Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

It is Monday and everyone is a bit tired after the weekend.  Luciana is feeling just fine today, no signs of being sick at all.  We are very happy about that.  Nothing serious, just a simple infection.  And she has the right medicine now.

I got up and posted and wrote for a while, then we were off as a family to go grocery shopping.  We have pretty much run out of foodstuffs at home and our extended (non-staple) foods are pretty much depleted.  So this was our big grocery run and possibly our last big one while in Greece (it is amazing how quickly we get to the point that we have to start pulling back on food in the house!)

We started with a stop to the pharmacy where we needed to get more of the antibiotic for Luciana.  We had only gotten one bottle of it when I was there on Saturday but we need three.  So we made a quick and easy stop there.

We stopped at our favourite bakery heading down the hill and picked up some bread and profiterole.

Then we went down to the Lidl at the big intersection north of our village sitting just north of the highway.  We did our big shopping there as they have great prices and many of the products that we want, like Dominica’s favourite muesli.  We did a bunch of shopping there.

On the way back to the village we stopped at the fourth grocery that we use and grabbed the peanut butter that the girls like (or at least the one that they put up with) as that is the only place that regularly stocks it. Then it was back home for us.

A rather long outing of grocery shopping, but successful and we will not likely be doing anything like that for the rest of the time that we are in Greece.  It will be all small things from here on out, we need to make sure that the fridge and pantry are cleaned out before it is time for us to move on to Romania in six or seven weeks.

Luciana is “all better” today.  No signs of fever at all since before the hospital on Friday night.  She is perky and happy and just wanted to spend today playing.

Liesl played Castaway Paradise for a bit this morning.  She continues to love the game.  She can lose hours with that game.

Dominica and I did a little looking for games online today.  We spent some time talking about how we could use video game design as part of the girls’ homeschool curriculum and I was taking her through video game studio products available via Steam like RPGMaker.  She was very excited about what tools were available so we looked through lots of products and then tons of games that were commercially made with RPGMaker.

Once we had the video game room to ourselves, Dominica and I took some time this afternoon to play Highrise Heroes together.  We played a lot and are down into the last sixteen levels or so!  We are really enjoying that game but we have run into a few levels that are insanely difficult.  We had a few that took a few tries and we are currently stuck on one that we cannot get through at all.  The jump in difficulty in being able to even progress to the next level is dramatic and doesn’t fit well with the initial feeling of the game.

Luciana insisted in playing a game for a little while.  So we played some Goat Simulator.  It is amazing how good she has gotten at that game.  She is very adept at playing it and has figured out some cool tricks that I never thought of.  The roller coaster throws you out so you can’t ride it, for example, but she figured out that if you lick it you get to ride it while being thrown out and flying in the air by your tongue.  It is hilarious.

Once she was done playing Dominica played Millenium which is an RPGMaker game from a moderate sized game developer so that she could see the kinds of things that can be made with the tool sets.  We snuggled on one of the beds in the game room, the only seating that we have, and played that for probably two hours until we were getting pretty sleepy.  Then we played Secrets of a Lost Planet for a while which started off like it might be okay but quickly devolved into total nonsense and appears that about five minutes into development the writer(s) must have walked out and left everyone unsure what to do so they just took stock hidden object images that they had available and stuck them wherever they fit in a sci-fi adventure game.  It’s nuts.

By the end of the day we had spent nearly the entire day in the game room.  It was a nice change.  Relaxing and a chance to actually do something fun.

We were all very tired here this morning in the Miller household.  But thank goodness we woke up and Luciana was feeling well.  No fever today at all and she was her regular, happy self.

My first order of business was driving to the pharmacy in the next town to get her antibiotics and more of Dominica’s acid reflux medication.  Like our other European medical experiences, this was easy and cheap.  No wait whatsoever, had the medicine the moment that I walked in the door and the antibiotics was just four Euros and Dominica’s acid reflux stuff was thirteen Euros for more than double the volume that she gets for seventeen dollars at the CVS in Texas.  So a bit better than half the price!

It was a lovely day, but only I went out for the drive.  I got back and Luciana took her medicine right away.  Then I went to the grocery store and got us supplies for dinner.  Mostly potatoes so that Dominica can make her corn and potato soup again.

Liesl played Castaway Paradise for a while this afternoon.  She made huge progress and opened up new areas of the game.  She was super excited about that.  Luciana just hung out in her little spot under my work loft and watched videos until she fell asleep.  She is feeling much better but is still pretty run down and needs a lot of sleep.  But she is very clearly on the road to recovery.

I did a bit of writing and stuff this afternoon.  Got three new “sections” of my Linux Administration book done today.  Working hard today to catch up on stuff as yesterday was basically a lost day completely.

The girls were both on the tired side.  Luciana slept much of the afternoon.  Dominica was pretty run down, too.  She made dinner, made sure that Luciana got her second dose of medicine and then went to bed to try to get some sleep by ten!

The girls watching Glitter Force together on Netflix this evening.  That is Liesl’s new favourite show.

Around eleven this evening our beautiful, mild day turning into a crazy storm.  Some rain and wind that was blowing stacks of metal chairs around outside.  We dropped from about seventy two degrees during the day to fifty five at night in about one hour.  Storms can roll in very quickly when you live on the sea.

What is really amazing is that it was a ninety degree difference between us here in Greece and back home in New York less than a week ago.  Watertown, New York, we heard, was the world’s coldest city one day, even!  Everyone back home was buried under snow and bitter cold.  Now it is five degrees warmer there than here, right now!

The storm lasted into the night.  All of our metal chairs outside were blown all around and the noise was incredible.  Living out on an island does make for a lot of wind potential.