to our village.  We managed to get a parking spot down by the church again.  We have not had to park in the far away space south of town for a while now.

Busy evening, not a lot of time to hang out after spending the day together doing errands around Crete.  Tomorrow will be quite busy as well.