Sheep Guarding Llama

Got up at six thirty this morning.  Just was not tired and was not getting any sleep.  So went down to the “office” and wrote for a while.

Happy sixteenth birthday to our niece Madeline today!

I got to play The Stanley Parable this afternoon, which is a game that I have been interested in for some time.  I played it for only half an hour or so, essentially “beating” the game.

I was at my desk until ten, then I went upstairs and went to bed and managed to sleep for two hours before Liesl decided that I had “slept too long” at two hours and tore the blankets off of the bed and made me get up.  So I was pretty sleepy all today.

It is Sunday today and we had planned to get up and go travelling today but Luciana said that her stomach hurt and so we decided, yet again, that we cannot go anywhere (we would later be very justified in this.)

I did a little writing this afternoon but not much.  Dominica made it a Gilmore Girls marathon day for herself and we really did not see her all day.  She was watching it when I got up and she was still watching it when I went to bed at night.

Liesl decided that she wanted to play The Stanley Parable today and she put way more time into it than I did.  She knows it from her YouTube gamer shows and knew a lot about it.  What a bizarre game for her to play.  She did a great job with it, though.

I set the girls up with a new Sega racing game today which turns out to be way better, better looking and more fun than the famous Nintendo racing game that we don’t have access to any longer.  Luciana has an easier time playing the Sega one and it does up to four players on Steam which is awesome.  So the girls can race against each other.

I spent the majority of the day camped out in the game room with my girls.  It was a daddy daughter evening.  We piled blankets onto the one bed and we made a blanket for, more or less, and called it our magical snuggle carriage.  We had a wonderful time just hanging out together.  Luciana was not up to doing very much and would sometimes watch Liesl play a video game and would sometimes watch something herself on her Kindle Fire.  Liesl spent most of the day playing Castaway Paradise.  She had played it before today but had not figured out how to “really” play it and had not really gotten into it.  Today I worked with her and showed her how to play and now she is completely in love with it.  She made it from level four to level nine and earned several badges.

I really like that Castaway Paradise teaches good values like getting experience points for helping others and cleaning up the island.  It also teaches about interest in banking and how the stock market works.  And it teaches about saving money up to buy things that she wants.  We played it for just hours and hours.

Tonight I got to play just a tiny bit of a game myself.  I literally waited the whole day and didn’t play anything until around two in the morning!  After hearing all of the hype around this week’s release of XCOM 2, I decided that I should try out the original XCOM.  I managed to get through the tutorial mission and the second mission (I chose to rescue Seattle) and I must say that it is looking like it is going to be a lot of fun.  I really enjoyed the first little bit that I got to play.  The story portion looks like it is going to be very enjoyable.

I got up to bed a little after three.  After getting so little sleep this morning, we made the girls sleep on the floor so that we would sleep better.  Liesl says that we really need to make sure that our next home has a bigger bed than this one.  Only have a double bed is not enough for our family.

Luciana went to bed long before anyone else.  She was not feeling the best all day.

We all slept in a lot today.  I got up and wrote for about an hour and was just headed to the game room to play something, I had not decided what yet, when Liesl beat me to it my thirty seconds and she spent the afternoon playing The Sims 3.  So I went to my desk and wrote for about seven hours hoping that, at some point, the room would be free.

The girls and I played some reindeer catch today.  It’s become one of Ciana’s favourite activities.  They have both improved a lot and are getting far better at catching.

Luciana asked to play Goat Simulator tonight.  Boy am I getting tired of that game.  We have logged twenty seven hours on it!  But it is one of the few games that we can play together.  She is actually quite good at it and does lots of the achievements on her own.

I played a tiny bit of Bookworm for a bit while we ate dinner.  Dominica and the girls were each watching their own shows so there was no family dinner, specifically.  Dominica made a corn and potato soup that was awesome tonight.  She and Liesl baked cheesy biscuits together, too.

The girls came in the game room after dinner and sat on the bed with me while I played Bookworm.

Then Dominica joined us and we played a little bit of Bookworm Adventures which is supposed to take place in ancient Greece, so it was perfect.

Then we played the last episode of the Blue Toad Murder Files and have finally finished that game.  We really enjoyed it and hope that they decide to make a second season of it, but it has been long enough since the original that that seems like it is not too likely.

Nearly up to the last of my backlog of SGL posts.  Dominica’s ankle is definitely improving.  She was able to handle going to the grocery store and pharmacy yesterday, although I brought the car as close to the house as possible so her total walking was very minimal and almost all on totally flat, smooth ground.  This evening, for the first time since she twisted it, she walked down to the corner store with me which is downhill  and on uneven ground – the same walk that caused her to twist it in the first place.  It has been nearly a month since she has made it to our corner store, having been unable to go the time that we had last attempted it.

She did pretty well, it was a tough walk for her, but she made it.  So it looks like she is on a long road to recovery.

Luciana talked me into more Goat Simulator today.  She just loves it when we play that game together.

I wrote and posted all day.  Then this evening for family game night we played the fifth and penultimate episode of the Blue Toad Murder Files.  We did much better tonight and the girls had a lot of fun playing with us.

After that Dominica and I played some Highrise Heroes again.  We tend to lose track of time when playing that.

Back on a more normal schedule today having gotten real sleep last night.  It has been cold much of the time that we have been in Greece but today is a nice, warm day and we have all of the windows open and are enjoying the sun and fresh air.

We all worked for a while this morning.  I did my writing, Dominica and Liesl did school.

This afternoon we needed to make a run to a pharmacy for some medicine.  We did some searching online and found that it looks like basic antibiotics are available over the counter in Greece so we are going to run to a pharmacy before going to see a doctor to see if we need to go to the doctor at all.    It would be so nice if things were really that easy.

We drove to the next town and went to the large pharmacy on the far side of town.  I knew exactly where it was after many times walking and driving by it, it is near our grocery store there, and it is a big location with its own parking lot (holds two cars) so it seemed like it would be the place to start.

It has been a while since we have all taken a trip together in the car.  It was almost a treat!

The pharmacy was great.  They were friendly, helpful, spoke English well and were able to get us what we needed right there and it was fast and not expensive at all.  Luciana was scared of going to see a doctor and so this helped a lot.  She equates doctors with getting shots.

That was quick, easy and painless.  So we stopped at the grocery store on the way back as well.  That made this a very convenient trip as we really needed to go to the big grocery store anyway.  We loaded up the trunk with food and went back home.

I had a busy evening of writing and did not manage to knock off from posting until one in the morning when Luciana and I played some Goat Simulator together.  Tonight we managed to get one of the elusive golden goats that sits way up on a power line!

 

As often happens for us here we all had problems getting to sleep last night.  Luciana got me up, just as I was drifting off, to go get her something from the main floor of the house. Once I did that I knew that falling back asleep was not in the cards so I just got up at a quarter after four in the morning.  I have learned that lesson.  Trying to sleep when you are not tired enough to fall asleep just wastes what little time you have neither sleeping nor doing the things that you want to do.  There are far better ways to spend your time.

I ended up feeling pretty decent and worked all night on writing and some Linux system updates that needed to be done.  It was a very productive morning.

I made the morning coffee around six!  Luciana came down very early in the morning, around nine which is very odd for her, and hung out with me for a while.  She ended up mostly camping out in front of the TV on the big chair and semi-napping there.

I had a busy day of writing and was tied up most of the day.

Late tonight Dominica and I got some time to play Highrise Heroes, which we are enjoying playing together.  Tonight we managed to beat one level with a single, awesome word!