Sheep Guarding Llama

I had insomnia last night and so my morning started around seven with what might actually have been zero sleep.  I went to my desk and posted for a while. Luciana was up early, around eight, but went back to bed.  Liesl was up around nine and Dominica a bit later like ten or eleven.

I did a ton of responding to the thousands of messages that I have had backlogged on Spiceworks for years and I managed to get caught up on SGL posting today as well.  And MangoLassi was rather active early this morning, too.

Liesl played The Sims 3 as soon as she got up.  I waited until the girls were done playing games and the room was available before moving in and trying my hand at playing the classic physics three dimensional puzzle masterpiece Portal which my dad likes to play as well.  There are nineteen levels in the original Portal and I managed to get up to halfway through the sixteenth one on my first sitting.  But by that point I was pretty tired, having played for over an hour and a half, and needed to put it down and go take a nap as I was falling asleep while I was playing.

I went up around two and laid down in the bed and slept until around six.  Four hours was perfect and I felt just fine.  Dominica was making dinner when I got up.  A Greek dish made from giant local beans.

All three of the girls spent the bulk of the evening playing The Sims 3.  The Steam system was engaged for at least seven continuous hours just for that!  This somewhat forced me to stay busy at my desk getting caught up on things, but I had been hoping to get a chance to return to playing Portal sometime this evening.  And I am just about ready to beat Quell as well.

Dominica wrapped up her gaming before two in the morning so that I could get in at least a little bit of time gaming before going to bed.

The girls are sleeping in our room, again.  They have been there for over a week now, I think.  Tonight Liesl insisted that she sleep on the floor so that I could have the bed.  All four of us do not fit in the bed together, so someone always has to have the floor.  Luciana will threaten to go sleep on her own in the loft if forced to have the floor and that makes Liesl sad as she wants everyone to be together.  So she and I have been taking turns on the floor.  She knows that my back has been bothering me for days and said that I should be in the bed tonight.

I slept in late this morning, until noon.  Sleeping on the floor worked out just fine, it did not bother me at all even though it is a solid floor and no carpeting and I was only on a thin blanket.  Amazingly sleeping on rock hard surfaces still does not bother me even after all of these years.

Liesl was starting school when I got up.  She and Dominica had been up playing The Sims 3 for a little while before I had gotten up.  Luciana played The Sims 3 a little bit before coming up to my office to sit with me and watch her school videos from Leap Frog.

Liesl said today that she loves her new, long school day format.  She is doing so much better in school now and has a great attitude even though she is starting earlier and doing so much more of it.  We are thrilled as she is moving so much faster and covering so much stuff.  Today she did a ton of studying Greek mythology, especially stuff around the Minoans and Knossos.

I had a very busy day of posting and working on open source projects, but it was productive and good.

Tonight Dominica made fake meatloaf from the local beans.  It was delicious.  Liesl really liked it, too.  We tend to eat dinner around nine at night these days.  And it often feels like lunch time.

It is Friday night and after getting the kids off to bed Dominica played The Sims 3 for a while (we have over one hundred hours logged on that game as a family now, and I have never played it myself in any form whatsoever; and those hours do not count the far greater time that Dominica put into The Sims and The Sims 2 over the years!)  Then when she went up to bed I played some video games and then tried to go to bed.

Dominica and I were both still awake around five.  She had the bed with the two girls, I was on the floor, again.  She fell asleep sometime between five and six.  I think that I got half an hour of sleep, or so, but maybe not even that much.  By ten till seven I had gotten almost no sleep but just was not tired or ready to be in bed so got myself up.

Luciana and I were actually awake at eight this morning!  Luciana got up to use the bathroom and then went down to the living room.  I went to the office and did some writing.  She fell asleep on the couch by the time that I had checked in on her.  So adorable.  Dominica slept in until around nine and Liesl until at least ten.

While Luciana and Liesl were sleeping and Dominica was taking some quiet time to read I got in a little video game time doing my daily Hexcells Unlimited and then playing a mission on Saints Row 2.  I had forgotten how much I enjoy that game.  I really want to finish it up because I have heard that Saints Row 3 is really amazing and a huge step above its predecessor but I do not want to start it until I have completed the one before it.

Luciana asked and asked to play The Sims 3 so I went back to writing and let her play for an hour or two.

Liesl is having another full day of school today.  She was awake, had breakfast and straight to her school work.  And it was another day of big time success, too.  She was happy and super productive and just went from subject to subject doing projects and learning all kinds of stuff.  They have done a lot of history focus because we are hoping that we might be able to pull off a trip to the ruins at Knossos this weekend.  It is less than a two hour drive so not bad at all.  But we would need to wake up and actually get moving to be able to pull it off.  Not easy for us these days.

One of the neighbours stopped by this evening just to drop off some of their own sheep’s milk that they get from the sheep next to our house!  People here are so nice and we have never had sheep’s milk so this is very interesting.  There are lots of sheep and goats on Crete but we have not seen a single cow, yet.

Ours days have felt so short ever since getting to Greece.  It feels like we are just getting started on the day and it is already midnight.  The time flies by ridiculously quickly.

Dominica and the girls played more of The Sims 3 today and I got in a little of the puzzle game Quell before going to bed myself.

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.