Today was a rather slow day for the Miller household. Luciana and I got to sleep in a little bit this morning, till around nine, while Dominica and Liesl were up at eight, showered, had breakfast and were starting school before nine. Liesl is doing a full school day today: a full, structured, no time off except a thirty minute lunch, six to seven hour intense school day.
School with Liesl actually went amazingly well. She had a great attitude all day and made it through tons and tons of stuff. She did quite a bit of her school work with me. It gives her a change of pace to bring her ready or word cards or whatever up to my loft office and sit with me doing them while I do some writing. That way Dominica gets a break, too. But Liesl and I actually enjoy doing the reading stuff together so it works out great.
Luciana did some school and spent a bunch of time with me in the office. Luciana got in a couple of hours playing The Sims 3 while Dominica and Liesl were doing school, too.
This evening we got the girls off to bed nice and early. Dominica and I set up the Blue Toad Murder Files and knocked out episode three. We are now halfway done with the series.
Luciana was the first one awake this morning at eight o’clock. She was so excited to get her chance to really play The Sims 3 today that she got up with less than seven hours of sleep! I have never seen her do that before. The rest of us attempted to keep sleeping and Luciana tried to talk us into getting up because it was morning. She was not going to be successful until the slats in our bed moved and fell out causing the bed to fall. That woke us up very quickly! We were lucky, they had only moved and fallen, nothing had broken. So a few minutes later the bed was repaired, but everyone was wide awake now.
So first thing was to head down to the gaming room and set Luciana up. She played for probably two hours before she decided that she was done and migrated to the living room, put on some IHasCupquake and promptly fell asleep. Liesl took over in the gaming room and played The Sims 3 for several more hours until the late afternoon.
I had a productive morning up in my office with the quiet afforded by Dominica napping in the game room with Liesl and Luciana napping all morning. So the house was more or less mine.
Sun came out this morning after it rained all night. Still chilly but bright. The heat is on in the house.
I started attempting to work through a two plus year backlog of private messages on Spiceworks. I have well over a thousand messages there. It is going to take forever to catch up on them.
Today ended up being a really tough day for Liesl with home school. For a while it has been a struggle to get her to want to do it and she fights and complains. Today she said that she is never in the mood to do school. So we decided that we have to crack down quite a bit. Starting tonight she has to be in bed early and she is getting woken up tomorrow early (ish) and school is going to be an all day affair, more school that if she was in a classroom without any breaks and without the flexible schedule. That will be good for Dominica, too, who has a tendency to use Liesl’s desire for a flexible schedule to procrastinate herself and both she and Liesl are unhappy having school being the last thing remaining in the day instead of knocked out in the morning. So tomorrow is going to be interesting.
I played a few rounds of Quell before going to bed. It is good. I am going to enjoy working through that series of puzzle games.
The cold and rainy weather continued on today from yesterday. At no point did we drop to freezing but it was very close and very damp. Aching joints weather. We really appreciate the heated floors on the ground floor of the house. They are just magical.
Today is a holiday back in the States and for whatever reason Dominica decided to give Liesl the day off from school. So today was almost entirely a video game day for her. After a long time of asking for it, and after having played The Sims Unlimited on her Amazon Fire tablet since last night, this morning we set her up with The Sims 3 on our Steam laptop so that she could play the full thing. This took a while to set up but once it was ready it ran really well.
Liesl totally loves playing The Sims 3. She has no interest in the version on her tablet any more. She played for many hours, easily six hours on it. Sadly she spent two hours setting up her first characters and did so so slowly that she never got to a point where she could do an initial save and the game crashed and she had to start over. She was very sad at that point.
Since today was a holiday, the Grice kids were home from school and we managed to get them to install Minecraft Pocket Edition and try out playing it online with the new server. Everyone was able to get on and it worked great except none of us had any idea how things were supposed to work and no one was able to find each other in the huge game world so it did not do what we had expected it to do. We have to learn more about how Minecraft is supposed to work before we try that again. The technology is working great, it is the ability to play the game that we are struggling with. Having a server-based game world is new for everyone. Not one of our kids or their cousins had ever even attempted that before so this was quite new for them.
I did some work today but kept it a little lighter than a normal day. I mostly worked on the obvious follow up project to yesterday’s PocketMine Server. Today I built a full Minecraft Server for the regular Java edition of Minecraft. This was not a hard project at all, but I have never installed Minecraft before so it was a good, if short, learning experience. It is pretty surprising it was how easy it was to set up and how well it ran with minimal resources when a company that specifically tried to sell Minecraft server instances that I dealt with a year ago could not, even with their engineering team involved, get a single working instance up due to an inability to address resource bottlenecks.
Luciana Eating Bread at the Olive Wood in Prines, Crete
Tonight we decided to go out to dinner at the Olive Wood around the corner, again. The food was so amazing on Friday night and while we were there the owner made a point of saying that his mother was going to make stuffed vegetables on Monday and we did not want to skip a night when we knew that the dinner was going to be vegetarian! It was super late by the time that we got out of the house, it was at least eight when we left! It was tough to want to go out because it was late and we really did not feel like leaving the house but we did not want to have them make food for us and us not be there either and did not want to pass up the chance for stuffed veggies. So we made ourselves do it.
Happy Liesl Having Dinner at the Olive Wood
It was a cold rain in the dark as we walked down the hill to main street (or whatever it is called.) The taverna was full but immediately people jumped up from tables to make room for us. Having kids has its advantages. We were the only ones eating, most everyone was just sitting around watching the football game.
Stuffed Veggies, baked potato and olives at the Olive Wood, Prines, Crete, Greece
Dinner was awesome again tonight. Green salad again and the same fried cheese and zucchini fritters. The girls begged for another omelet so the owner made one just for them. We got pom frete tonight which we did not get to try the other night. So good, just how my dad likes them. And then the stuffed vegetables were amazing. Best that I have ever had. We had a decanter of wine as well, with dinner.
After dinner, the same as we had done on Friday night, we had the traditional Turkish and southern Greek after dinner aperitif of raki.
After dinner we walked back home and it was almost time for the girls’ “getting ready for bed alarm.” So they watched a little YouTube on their Amazon Fires and were off to bed. I played maybe forty five minutes of Train Simulator 2016 and was off to bed myself.
Sunday. I got up and started by day with a quiet bit of Squarecells. It’s a great way to get your brain to wake up in the morning. Peaceful and relaxing yet invigorating. Makes you have to think.
Luciana got up early and came down to play Goat Simulator with me. She is so cute how she likes to play this game with me. We just run all over the place and blow things up. It is a perfect game for her as there is no objective and you never really get hurt.
Playing Goat Simulator with Ciana
Today’s big project for me is building a PocketMine Server so that the kids can all play Minecraft Pocket Edition (the version that comes on the Amazon Fires, iPads, iPhones, the Fire TV and the Windows 10 Edition) with each other as a multiplayer thing.
That took a bit of the day, especially as I am not familiar with Minecraft at all, but I got it working and it seems to work really well. We were able to test it in the house using the Fires and the Fire TV. It works and we can get the girls into a game. The nice thing about having a server is that their game world is persistent and it is shared so that they can play together rather than each playing their own, disconnected, game. If this works as planned, and it should since we are connecting remotely to a server in New York and not running anything out of the house, their cousins should be able to all connect from their Amazon Fires as well letting all six of the cousins play Minecraft Pocket Edition online together, which is very cool. When they are in Texas they often see Garrett and Clara playing online with a friend on the PS3. Now they can all play together. Playing on the tablets is a little weak, but on the Fire TV it works beautifully just like the PS3 version, maybe better, and the new Windows 10 Edition Beta looks to be like that. If we only had multiple Fire TVs, lol.
The girls did not play Minecraft tonight, but it is ready for them when they are ready to do it. Now that there is a server, maybe I will try playing it myself and see what this game is all about.
It is Saturday, again. Every weekend we have these grand plans of getting up early and setting out to see Crete and do exciting things. But by the time that it is the weekend we are worn out, looking forward to getting some rest and more interested in just relaxing around the house. And so goes this weekend as well.
I was up pretty early today, myself, and the girls were up too, before Dominica was. The girls and I used the morning to ourselves to play video games together all morning. We had a great time. They are addicted to Goat Simulator, Minecraft and a few other games. They have really gotten into video gaming big time. Our new Steam setup has been helping with that quite a lot. This morning I got Goat Simulator loaded onto the Amazon Fire TV in the living room, too. That way the girls are still able to get a Goat Simulator fix even when someone is in the media room using the big gaming system for more… interesting games.
I got Minecraft Windows 10 Edition, which appears to be the Pocket Edition but rewritten in JavaScript, set up on Dominica’s Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro for Luciana to use because the full Java based Minecraft just can’t run reliably there. Between Lenovo’s shoddy setup and the crappy Intel HD graphics system the machine is just not stable. I think that, after today, Dominica is finally at a point where she is going to consider just doing away with it. It does not meet our needs well at all and is something that we would never have bought on our own. If it had not been free it is the last thing we would be using and now that Dominica has used it for a year and a half I think that we can justify moving on and getting her something that works better for our family. I am hoping that our finances are good and that in the summer we can get another Asus ROG or something similar. It is very apparent that we need two systems more like that while we are travelling. So Minecraft Windows 10 Edition is limited in the way that makes the girls not use it very much, but at least it is stable and runs just fine on that laptop. It is not nearly as nice as using the Amazon Fire TV for Minecraft Pocket Edition, though. That works extremely well.
Today was pretty much a video game day, all day for the family. It’s a fight to be able to get time in front of the Asus Steam machine. Everyone wants to use it nearly all of the time. I don’t get to use it any more than anyone else. At least I nearly always manage to get in a little time on Hexcells Infinite every day. It has a “daily game” mode that I like to do knowing that lots of people around the world are playing that same puzzle on the same day. I really like the “infinite” feature that they added.
Opened a plastic bottle of local wine tonight. That’s right, one of the local wine comes in a twist off plastic topped plastic 1.5 litre bottle just like soda would back home. It is pretty hilarious because to an American that is unthinkable but it is actually a far better way to sell and consume wine. Just put the top back on and it is good for days and you can’t just drop it and have it shatter. I will likely buy this brand, which is well under three Euros, again as it is local and descent.
Tonight I started playing SquareCells, the sequel to the Hexcells trilogy. I am enjoying it. More of the same but with a couple of twists that make it feel decently fresh and quite enjoyable as a continuation. I hope that Matthew Brown, who made all of these games, goes for a similar trilogy with SquareCells that he did with Hexcells or, at the very least, does a sequel of SquareCells Infinite with a random game generator. That would be great and I would buy that for sure.
