Sheep Guarding Llama

It’s Friday, the end of our first week in Greece and on Crete.  Going nowhere today, just staying home and getting work done.  I did a lot of writing and posting today.  I put in a lot of time today trying to figure out how to get Internet working throughout the house.  We have had nearly endless issues with the wifi reaching around the house, especially to the girls’ room and to the media room.  We have a Tenda WiFi extender that was included with the house but never configured that I worked on a lot trying to get working.

In the end, after several hours, the verdict is that the Tenda is broken and does not work at all.  The product was abandoned years ago from their website and the firmware that shipped on it is newer than the newer version that their own website has on it from 2014.  The device can only hold a configuration for about half an hour before it goes down and stops working and it does not correctly pass the network information along and so it breaks communications from anything connecting to it and it conflicts with the real WiFi breaking it too.  So it doesn’t just fail to extend the network, it breaks the networking that there already was.  Totally useless.

The ADSL wireless router is bad enough.  It needs to be rebooted easily four times a day just to keep the WiFi working.  We are constantly losing our connection everywhere and needing to power cycle it.  It is a bit ridiculous.  When it works, it works pretty well.  But the device itself is so cheap it just never works.  Thankfully I now have my Linux laptop plugged into the Ethernet on it rather than the WiFi AP and that is much faster and much more stable so my connection is pretty good when I am working from my little office.  Sadly we decided not to bring our Ethernet cables with us on this trip because they are so heavy and if we had it with us, we could have run a line from the router down to the Amazon Fire TV at least and had two machines with mostly solid connections instead of just one which would have, in turn, reduced the demands on the flaky WiFi portion of the device.  I don’t know how much that would have improved things, but rather a bit, I am guessing.

Domincia and Liesl spent much of the day playing hidden object games in the media room.  I really did not get to play anything today as they pretty much took over the room, but they are loving it and really getting into the games.  Dominica has been flying through video games since we got this system set up.  And Liesl is having a great time.  She is really good at the hidden object games and is a big help to Dominica.  The games are really good for helping Liesl with her reading as well.  She is learning so many new words.  She reads nearly everything that comes up in the games.

Last night Dominica started soaking a huge thing of chick peas that she had gotten from the grocery store yesterday.  We have never really done dry chick peas before so this is a new adventure.  Today she packaged them up for later use now that they are rehydrated.  The bag of dried ones turned into quite a large collection.  We have the equivalent of dozens of cans of chick peas!  For dinner, Dominica made a curried chick pea salad with apple thing that would kind of remind you of a Waldorf salad that we had on pita bread.  Another big meal fight with Luciana who refused to even try anything.  This is getting old quickly.

My bronchitis is greatly improved.  I should be well in a couple of days.  Looking forward to the weekend here.  I doubt that we will go anywhere tomorrow.  Still the lingering remains of jet lag haunts us and I am still catching up on several things and everyone just wants to relax.  But hopefully on Sunday we will be able to rally the troops and manage to get in the car and do some sight seeing.  We have seen so little of the island thus far and it would be really nice to be able to say that we had seen a bit of the region having been here for more than a week at that point.  It is not unlike when we first arrived in Spain, though.  Our first week was quiet but we were off to see another town across the region after our first week was up.  I feel like we are far less motivated to get out and travel here, though, for some reason.  Perhaps only because we’ve gone no farther than Rethimno thus far and we have been here this long and we have just settled in to being at home.  It is very true that the idea of heading out to see things does not really occur like it did in Spain.  There we were itching and so anxious to get out of our village and explore.  Now we are thrilled to have time at home and be able to just be a normal family doing normal family things.

It is Christmas for Eastern Orthodoxes today and since we are in Greece, we get to celebrate Christmas again!  Strangely, everything was open today but yesterday, everything was closed.  We are so confused.

Today is one of our first mornings where Dominica and I woke up in the morning on our own.  The more sunlight that we see, the more easily we will combat the jet lag.

Got the kids up around one so that we could go out and try the shopping thing again.

Today’s shopping was, finally, a success!  We were very excited and very much relieved when we got to Atsipopoulo and discovered that the grocery store on the north side of town was very much open.  We stopped there and did not even attempt to go any further and did all of our grocery shopping.  Easily an hour of shopping.  We got nearly one hundred and fifty Euros worth of food.  We got a lot of stuff.

While shopping in Ατσιποπουλο we were also just amazed that the grocery store actually had many North American to European power adapters!  Just what we needed!  Actually they were universal to European adapters, which are not as ideal because they are bulkier, but they will work just fine and handle three prong plugs really well and are very versatile.  They are probably stocked instead of North American specific ones because they accommodate nearly anyone from anywhere so they only have to stock one thing rather than many to cover whatever need might arise.  We are so happy.  We bought three adapters plus one power strip.  Our lives in Crete are about to change.  Much less hunting for an adapter all day long and I will be able to stay in the upstairs office to work all of the time instead of working from Dominica’s laptop in the dining room most of the time.

We came right back home from our highly successful shopping trip very glad that we ended up not needing to head on into Rethimno to do additional shopping to find the power adapters.  That could easily have been hours of work and easily could have been fruitless.  We are so happy, now.

Once at home it was time to get everything set up.  I got my office upstairs set up with power and got the Amazon Fire TV set up in the living room connected to the television that they have there that we have been playing video games on for the past several days.  With the additional adapters we are able to have this television dedicated to the Fire TV and we can move the video gaming rig into the media room (the third bedroom, the one downstairs.)

I set up the gaming room today.  We are using the downstairs bedroom which has two beds and no one has wanted to sleep in there.  It is a very large room, though, and is also Liesl’s arts and craft room.  Her “Sew Cool” kid’s sewing system is set up in there as well.

Now that we have enough power, we were able to not only set up the laptop but set up the speakers and the projector as well.  We have it set up with the projector on the back wall and the laptop gaming rig sitting on the concrete window sill.  So it isn’t going anywhere.  The project throws a nearly ninety inch image on the plain, white wall.  It is pretty much perfect.  This is a serious gaming setup that looks great and we can now sit on the beds.  We are so excited to have this set up.

Now we can have someone using the Fire TV in the living room and someone playing games in the media room.  This is much better because both of our girls like to be doing things all of the time and Dominica likes to play video games as well.  Even with all of this we do not have nearly the gaming capabilities that we would like but it is a huge step forward.  When I got the Fire TV set up today we found that the Minecraft PE that we had bought for the girls on the Fire Tablets last week had shown up here finally.  I had checked before and it was not there, so apparently it just took time for the database to update.  So we got that downloaded and the girls are very excited to get to play it there now as well.  Since we only had to buy it once to get it in all of these different places it was a great value.

We set up and played games as a family a bit tonight.  Luciana decided to go play Minecraft in the living room for much of the evening.  Dominica and I, with Liesl coming in and out, played the second episode of the Blue Toad Murder Mystery Files which my dad had just completed this week (he completed the whole thing, all six episodes.)  We love this one for family game night.

The girls decided to camp out in our bedroom again tonight.  Luciana started off sleeping in our bed but could not settle down and got in trouble and eventually stormed off and slept alone up in her loft.  Liesl slept in the makeshift bed of blankets on the floor right beneath my side of the bed and loved her little spot.  She slept soundly there all night.

Today was a big success.  The one thing that we have really been struggling with is Luciana’s diet.  We are getting her to eat but only with huge fights.  She is determined to not want to eat with us and not eat what we are eating.  The changes in diet with new locations each presents a new challenge as the things that we rely on in other places just do not exist and we have no choice but to adapt to new food lifestyles.  This move has been more drastic than most.  This is our first time in a new country where we have not gone out to eat even a single time in our first week.  We have yet to have eaten a single meal anywhere but at home and not a single one has been a prepared meal, either.  Good for our health and wallets but we are missing a major component of visiting Greece, as well.

Wednesday on Crete.  I woke up at one this afternoon, which is about nine hours of sleep.  I feel a little better than I did yesterday.  Nowhere near good at all, but better rather than worse.  I was really rough last night when I went to bed.  But I ended up being able to sleep pretty well even with the sinus and bronchial infection that has been plaguing me for days.

The whole family was actually awake before two, which is a first here.  The girls have not been up this early yet since we got to Greece.  This was something like four and a half hours earlier for Ciana than yesterday!

We have sun and a lot of wind today.  Not too chilly, you would still want a light jacket if going outside but very comfortable with that.  We need sun regularly because the hot water is solar powered, which is the standard here on the island, and if we go too long without sun we have to manually switch things over to a backup power system to heat up the water or just go without hot water until the sun returns.  In Crete this is normally not an issue but most people do not live here during the winter months so the time when you use the most hot water and when it is hardest to heat up are not things that are usually faced.

We got the kids up at two today, we need to get shopping as there has been nothing but lentils to eat since we got here and we are ready for some other food.  We are desperate to find a place that sells North American power adapters as well.  What a difference that will make.  Even if we only find two three prong adapters it will completely change how we do everything here and finding another two or three two prong ones will be all that we need to not be constantly looking for one and cannibalizing them from other things using them.  We need six, three threes and three twos, in continuous use just to have the laptops, projector and Fire TV and stick plugged in and ready to go.  Then everything that needs to be charged is in addition to those!  It is amazing how many you need even just for the most basic things.

So we loaded up the kids and got them out the door.  This actually went pretty smoothly and the kids were pretty happy to get up which amazed us.

We decided to drive straight to Rethymno and go to an electrical store that Dominica had found online.  We figured we don’t know how often we are going to manage to head out and do shopping so we should go for it and try to do everything that we need at once.  This is the first time that Dominica or the girls have seen anything of Crete or even of Greece outside of our home itself or just walking down to the corner.  Literally they have been nowhere and our village does not have a lot of vistas going out very far.  So this is a big deal for them . Our house has mostly high windows so there is sunlight but all that we see are the vines on the buildings next door, not views out to the sea.  It has been too cold to be out on the terrace so even though there are views from there, we have barely seen them so far.  So this is quite a treat for everyone.

We drove along the shore and into town and parked on the east side of the city on the main street at the Carrefore grocery store.  We have used them all over the world and like them so we figured that that would be a good place to do some grocery shopping and parking was easy to do.

We started out by hunting for the electrical store.  We walked to where Google said that they would be and it had placed them squarely in a small park with no businesses around.  Very odd. Luciana spotted the small playground (one thing that you spin on and two swings was all that it had) and wanted to play. So I left the girls there and I walked around for blocks in every direction to see what I could find.  The answer was that every single business that I found was closed and I never found an electrical store.  Not good.  It was only about four thirty so we were pretty surprised that things were already closed.

I returned and we just went to the grocery store instead.  It was locked.  We checked the times listed on the door and clearly it was supposed to be open.  But it was not.  They stated that they were open until nine.  This isn’t good.  This is a lot like what happened to me on Sunday.

So we figured, from what I had seen and this, that we were going to find nothing in the city and that we should go straight to the Lidl outside of town in case that was going to close.  It is a big German chain and we figured that it, if anything, would be open.  So we drove straight there and… it was closed too.  Times on its door said that it should be open as well.  Argh.

Dominica asked if maybe it was the Feast of the Epiphany.  So I looked into it and sure enough, today is the Catholic Epiphany.  This seemed like it should not matter, though, because Greek Orthodox uses the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian one so their official Feast of the Epiphany is on the seventeenth, not today.  We knew this because we had talked to Sofia about Easter.  She was hoping that we would be in Crete for that because it is such a huge thing here and it would be great for us to see it.  We are leaving Crete on the first of April so we were not hopeful but looked into it.  It turns out that Easter is on March 27th this year, so we will be here for it – except that Greek Orthodox, being on the Julian calendar, celebrate it in May this year.  This is one of the years where the two calendars diverge dramatically and it is a month and a half apart.  Some years they share the date.  So we will miss it, by a lot.  So apparently one holiday uses one calendar and one uses the other.  Now we have no idea how to track holidays here!

On the drive back to the house empty handed we did manage to hit the same bakery that I had found open on Sunday where I got our awesome bread.  Dominica was sure that it was closed and said that she thought that it looked closed and didn’t want to get out of the car to check.  I made her and lo and behold, it was open. So we took the kids in and we bought a lot of stuff.  Little treats, cakes, ice cream, yoghurt and more bread.  We really stocked up.

Dinner was lentil soup, again.  This is our fourth day of lentils in a row.  Two days of stew, two days of soup.  But at least we had fresh bread and treats for dessert.

I spent the evening writing and posting.  The girls played Minecraft, The Secret of the Magic Crystals and Castaway Paradise.

This evening, after my midnight meeting, I went down and went to play Adam’s Venture: Episode One.  I only got to play maybe five minutes before Dominica took over the chair and played the game.  The girls and I sat on the floor and watched.  Actually the girls sat on the floor and I made food for everyone (getting snacks for the girls, buttering bread for Dominica and myself, making tea, etc.) for nearly an hour which is how Dominica ended up getting to be the one who played.

We all stayed up until we completed the first episode in the three episode game series.  Overall, it was weak.  The game was well made with decent graphics and audio, controls were acceptable.  But the storyline was pathetic and gratuitous.  There was practically no story at all and was nothing but a super loose plot device to trigger a long string of completely random, meaningless puzzles that always started with you correcting a Bible verse.  It wasn’t a bad game, but it lacked pretty much everything that I look for to make a game fun.  The protagonist is a rude, idiotic, over the top and very unnecessary chauvinist.   The bad guy is, apparently, the company that he works for.  There was little clear goal or logic to the game other than you play someone you dislike and solve puzzles for no reason and they beat you over the head with topics from Genesis.  Only two more episodes to go, maybe the plot will develop and they say this as an intro?

Got the kids off to bed at a moderately decent time tonight.  This is one of the first nights that neither of them slept in our room at all.  Hopefully this means that they are starting to get into a routine and are beginning to adjust to the timezone a little.

My bronchitis was feeling a little bit better as I headed to bed tonight. Fingers crossed that it is improved by tomorrow.

We slept until after noon today.  I woke up with bronchitis.  Just great.  This is going to make for a very rough week.

I got up and got right to work posting and getting SGL caught up.  Don’t want to get behind now that we are in Europe again.  I’ve already gotten all of the European stuff updated and am only catching up with the holidays in Texas since yesterday so all of the stuff in Crete is detailed and quite accurate as it is being done on the spot.  Texas I am doing my best to catch up.

Dominica went for the living room gaming rig this morning after having completed three whole games yesterday and started playing the super casual clicker title Among the Heavens.

When she went to take a shower, I switched into the gaming seat and got in maybe an hour playing Fallout 3.  The game froze on me many times and made in nearly impossible to play so I eventually gave up.  I have too much work to do anyway and I was spending more time at the kitchen table on Dominica’s laptop than playing the game anyway.

Today’s big project, besides normal posting, was getting SGL completely caught up and I managed to make it, too, which feels great.  There has been so much to write about for the past week that it really needed to be done now and could not wait and has been hanging over me so I wanted to get that done today.  Now dad is going to be busy reading this for days!  These are some very long posts.  And, at his request, there are pictures on most of the posts as well.

The video game rig was engaged for the entire day.  Almost none of which was from me.  I got to play maybe half an hour late in the evening, but that was all for me.  Liesl and Luciana took over and used it nearly all day.

At one point Dominica and Liesl were both sitting next to each other on the downstairs couch playing games on the Fires, it was adorable.  Liesl and Luciana are really loving their new Fires and do not seem to miss having access to their iPads at all, which is so awesome because the Fires are so much lighter.

Speaking of which, the shipment of the laptop that was too big to bring with us and the three iPads that we are not bringing with us all made it to dad’s house today.

I spent the majority of the day drinking tea and running to the bathroom to blow my nose.  This sinus and bronchial infection is really kicking my butt.  I was tired after being awake only eight hours!

Dominica and I made a small run to the corner shop today, just a few basic supplies before they closed for the day.    They were already out of bread so we need to find more tomorrow.  It is a very small shop and our variety is going to be exhausted very, very quickly.  Dominica is beginning to research ways to make things out of lentils.  I have been hoping that she would learn to make homemade veggie burgers for years so maybe this will be what pushes her over the edge.  I like the fresh made ones so much more than the store ones.  And they are healthier, too.

Dominica made vegetable and pasta star soup for dinner.  Luciana did not get up until six this afternoon (yes, really six!!) Just in time to have a little time awake and then join us for dinner. She finally caved after a night with no food and she ate last night’s lentil stew that she had refused all night to eat.  Then she ate the soup.  It took a lot of work but we made good progress today.

I showed Liesl the new game The Secret of the Magic Crystals which is a bizarre horse raising game amount a meteor that fell to earth, turned into magic crystals and turned horses into unicorns or something of that nature.  It was a deal that I found on Steam sometime in December and had set up for her but no one had actually played yet.  She loved it and played for three and a half hours today!!  Luciana played some Minecraft this evening on Dominica’s laptop, too.

Later on Luciana decided to try Castaway Paradise which I had shown to the girls when we were in Nicaragua but Liesl had not been interested and Luciana was curious but had mostly overlooked it.  This time they were both hooked.  Luciana played for almost two hours while Liesl watched.  Then, just before bed time, Liesl got to play for about half an hour as well.  This game is great because it is made for kids but forces Liesl to read everything on the screen for both her and for Ciana so she gets a lot of reading practice in while they play.

The jet lag continues to plague us.  I am not sure that it is getting any better.  Our schedules are so skewed.  It is much like it was in Spain, again.

I have forgotten to mention, thus far, what a disaster it has been that we do not have enough North American to European power adapters.  First of all, we simply do not own enough of them.  Secondly, all but two that we own are two prong, not three prong, and that is a problem in and of itself. Thirdly, only half of our adapters came with us and only one of the three prong ones.  So right now we can only plug in the gaming rig, my work laptop or the projector at one time.  That is a bit of a problem.  And of the two prong adapters that are here there are not nearly enough to handle charging all of the Kindle Fires, iPhones and other things that need to be plugged in every day.  So everything is on a rotation and things are not getting charged when they need to be.

We got the girls off to bed around four.  Not much of a victory.  It is such a struggle when you get up so late.  We are attempting to adjust our sleep schedules but it is not working well at all, especially with me being sick and needing any sleep that I can get.

Tonight Luciana decided that she wanted to sleep with Dominica and me because Liesl has been sleeping with us and she has not.  Liesl was very sad because she hates sleeping alone.  She wasn’t upset that Luciana got to sleep with us, only that she was then alone.  So I set her up with a bed of blankets on the floor next to me and now both girls are very happy.

Dominica and I were up with alarms at nine this morning.  That was a bit of a struggle.  The jet lag is still kicking our butts.  It was painful trying to get out of bed at that time.  Dominica ran around the house cleaning for at least half an hour because the owner, who is also the architect, of the house was coming at ten to look into the issues with the boiler after we were unable to figure out how to get the radiators working from the discussion on the phone yesterday.

He arrived at ten.  He is a local, retired architect.  We got the history of the house.  He bought it hoping to move here but after he was done with the house his wife did not want to live the city which is not far away.  He modified the house to make his son, who had met us to let us into the house the other day, want to live in the house in the hopes of getting two votes for moving but his son went off to university in England and now that he has recently graduated has moved to Athens and is not going to live on the island.  So this likely means that we are the closest thing to someone actually living in the house, ever.  That’s weird.

After spending an hour or more working on the radiators and then on the boiler the owner finally gave up and called for a mechanic to come and look at it all.  So he left for a few hours while he waited for the mechanic to come.

I relaxed this morning.  Played some HexCells Infinite and then Fallout 3.

Dominica and I ran to the corner store to return the plate that was lent to us yesterday and picked up some trash bags while we were there.  So glad to have a corner store a few feet away again.  We have certainly missed that!

It was early when the mechanic came and got the boiler fixed.  We were very glad that it was not us being clueless Americans and not being able to figure out how the radiators worked.  When even the owner did not know how they worked we felt much better.

Dominica ended up napping for much of the afternoon getting in at least two hours on the couch downstairs.  While she was napping I did some posting on MangoLassi and simultaneously played a little more of Fallout 3.  I have been away from posting for several days and am very behind.  Trying to get caught up a little bit.  I need to get caught up on SGL, too.

The girls slept until five. Five in the evening!  The jet lag is very severe.  Not only did we travel eight time zones but it was a very exhausting process.  Put all together it is really messing with everyone.

I set the girls up to play games in the living room and I moved to the kitchen to use Dominica’s laptop to really get work done.  Luciana used the gaming rig to play Minecraft for a little bit but then gave up and moved to her Kindle Fire and Dominica took over so that she could play Castle, the hidden object game that dad completed the other day.

I have a really rough sinus infection today.  I’ve had it the last couple of days but all of the walking yesterday made it hard to notice as that kind of activity and being out in the rain and humidity all day made it feel pretty decent.  Today being inside all day and being mostly sedentary it is really awful.

Dominica made a lentil stew for dinner that we had with the whole wheat bread that I bought yesterday.  It was good.  Liesl ate a little of it.  Luciana refused and got no dinner.

I worked all evening.  Dominica completed Castle and then went on to play twenty minutes of Escape the Museum but was not into it so she moved on to Sharpe Investigations: Death on the Seine.

Dominica ended up beating that game too and then went on to play the Runaway Express Mystery which was much longer and kept her playing until after four in the morning, but she finished that one, too!  Three games down in a single day. People wonder why we have so many games, this is why.  Once Dominica gets going, she eats through games like crazy.  And the girls play lots of them at once and are making progress on several themselves.  Liesl started playing Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two yesterday and is liking it.  She will be through that in no time, I am sure.  Luciana is very much into her princess games, Goat Simulator and Minecraft.

We had huge Luciana eating issues today.  She kept asking for food and then refusing to eat it.  This went on for hours.  She got in all kinds of trouble and ended up spending easily an hour sitting at the dining room table staring at lentils that she refused to eat.  This is after sitting with the family during dinner and refusing to try anything.  She ended up going to bed losing all of her toys, having to sleep alone, no food and looking forward to tomorrow being a day of sitting at the dining room table staring at lentils again.  Liesl is good about trying food and eating what she requests.  It would not be so bad if Ciana was picky but would at least eat the things that she asks for, but she does not even do that.  She often asks for food and then won’t touch it.  We have to break her of that.