Sheep Guarding Llama

I am starting to get SGL caught back up.  It is Saturday and we continue to be house-bound.  Dominica has not managed to go anywhere outside of the house since she hurt her ankle and is at least able to get up and down the stairs now, and is starting to improve, but not enough to venture out.

Mostly a quiet day.  The kids and Dominica played games, I wrote.  We just stayed home.

Only ended up buying two more games from Steam today: Lume and Lumino City.

Tonight the family all hunkered into the game room and Dominica and I played episode four of the Blue Toad Murder Files.  We did a bit better on episode four than we did on episode three, but we are still not very good at it.  Still a great game and we are way more into the story, now.

After that, I started playing Highrise Heroes and after not too long Dominica came in and joined me.  We ended up having a lot of fun playing it.  It’s a word puzzle game mixed with a ridiculously weird story that goes along with it.

I was the first one up today at eleven.  Liesl was up after me and came down to the game room and we played video games together for a little while before anyone else woke up.  We tried playing Snuggle Bus which is one of the forty or fifty new games that we got last night in the Steam Lunar New Year’s Sale.  It was fun and Liesl was able to play it herself pretty easily and made it through the tutorial and all of the easy levels on her own in no time!

Dominica was up before noon and we spent a bit of time this morning going through the Steam Lunar New Year’s Sale together to see what we wanted.  There is a ton of new stuff on sale this morning that was not on sale last night – the big thing being all of the DLC for The Sims 3 which Dominica and the girls have been waiting for, as well as the DLC for The Sims Medieval.  So we loaded up on that and set up the Steam system to download as it is sixteen gigabytes of new content to download just for TS3!!  That is going to be an entire day process (thank goodness we have twice the Internet speeds here on Crete than we have when in Texas.)

I did a bit of writing and posting today.  I got quite a few articles in my series on Linux System Administration written today.  That is going to be a project that will go on for a long time before I have accumulated everything that is needed for it to be a real guide, but I am getting a good start under way.

One of my projects today was building out an ELK server on our Scale HC3 cluster in the lab.  I’ve had a few ELK servers in the past but this is my first one built from scratch and running internally.  This was a good Saturday project.

Everyone was very impatient for all of The Sims 3 downloads to happen.  It was a whole day of explaining to the girls that the game would not work again until all of the updates were done.  So of course all three of them insistent on watching streaming videos instead, mostly all at the same time, using the bandwidth instead of letting the updates download making it take at least twice as long as it needed to.

Liesl has gotten hooked on watching the classic episodes of Laverne & Shirley which we have introduced her to this week.  Luciana does not like them and prefers when we watch Keeping Up Appearances because she likes the “mean lady.”  Hulu has a few select episodes of Laverne & Shirley and of Happy Days, which we have not tried yet.  It is very depressing that they only have a few episodes from each season because the story is not continuous in any way and you only get quick glimpses of what the show was like over time.  It’s maybe three episodes per season.  It would be really nice if they had the whole things.  There is so much great television out there that no one seems to be willing to license for anyone to watch.  What a waste.  To believe that we live in 2016 and have, as a society, lost access to a huge wealth of social and historical entertainment with great significance to earlier generations.

Around midnight the downloads completed and Dominica moved into the game room for several hours.  There is so much new content, it is overwhelming.  She is loving all of the new gaming opportunities.  The girls are anxious to get a chance to play it tomorrow.  They all like that game so much, they all want to see the new stuff.

We got another huge batch of games on sale today.  Today’s crop includes: Detective Case and Clown Bot in Murder in the Hotel Lisbon, Khaba, It’s Spring Again, Cheesecake Cool Conrad, The Sims 3 Ambitions, The Sims 3 Late Night, The Sims Medieval: Pirates & Nobles, The Sims 3 Seasons, The Sims 3 Pets, The Sims 3 Generations, The Sims 3 Into the Future, The Sims 3 University Life, The Sims 3 Island Paradise, Ferrum’s Secrets: Where is Grandpa?, 100% Orange Juice, 15 Days, Square Heroes, Gumboy Tournament, Snuggle Truck, Type:Rider, Fortix 2, Reversion, Way to Go, Equal Sums Collection, Big Secret of a Small Town, Secret Order 2, 9 Clues 2, Portal of Evil, Ladra, City of Fools and Al Emmo’s Postcards from Anozira.  Mostly all games for Dominica today.

Today is the beginning of the Lunar New Year’s Sale on Steam.  Oh boy.  And it is Friday, the week is nearly over.  Dominica is still not really able to walk, but she is getting around the house slowly.

It was a busy day of writing and posting for me, not a lot of time to relax.  These days can slip by before I even blink.  I can’t believe how  fast time has been flying since we got to Greece.  I feel like the sun is going down before I’m even done with my coffee!

The family all played video games all day.  They pretty much just camped out in the game room and I was left to my own devices for the day.  Pretty productive.  I have been doing a bit of work on my Linux Administration book this week, it is making good progress.  It will, of course, take years to get through.

Steam was so busy today that their site was actually down pretty much all day here.

Once the site was up I went a little crazy tonight.  I’ve had so many games on watch lists for so long.  We got thirty new games including Flock, Torchlight, Dear Esther, the Drakensang series, Lexica, NightSky, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s mine, The Room, FootLOL, The Bridge, Tiny Brains, MouseCraft, Nihilumbra, Shu’s Garden, A Sirius Game, Unium, Cubot, Supreme League of Patriots, Fox & Flock, Swapperoo, Defend Your Life, The Musketeers: Victoria’s Quest, Highrise Heroes, Loop, INK, Cross Set, Monochroma, The Chosen and Half Dead.  I might be a little bit out of control.

Dominica got up this morning and updated out Steam machine with the new Steam update which also updated the Steam controllers.  They have dimmer lights on them, play different sounds and have travelling configurations on them now.  A nice upgrade.

I spent the morning writing and posting, as usual. The girls talked me into playing Minecraft PE with them, it’s rare that we find time to do this but it is so much fun playing it online as a family.

The Minecraft PE clients on our devices updated today, breaking the PocketMine server.  We are really bummed.  The girls are quite upset. So no more Minecraft PE for us until PocketMine is able to get things set up to work with the latest version of the clients. No fun.  We barely got into playing that and now we have lost it.

I had a long conference call today and then wrote all evening.  Tonight the girls and I played Puzzler World for a few hours together.  Liesl is getting much better at sudoku.

Wednesday.  Dominica is improving, but the improvements are ridiculously tiny, day by day.  You can barely tell.  I think, in many ways, it is more that she is getting used to dealing with the pain rather than it actually getting any better.

Today Luciana made me play Goat Simulator with her.  She loves this game on its own but mostly she had decided that she loves playing it with me.  So she makes me go in the game room and she sits on my lap and we play two player on it.  There is nothing to really do in it, so it is all just running around and being goofy.  It really is just about the perfect game for a four year old.  You get to do ridiculous things, there is a ton to just run around and see and there is no way to die or fail so you get to just keep playing and being silly.  She has so much fun.

Was very busy this morning installing Windows systems for lab testing.

Dominica was able to do school today with the girls.  That was a long day for her and her ankle is really hurting after that.  She played some more Sims Medieval once school was done for the day.