Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Friday.  We all slept in this morning.  I started the day with the daily Hexcells Infinite puzzle.  The breezed through that and then tried a little of the new game Fine Sweeper that I had picked up on sale yesterday.  That was fun.  I made it to level twenty six on my second try and made a pretty impressive top global score for one of my first tries!

The girls took over the Steam system from me to play Goat Simulator.  I noticed today that it supported multiple players, up to four.  So I hooked up the second Steam controller and the girls played for an hour or so on a split screen.  This is so perfect for them.  They had so much fun.  We could hear them all through the house just laughing and laughing.  They get onto the funniest kicks.

This afternoon Dominica wanted to go grocery shopping so we packed up the kids and went to two different grocery stores.  One in the next door village and then down to the bakery two towns away where we picked up cheese cake and profiterole in addition to our bread and stuff.  Then up the hill to a fancier grocery store that we had not been to yet.  It was a good shopping run and we are well stocked after this.

We had decided to go out to dinner tonight, only our second time going out to dinner while in Greece, and wanted to do something low key and near home.  So we settled on checking out the local restaurant which is right down on the main road to the south of us; a very quick walk.

We dropped off the groceries and stuff and dealt with a bit of a parking problem as we could not figure out where to park the car as our usual area for it was full of other cars.  Once we had a solution, which took probably half an hour since we were not very good at figuring out what to do, we walked on to the taverna, which was right around the corner.

This is a little place called the Olive Wood and is extremely small and local.  There are definitely no people coming from other towns to visit this restaurant, it only has maybe three tables and a couple seats at a sort of bar where they are preparing the food, not a bar that you would actually sit at.  Brightly lit and a television up on the wall in the corner showing the football game as you find all over Europe.  This is definitely the local haunt.

We were welcomed most hospitably, people even moved to get us a good table.  There were a couple individuals in the taverna and one large family our group at the back table.  Very small place, we could hardly go unnoticed in any way.

The owner spoke just a tiny bit of English but enough to work out, after a bit of explaining, that we were pescatarians and did not eat meat. However, he then had to explain that he had no fish and that if we want fish we have to come in the day before and request it and then he will go down to the wharf and pick some out for us for the next day.

This is a classic small town taverna like you should expect when travelling to out of the way Europe, especially in the south, and the meal was “eat what we bring.”  It was not quite like that as he would ask us if we wanted things but it was not like they had a menu of any sort and it was little bits at a time.  We got a decanter of the white house wine, which was very tasty, and the girls broke out their new colouring books that they had picked up at the grocery store earlier today and coloured while our food was made.

First up we had a green salad.  Very Greek with delicious oil dressing, lots of parsley and tart flavours.  We really liked it and Liesl even had some.

Next up was fried cheese.  This was amazingly good.  Two big slabs of square, thick cut local cheese, rolled in sesame seeds and quickly pan fried.  He brought one, then the other to us.  Very tasty.

We got tomato fritters next, which were very good.  Then the main meal was an omelet, very similar in nature to a Spanish tortilla, with eggs and potatoes.  It is apparently a very Mediterranean food, but not one that you tend to associate with Greece coming from the US, but I supposed when you think about Greek food in diners it is very much what we think of.  So that makes sense.

We had zucchini fritters then, too. Those were so good.  The girls were happy with the food and really loved the omelet.  They devoured that.

The table next to us ended up sending over a decanter of wine to us and we ended up hanging out quite a bit.  They were having a bit of a party and had brought chocolate cake, too, which the taverna served to us, too.  They recommended that we take part in the local carnival parade when it comes around.  They said that it was much more fun than just watching it, especially for the girls.  They were nearly all Brits who had moved to Prines a decade ago and just settled, except for one that was from Mozambique.  Every one is so friendly and social here. Southern Greece definitely works well for me.

I had to duck out early and run back up the hill for my Wednesday conference call that had been rescheduled until tonight.  I left Dominica and the girls hanging out with the neighbours.

Dominica and the girls were back to the house before I was done with my call.  It was very late by the time that that was done and before long, everyone was off to bed.

It is bright and sunny and warm today.  A really gorgeous day.  I got up and posted for a bit, but I had promised Dominica and the girls that I would go for a walk down to the bakery that they like and get them cake.  They had been begging me to do that last night but I was not going to go down in the evening and the weather was not that great. No excuses today, it is really nice out.

It is two villages from our place to the bakery.  It is about four kilometres each way, which is not all that bad on the way there, which is down hill.  So I made great time and was feeling very relaxed as I walked down to the bakery.  I bought lots of cakes, treats and loaves of bread to bring back home with me.

I took a few pictures while I was out walking.  I got a cute one of the German Shepard that lives next door and is always trying to get us.  I caught him off guard with the selfie and he looked calm.  But the instant the picture was done he was trying to tear through the fence again.

The walk back took quite a bit more energy and time than the walk to the bakery.  Carrying the bread and treats, a bottle of water and doing four kilometres up hill slowed me down quite a bit.  The sun was actually pretty low by the time that I made it back to the house.

The bulk of the “day” was spent out on my walk.  But it felt good.  It was probably two hours of walking or more.  Plenty of work to do once I was back home.

We ate a lot of bread and cakes today.  Other than my walk it was a quiet day at the Miller house.