Sheep Guarding Llama

Now it was Dominica’s turn to have insomnia last night.  We were both up until at least five in the morning.  I have no idea when she fell asleep.  So we ended up sleeping in until around eleven.

Today was a lazy day at home.  Homeschooling for Liesl.  Dominica discovered a book about some people that travel a little like us so she was into that all day and we barely saw her at all.

I did some scripting today and posting.  It was a busy day but one with no real events.  Nothing to really discuss, but lots of stuff was accomplished.

January is just flying by.  I guess it is the jet lag, mostly.  In some ways it seems like we have just gotten to Greece, I mean we haven’t gone anywhere or done anything yet at all.  But in other ways it feels very much like home and we are fully settled in and this is just where we live now and it does not seem odd in the least.  I guess the year of travelling has already caused us to alter our sense of normal and this feels very normal now.  We are nearly at the end of our second week in Greece!

Luciana has taken to bringing her Amazon Fire tablet up to my work loft (which sits above the living room directly over the little alcove with the couch where Liesl likes to sit) and putting on headphones and sitting beside me at the desk watching her YouTube shows.

I have our new family travel blog website set up.  The design is not done at all yet, so that needs to be addressed, but at least it is set up and we can start getting some blog entries out.  We’ve also renamed our travel community.  The old links still work but the new one is: dontforgettopackthekids.com

I stayed up late working on some BASH scripting and did my first of my own code hosting on GitHub.  I’ve used GitHub a lot, as we worked with it all last year, and I have had my own account for a while but this was my first time posting one of my own projects there.  Very tiny and no big deal at all, but it is nice to have it set up and doing something.

I was up at ten today.  My jet lag is vastly improved.  I got up at least an hour or more before Dominica was up.  Easily two hours.  I went down to the office and worked on posting all morning.  It was quite busy.  Also tested out the Nylas N1 email client.  So far I am liking it.  It is actually easier to use with Office 365 than Outlook is on Windows!

When Liesl got up, she decided to make today all about hidden object games.  When she wasn’t doing school she was playing hidden object games for most of the day.  She is currently playing the “9 Clues” series.

Luciana remembered the “reindeer catch” that we played yesterday and made me play it for nearly an hour today.  The girls think that catching the stuffed reindeer is so much fun.

We spent a few hours getting the entire family showered and dressed and out the door this afternoon for our first, ever night out in Greece.  Even the girls were asking if we could go out to dinner at this point!  We had no idea what we were going to do until we were out and on the road.

We didn’t leave to go to dinner until well after seven.  We started by driving to the market in Atsipopoulo and stocking up on cereal and some other stuff that we can not get in Prines.  Then hit the ATM to make sure that we are set with cash as we do not come out this way all that often.

After our errands we talked about what we wanted to do for food.  We had seen several little local restaurants open in Atsipopoulo but Dominica felt like going down into Rethymno so we drove down there.

With some magic and good memory, I got us out onto the beach front road by the marina and drove until we found where lots of other people had parked and just got out and walked the beachfront strip – what would be essentially a boardwalk in the States but it is all paved in wonderful, old tile.

We got out and walked the entire water front so that Dominica and the girls could see what the options were.  The girls were just in a mood for pizza, though, and we saw a nice looking place advertising pizza right where we had parked.  So we walked all of the way back and ate at the Living Room Lounge and Cafe.  We had wanted to sit outside but for food they recommended inside.  So inside we went.

Dinner ended up being awesome.  We really liked the place, even though it was packed beyond capacity, and the food was excellent.  The girls both ate really well and enjoyed it a lot.  After dinner they even brought us, on the house, the most amazing profiterole to share with a hazelnut chocolate cream.  It was so good.  Luciana ate a lot of the profiterole.

After dinner we just drove back home.    Relaxed at the house.  Some how the girls managed to stay up until one thirty in the morning!  Dominica was busy playing a video game and lost all track of time.  I was working in the office and did not realize that it was one until, well until it was one. So I rushed them off to bed as soon as I realized.

I woke up this morning to the sound of NATO fighters taking off and shaking the house.  It was probably eleven when I woke up.  It was a good night’s sleep and I am feeling much better today after having had a night of no sleep.  And I feel like I am mostly on a realistic European schedule now, as well.  It is tough for us because we deal with people in the US all day long, especially me, so getting to an ideal schedule for me (bed by eleven, awake at six) just doesn’t work because then I am unable to overlap with people back home.  So it kind of forces us to be on a skewed schedule of getting up very late in the morning and staying up late at night, even though we would prefer to be up with the rising sun, or at least I would.

The girls were up before me today, which is unusual.  But they did not miss a night of sleep like I did.  They only beat me by twenty minutes or so, though.  So not much.

Today was a day of eating leftovers.  Dominica has been cooking at home for every meal since we have gotten to Greece and there are lots of odds and ends to finish up so that we don’t have them piling up in the fridge and going bad.  We are generally terrible about that but today we made an effort and pretty much cleaned out the fridge.  This is awesome, we are eating on a much tighter budget than we have in a long time, maybe ever.  Even in Spain, where food was cheaper, we were eating out and getting prepared food much more frequently.

Life in Greece is very different for us than life in Spain.  How much of that is because we are on a little island, or because of differences in jet lag, or in work schedules or because this is not our first, long stretch in Europe we have no idea.  In Spain we were instantly out and exploring the area, including our first weekend taking a trip across the region by car and staying in another town.  Here, we have barely left the house.  I’ve been out a few times and Dominica and the girls for only one car ride to anything other than the one trip to the grocery store.  Maybe we are just used to things and not that excited to explore any more?  Maybe we are just tired.  We have not even gone out for a single meal, yet.

I supposed, being our fourth long term live in country in a year, we are just used to the constant exploration of new places and are not so excited to get out as much as before and we are so much more tired and looking forward to the chance to just be at home and relaxing.  It has been quite a busy year, we need downtime, too.

Liesl is back to school today.  They have taken some time off for the holidays and the move but today is full school again.  I did her word work with her and she and Dominica butt heads something terrible and it can easily take an hour.  I’m able to keep her on task and we get through it in twelve minutes without the fighting.

I spent a lot of time posting today, it was an incredibly active day.  Everyone has recovered from the holidays, I am imagining.

This evening Luciana talked me into playing catch with the girls for maybe half an hour or more. We played using the stuffed reindeer pillow that Luciana got for Liesl for Christmas.  They call it “reindeer catch” and they had a great time.

We managed to get everyone off to bed nice and early tonight.  The girls went up around eleven.  Dominica and I just a little after that.  The girls begged for me to sleep up in the loft with them again so I gave in.  My back will likely really hurt tomorrow, there is no room up there for me to toss and turn like I need to so my back tends to be pretty sore after trying to sleep in a small bed.  But it keeps them happy and helps them to get onto a good schedule as they are willing to go to bed and actually go to sleep hours earlier this way.

No sleep for me, whatsoever.  Not even ten minutes.  Got out of bed around give and went to the office for probably half an hour and then, once I was caught up on everything since I had attempted sleeping, I went down to the media room and set up the gaming rig and got to work on some games.

First up was the final two puzzles of HexCells Infinite which I blasted through quickly, completing that game.  Then I hunted around for something new to star that I thought that I would be able to get through in a day.  I settled on The Perils of Man and got to it.

That took nearly nine hours, but I made it to the end.  The game was excellent.  Fun, the puzzles were  a bit hard given how tired I was, but the storytelling was really well done and well paced.  I enjoyed it and Liesl snuggled with me and watched the last couple of hours with me.  The whole thing was quite original and the Swiss setting was a neat touch (the game was made in Switzerland, won several Swiss awards and was sponsored by Swiss Re.)

I did some posting this evening after the game was completed, but it ate up most of my day. Once I was done playing it the girls used the Steam gaming system to play Castaway Paradise and The Secret of the Magic Crystals.  That tied it up for several hours.

I managed to get to bed before eleven, about four hours before the earliest that I have managed since being in Greece.  The girls have been asking and asking for me to sleep in the loft with them some night.  Since I was going to bed early I figured that tonight would be a good night for it.  So I set up my CPAP up there early and got to bed about an hour before the girls came to bed.  They stayed in the lower part of their room playing together for a while before coming up.  Luciana threw a fit and said that she did not fit on the bed and made me make her a bed on the floor.  But an hour or two after I fell asleep she decided that there was room and moved onto the bed to snuggle.

Today is a big one, Danielle turns forty!

It’s a bright, clear Saturday here on Crete.  We decided that we needed a day of nothing, still, to relax and recharge.  These relocations are exhausting and my bronchitis is not fully cleared up, yet.

Around nine or ten this morning Ciana sneaked into our room and climbed into bed to snuggle with me.  So I ended up staying in bed several hours longer than I would have otherwise.  I was actually awake by around ten on my own.  Dominica and I were both awake and up and about before noon.  Slow adjustments.

I got up and did some writing and posting.  Dominica went into the media room and spent the early afternoon playing video games.  She is loving the new setup, it is really awesome.  It was a really bright day and we did not even have to close the room door or have to pull the shades all of the way down in order to see the roughly ninety inch projection, either.  And that is projected onto a normal wall.  This project is awesome.

This evening, Dominica did her first project of making both veggie burgers and chicken nuggets at home!  She did both using our huge stockpile of chick peas.  I’ve been hoping that she would do this for years, so I am very excited.  This is a huge deal for us because we are vegetarian and eat a lot of this stuff, homemade veggie burgers are generally way better than the ones that you buy frozen from the store, these should be quite a bit healthier than the store-bought ones and the cost of these is a small fraction of what they cost in the store.  I don’t know exact prices, but in the store these are a buck or two per serving, at home they are maybe ten cents!

The really great news is not that the homemade “fake meat” was delicious, but that Luciana loved it! She really, really liked it.  This is huge.  Not only did she like the chick pea food but both girls loved the broad beans cooked in olive oil.  Finally food that everyone wants to eat, is cheap, relatively easy and extremely healthy.

Dominica worked on completely both of the Brink of Consciousness video games in the media room today.  Liesl camped out with her for most of the day outside of playing with Luciana from time to time, like with their new Playmobile waterslide set that they have set up in front of the fireplace, or watching Maya the Bee on the Fire TV.  Luciana spent much of the day using her Kindle Fire sitting in a chair next to me upstairs in my little office.

I did a ton of uploading of pictures to Flickr today.  If anyone has been looking for stuff from the past few weeks, it should be there now.  Several hundreds of pictures uploaded.  One of my bigger “from the iPhone” uploads.  Have not had time to deal with that for the past several weeks.

We all ended up staying up very late tonight, it was four in the morning when we finally all got off to bed.  Dominica and I both ended up with insomnia.  I had actually managed to have fallen asleep but was woken up by her phone alerting that she was getting middle of the night texts and after that I could not fall back asleep.  She did not manage to get to sleep until around nine in the morning!  I got out of bed at five and just gave up with no sleep at all.  Tomorrow is going to be an exhausting day.