Sheep Guarding Llama

Today started out awesomely.  It was bright and sunny and we all managed to get up at a great time in the morning.  No late sleeping in for us.

The phone rang around nine thirty so that the car rental company could talk to us to arrange fixing the car.  They said that they would arrive in about half an hour so I got up and got dressed and did a little checking of the news online before they arrived.

I had to go out and walked them up the street to find the car.  It is impossible to describe where things are here as there are no street names or anything of the sort.

They brought three people with them to get the car!  They jumped it and then drove it down to the city so that they could change out the battery for us, just in case.  They had it for about an hour and a half before bringing it back for us.

It was a good start to the day.  Great sun, warm weather, the car was fixed, I was getting good writing done.  Dominica and I even, for the very first time since we have been on Crete, went out onto the terrace with our bread and oil and just relaxed up there enjoying the warm sun and seeing the sea on one side and the snow capped mountains on the other. It was glorious.

Then Dominica and I went for a quick walk down to the corner store to grab a few quick groceries when disaster struck: the vicious German shepard that lives on the side of the road by the church lunged at her as we walked by.  She knew that he was there but was not paying attention.  He is, of course, behind a study metal fence and had no means of getting to her whatsoever, but he startles her pretty significantly.  It was just enough that she stepped away from him without looking and twisted her ankle on some uneven asphalt and came down hard on the road.  Hard enough that she scraped about four square inches of her left knee and was bleeding.  But that wasn’t important, the terribly sprained ankle is the issue.  Same ankle that she came down on in Spain almost a year ago.  She lay in the street for a bit before we were able to hobble back up to the house.

This is probably a worse sprain that the one a year ago.  Dominica is in rough shape.  We set her up in the living room with her ankle elevated and iced.  It will be weeks before she can walk again.

I had a busy day of projects that was made far busier by needing to take care of everything that Dominica normally does for the girls during the day and needing to get stuff for Dominica a little bit as well.  We won’t be travelling tomorrow like we had planned, obviously.

Dominica spent the remainder of the day playing The Sims 3.  The girls both slept up in the master bedroom with me, but both, because they are the crazy sisters, decided to sleep on the floor together, so I got the bed completely to myself.

We are hopeful that Dominica will be improved tomorrow.  We will have no idea as to the state of her ankle until then.

The sun was gone today and we are back to rainy and dreary.  That did not last long.  It was great yesterday.  So, of course, we are not dealing with the car today because that would mean taking it for a journey to make sure that it was charged and we do not want to bundle up the girls and try to take them somewhere when it is cold and rainy, especially if we were to go try to see ruins or something.

We did need some supplies today, though, as we are out of money having spent the last of our cash last night on groceries.  So shortly after getting up I set out and walked to the far side of our next door village to get cash from the nearest ATM and then I went grocery shopping at the big grocery there and got a few bags of groceries to carry back to our house.  That took some time but we are now stocked and don’t have to worry about money for a while.  One ATM run can last us a couple weeks.

While I was out Dominica tried to call to line up someone to deal with our car and figured out, while doing so, that the reason that we have not had service for our phones is not because there is no service, but because our phones had been shut off!  So she called Danielle and Danielle looked into it and apparently T-Mobile decided that while we were on a traveller plan for phones, using them in places like Crete was just too suspicious so they decided to shut the account off, you know, to protect us.  Ugh.  So they is getting resolved.

I had to go to the local corner store this evening, too.  While I was there Dominica managed to talk to Greenways from where we have rented our car and they said that they would come up in the morning and take care of everything.  That will be much less stressful.  So we are feeling good.  We have cash, the car is being dealt with and our phones are back on.

We made frozen pizzas for dinner, since I had gotten them at the grocery.  Just a quiet evening.

Tonight we tried letting the girls stay up a little later to see if it would help them get to sleep faster, but they had to hang out with us in the media room and watch Keeping Up Appearances.  They agreed and it worked well.  We had some great family time watching a show that helped us to all wind down and relax.

A very bright and sunny day today.  It is wonderful.  We got up and it was a little late and we decided that we did not have the energy to deal with the car today so we are going to hold off on doing that until tomorrow.

We had a rather relaxing day.  The girls worked on school all day.  I worked on writing and projects.  We did not go anywhere.  The sun was out but we only enjoyed it in a cursory manner.

It is a dreary, rainy Monday morning.  Exactly my kind of weather.  It was so cold and dreary that we decided that we would not try to jump the car this morning because that would mean packing up the girls and going for a long drive in the cold and the rain to wherever it is that we might want to go, which because it is a Monday is very likely to be closed anyway.  So that did not seem like it would be a very good idea all around.  We will just put it off until tomorrow.  At this point it really does not seem to matter one way or another.

I ended up spending the whole day working up in the office loft doing posting and writing and some technical projects.  Dominica watched a new Canadian television show that she is newly addicted to for a bit of the day.

This evening I went down with the last remaining main bit of cash that we have left and did some grocery shopping.  That was fifty Euros of groceries.  We have a few Euros left, but not much.  Without the car, the only way to get cash is for me to walk to Atsipopoulo which is not terrible, but not close, either.  I have been hoping to not have to do that but it is looking likely that I will need to.  We have made it for nearly a full month with only hitting the ATM twice in all of this time and due to a combination of the local withdrawl amounts and our bank policy back in the States we are unable to take out more than about $305 each time meaning that we have only gone through about $610 of cash in a month which is less than our normal ATM withdrawl amounts would suggest.  Dominica even remarked at how little we go to the ATM here in Greece than we did while living in Nicaragua where it seemed to be every four days and we were taking out larger amounts, too.

Dominica made a delicious tuna casserole for dinner tonight.  The girls were not thrilled, but the adults enjoyed it.  We watched a little of Are You Being Served? tonight, too. We were hoping that Liesl would enjoy watching it with us, but she was not interested and left to do something on her own.

We got the girls off to bed by eleven.  They did not go to sleep, though, until easily two thirty.  Dominica stayed up until two watching her show and had no idea that the time was passing but then had insomnia and was easily awake until five or six.  I was up until around five working and then off to bed.  The girls are in our room again tonight with Liesl on the floor.

We overslept this morning.  Dominica did not realize that Luciana had managed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and was feeling better after a few days of being constipated and that we would be able to travel this morning so she did not jump out of bed as early as she had intended to.  So when we got up in the late morning we were in a rush to attempt to get everyone ready, out the door and off to Knossos to go see the ruins.

We scrambled like crazy, got showered, dressed, packed, out the door, loaded up the car and…. I had left the lights on last week and the car batter was completely dead.  We are not going anywhere today.

We all went back to the house and decided that the kids would just have a play day.  Maybe we will try the car again on the morrow.  I walked down to the corner store and got bread, milk and a few items that we were out of and asked about getting the car jumped.  The owner said that I should come back in the morning and his wife would call someone for us to come and jump the car.  So that will likely be easy.

I did some posting and a bunch of site work today.  Then I took some time and played Portal up till the final challenge of level eighteen which is nauseatingly difficult and impossible for me with the Steam Controller.  I will have to save it to try with a mouse at some point. Maybe that way I will be able to do it, but as it is it goes from slightly challenging to impossible all at once and there is just no way for me to do it.

After that I played some Hexcells Infinite, I am now seventy five percent of the way to the big “Infinite Sixty” badge.  No idea why I want that, but it will make me feel good to earn.  And I finished playing Quell.  Liesl came in to join me while I played that and snuggled.  She helped me with the game but we were near the end of it so the puzzles were really hard.

Our cell phone service has been down for over a week now.  We have no idea what is going on.  Because we never drive anywhere we have no idea what might be the issue.  Maybe our local tower is down.  Maybe there is an issue.  Maybe it works the moment we are outside of town.  We use wifi at the house and have an old fashioned land line for emergencies so it has not been a big deal, we never make calls with the cell service anyway.  Hopefully it works when we are away from the house.

We were all feeling lazy today so it was fish sticks and veggie sticks (like fish sticks but filled with corn, peas and other veggies) for dinner.  It was quite yummy.

We actually got the kids off to bed just after ten thirty tonight!  We have, for over a week now, had a bedtime alarm.  First an alarm goes off to let them know that it is about forty five minutes before time for bed.  Then another alarm goes off when it is actually bed time.  This has been working great.  Before they would stay up way too late and be caught off guard when suddenly it was time to head to bed and be upset that they had not done something that they had been pushing off like eating or watching a video.

Thinking back to when I was their ages, we always had very obvious prime time television that put us into a standard groove.  When I was Luciana’s age, it was seven o’clock, once the news was over, for younger viewing.  When I was Liesl’s age the shows ran from eight until ten five nights a week.  That prime time slot made it super easy to have a set schedule in the evening.  Get everything done by eight, sit down and it was Who’s the Boss, Growing Pains, Alf, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Family Ties, Cheers, Taxi or whatever.  Two hours, most nights, and you knew each half hour clearly until the night was over and it was time to go to bed.  Or get ready for bed or whatever.  It gave the evening some perspective.  With video games and YouTube and Netflix they do not have that at all now.  So the alarms help, in a small way, to provide that.  Looking at it from that perspective makes it make a lot of sense to me.

No late night for us.  It was after midnight, but not long afterwards that Dominica and I went to bed.  Maybe we are onto a good schedule now?  It is Luciana sleeping on the floor tonight. Now the girls are competing for who gets to sleep on the floor.  They are both like me and like the hard floor and unlimited space but having everyone nearby.  Liesl is sad that she doesn’t get to be on the floor but gives up the spot to Ciana willingly.  Ciana dislikes being crushed in the middle of the bed whereas Liesl enjoys the extra snuggles.