Sheep Guarding Llama

Tuesday.  SGL is way behind and falling behind more and more.  I have been so busy with writing and posts and keeping up with stuff around the house, especially now that Dominica is not able to do very much so I get interrupted by the girls heavily throughout the day and really, there is very little to tell.  Right now our lives in Greece have become rather mundane.  We always have the risk of just staying home and never leaving the house, Dominica would happily be a hermit if she was allowed to be, and with her ankle being broken there is really no means for us to do anything. So our days are very much repetitious for the time being.

I have started writing a book, of sorts.  I am doing it online and writing posts or articles instead of chapters to make a living book on learning Linux System Administration.  I have several of the articles done as of today and I am getting a good reception and people seem to be very interested in the idea.  This is something that I should have done long ago but there was just never time.  Hopefully I can manage to keep working on this.  It requires rather a lot of work but if I can get one article out per day, it will move along pretty quickly.

I got word from the job that I had a few months ago that things have gotten pretty bad there and that my decision to leave when I did was definitely the right one.  The culture has been going downhill and the company is, as I had suspected from the bait and switch that got pulled on us while we were in Spain right after I had started, not what it had been meant to be and they are failing to be able to retain staff, are violating labour laws, not living up to basic obligations, etc.  Not that things are “bad”, but a job like that where you voluntarily take a huge cut in pay over market average because the job is supposed to be amazing kind of needs to actually be amazing.  I think it probably was amazing but the management failure right days before I started seems to have gone very badly and they have never managed to figure out how to remedy that and now it is starting to spiral down.  The team I was on was supposed to have grown dramatically while I was there and they just kept talking about all the people that they were going to hire.  Instead of hiring, they didn’t manage to fill my position after I left, another person left the team, another is leaving the team and now they are unable to hire at all and just attrictioning out.  And even with all the extra people never managed to do the work that two of us were expecting to have done by last summer – but the internal politics made it all stagnate and nothing happen whatsoever.

So, I feel bad for them a little, but mostly I am very relieved to have made the decision to go separate ways.  It never felt like a fully healthy environment, something was always wrong.  And now, half a year later, the people who were most passionate about how good it was are sure it is not good enough to stay at either.  I would have been incredibly unhappy had we moved to California for it, even if it had only stayed as good as it had been in the past!

I ended up working on writing and posting all day, late into the night.  Did some grocery shopping today.  Other than that, never took a break from attempting to be productive until quite late.

The girls beg every night to get to play Puzzler World now.  So we played a little tonight and racked up a few achievements.  The game has over eleven hundred puzzles in it, so we won’t be completely the game any time soon.  It was a great investment.  Each game was like one tenth of a penny!  Good for our family game nights.

Monday morning, it is bright and sunny and nearly seventy degrees here on Crete.  We cannot believe at all that our first month in Greece is already over.  How did this happen?  Where did the time go?  It feels like we just got here.

Dominica is nominally better today, but only just.  She is still not walking anywhere and not going to be for quite some time.  She is not needing help so much to get around the main floor of the house, now.

Opened up the house and got light and air in today.  So nice to be able to open the back door and be wide open to the outside.

I worked all day, lots to do.  Dominica was in the game room most of the day.  The Sims Medieval has been the mainstay the last few days.  I barely get time to do anything as she is unable to move around to do anything other than living in the game room.

We were hopeful but Dominica’s ankle is still terrible today.  It’s Sunday so just a lazy day at home for us since travelling is out of the question.  Getting out to see the ruins at Knossos seems like it is getting harder and harder to do.  We’ve been here on Crete a full month as of today and we have not had a chance to go anywhere, yet.

Like yesterday, since Dominica is immobilized, she is set up in the game room.  She has been sleeping in there too, since she cannot climb the stairs.  So the girls have been sleeping with me upstairs and Dominica has been alone downstairs.  Yesterday she played The Sims 3 basically all day.  Today, since she has nothing to do but game, I picked up The Sims Medieval for her and we, after tons of work, got it up and running for her so she has been playing that as well.  It requires installing through Origin rather than through Steam, which is confusing and very annoying.  How do non-IT people use EA games at all?

I had to walk down to the taverna to return their Tupperware this afternoon.

The girls got me to play more Minecraft PE with them today.  We are having a blast with that.

Tonight we played Puzzler World with the girls for a bit of a family game night.  They have played it a tiny bit before but this time both girls really got into it.  Liesl is now doing sudoku and link-a-pix puzzles all by herself and Luciana is doing fitword puzzles.  This game is great for us.  We can do it all together as a family with Dominica and I doing the hard word puzzles and the girls having lots of easy stuff that they can do, too.  And Liesl being able to do sudoku is amazing.  She picked it up really quickly.

Status on Dominica’s ankle today is that she is slightly improved and can hobble around when necessary but she cannot walk on it flat yet and is still going to be in bed all day.  This sprain or twist is definitely worse than the one in Seville was last year.

So it is Saturday and we are not going to be travelling this weekend.  Or, I would guess, any time soon.  This puts rather a damper on our plans.  We are already talking about scaling back all of our travel plans and only seeing Crete while we are here and not taking any time to see mainland Greece.  Which is disappointing but really, we have limited time for just travelling around anyway.

I got Minecraft Pocket Edition set up today so that the girls and I could play it together online on the PocketMine server that I have running now.  We played for hours, it was so much fun.  This is the first time that we have been able to play any game all together online like this.  Luciana used Dominica’s laptop, I used the Fire TV and Liesl used one of the Fire tablets.  Being able to build stuff together in a shared, persistent game world is super fun.  The girls were so happy that we got this working.  This is going to be great for us as a family.

Tonight I walked down and ordered dinner at the taverna down the street and they delivered dinner up to the house.  It was, as expected, completely amazing.  They even delivered it in their own, personal Tupperware that I need to bring back to them tomorrow!

I woke up at eight, but talked myself into staying in bed until more like ten.  I was the first one up but Dominica was up not long after me.  Her ankle is no better today, it is exactly the same as it was yesterday.  She can still not walk in any way and is laid up in the gaming room for the day.

Since Dominica is stuck with nothing to do but use the Steam system to play games we bought The Sims 3: Supernatural expansion for her (Liesl has been asking for it too) full price so that she would have tons of additional content to play while she is stuck in there.

It is a truly gorgeous day today.  As we have been so shut up for a month and since we cannot travel, I at least ran around and opened many of the windows and the back door so that we would have fresh air in the house.  Boy was that nice.

Dominica had to stay in bed all day.  My day was pretty busy and there was no way for me to concentrate on anything as I had to take care of the girls all day. We discovered a new source of games for them, Go Girl Games, or something like that.  Simple web games, but they love them.

Dominica spent the whole day playing The Sims 3.  She forgot to save, though, and a crash caused her to lose pretty much half of her day of gameplay.

I went to the grocery store this evening to get some supplies and then I walked down to the taverna to get dinner.  I was the only person getting dinner there, so the owner called his come to come cook and sent me home and delivered the food up to our house an hour later.  Greece is awesome.

We watched a little Keeping Up Appearances before I went and played games with the girls for an hour or two.