Sheep Guarding Llama

Dad has been playing the hidden object, or more appropriately as it appears to now be known a “hidden object and puzzle adventure” or HOPA, game based on the Castle television show.

I spent the morning alone trying to get work done out at the condo in Galveston.  It was a shorter day, I was only really out there during the morning and by early afternoon I packed up and drove up to League City where we will be spending the holiday.  I am staying there tonight to make things easier to deal with.  I had not been planning on bringing the new video game system but Dominica said that I should bring it so I packed that up at the last minute, as well.

This evening we went over to the Toccos’ for dinner.  The kids were rambunctious, of course.  Very excited about tomorrow.

After dinner it was back to the house and time for the pajama elf to dole out the new pajamas for the night.  Luciana and Liesl got very lucky that their pajamas just happen to come with matching pajamas that perfectly fit their new build-a-bears.  They were so excited and thought that that was the coolest thing.  Little did they know that it was a coincidence.  Sadly, Clara’s pajamas did not come with a matching smaller pajamas for her build-a-bear.  No one even thought about this as none of it was planned nor were the bears expected, it was just how the pajamas came.  But Clara felt like she was missing out and was very sad, understandable.

Dominica and I ran to Walgreens and hunted around in the last minutes before they closed and Dominica managed to find a holiday dog costume of a Santa outfit that looked like it would fit Clara’s build-a-bear.  We brought it home, hid it in all of the wrapping, called Clara out and she was thoroughly convinced that the pajamas had just been overlooked in her over-zealousness to open her Christmas pajamas and was as happy as a clam.

The laying out of the presents went until well after midnight.  It was, as always, very exhausting.

We were all very tired when we finally got off to sleep around one in the morning.  Dominica and I slept in Garrett and Clara’s room while the kids all piled into Madeline and Emily’s rooms so that they would be isolated.

I meant to sleep in this morning but we had gone to bed so early last night that I was awake just before five.  I checked the clock and then thought about how long I had been asleep and decided that yes, my body had gotten a full night’s sleep and it was ready to get up.  So get up I did.  I went out into the kitchen and got to work doing some posting and stuff and checking up on the downloads.  Yes the video game downloads continue unabated.  Day after day, hour after hour, more and more games download and still there is so much more to get!  At this point we have something on the order of seven hundred games downloaded onto the Asus ROG laptop between Steam and GOG.

It was several hours, around nine o’clock, when the next person was awake and that was Luciana.  She beat Dominica by at least half an hour.  So I got her started on her day with her breakfast, bathroom routine and set up doing stuff in the living room.  Dominica was up before long and Liesl had to be woken up around ten.  She was not happy to have to get up at all.

The girls did their Advent Calendar, it is almost done.  They love the Advent routine and the Playmobile calendar that Dominica’s mom got them is a big hit.  They love all of the toys that come in it and it works with their other toys and stuff.  It’s perfect.  They are so excited to get up and do it every morning.

It was easily ten thirty or later when we packed everyone into the Spark and I drove them up to League City to drop them off.  We stopped quickly at the McDonald’s drive through around the corner to pick up breakfast to eat in the car on the drive.  It was a quick trip, just unloading the car and off again.

I had to make a stop at Fry’s today.  It turns out that Liesl had been out shopping and found a wireless mouse at Five Below and told Dominica that she had to get it for me for Christmas because she knew that I really needed a mouse so that I can get work done, which is very true.  The mouse at Five Below is the cheap one that we already have that does not work well, though.  So Dominica had told her that she was going to order me one instead.  But, in reality, picking out a good mouse is something that needs to be done carefully and probably in person.  So Dominica sent me to Fry’s today to see if I could find a good travel wireless mouse that would meet our needs.  It is so sweet that Liesl has been demanding that I get a good mouse and has been looking for one.  She has mentioned a few times that she was concerned that my Christmas present was not going to arrive in time, now I understood why.

So after thirty minutes or more of checking out every mouse that I could, I finally decided on a forty dollar Logitech Bluetooth travel mouse.  I like that it is Bluetooth because it means that I will not have to deal with a dongle and that is always a problem when traveling.  Those things are way too easy to lose.  We do not need an additional one, especially not one for an expensive mouse.  And the travel model was quite small, which is pretty important for us.  It’s very special that Liesl put so much thought into this gift.

From Fry’s I drove back home and settled in for my quiet day at the house.  I got some writing done today, lots of game downloads, some work on the games, some posting and I managed to get caught up on SGL posts which is pretty important as next week is going to be very hectic and then we are off to Greece and traveling when behind on the blog is always very bad.

In between working on other things I managed to beat the video game HexCells Plus this afternoon.  That’s the second of the HexCells Trilogy of games.  Only HexCells Infinite is left for me to tackle and I made it a long way through that this evening as well.

I ended up staying up well past midnight as I was getting writing done.  I often do my most work late at night.  The fog was around all day but after ten or so it got really think and by midnight you could barely see the cars on the road.  It was quite warm during the day, eight one degrees this morning, but cooled off quite a bit tonight.

Lost Internet access a little while after midnight which was super annoying.  I did get a chance to chat with a buddy living in Thailand right now, though.

Up until two in the morning.  Got the entire Nancy Drew video game archive collection set up to download through the night.  I am hoping that Liesl likes these games, there are more than twenty of them.  I am hopeful that somewhere in all of these new games that there are some gems that the girls will really enjoy.

Eight days until we fly to Istanbul.  Our time is rapidly diminishing.  Because of everything going on here and Christmas coming so quickly we have this feeling like we are just hunkered down in Texas and will be here for a long time. But we are just a week and a day away from needing to be fully packed, on our way to the airport and off for most a year in Europe before returning to New York, not Texas.  We won’t be returning to Texas for a full year, or so the plan goes.  This is our first time on our travels where we are going to be away from the US for even a complete three month stretch, let alone almost six months!  Our longest was when we were in Spain for two and a half months, plus a week in Norway and a day in Ireland.  It was just under three months.  Nicaragua would have been nearly as long but we returned a little early.  This will be longer than both of those trips combined.  There is so much mental and physical planning to do.  I’m not sure if we are really going to be ready or if we are just going to panic and run for the airport at the last minute.

I am home alone this morning.  Dominica and the girls spent the night at the Grices’ so that I could get some time to relax and get some things done on my own.  It is very hard to be productive when everyone is around all of the time and you don’t have any quiet space.  This actually works out quite well.

It is a nice, foggy day on Galveston this morning.  Much like yesterday.  I have the door and many of the windows open.  It is sixty nine in the house, just about perfect.  And the light is soft and white.  I can see someone surfing in the roiled Gulf while I write.

The video game downloads continue.  I was right when, several weeks ago, I predicted that I would need the full month in Texas to get the games that we wanted.  We only have a week to go and are definitely not going to be able to get everything, but certainly have been able to get enough.  We have tons and tons to play, that isn’t an issue.  Now just making sure that we have the selection that we want.  I suspect that once we are in Greece for a week that the girls will start playing games quite a lot.  They are both such avid gamers.  We are so happy that they have started to play games all of the time rather than watching YouTube or whatever like they used to.  So much more interactive.  They still loving watching YouTube shows about games and learning about their games from that, but that is a pretty good use of YouTube.  They use it to learn about games that they want to play and about how to play the games that they have.

I was home alone until five forty when I hoped in the Spark and drove up to League City to have dinner with the family.  Nothing fancy tonight, just cooking at home.  Something simple.  Vegetarian fake turkey and green beans with potatoes.

The kids had apparently begged for popcorn and a movie night.  So the little girls and Emily sat in the living room and watched Cinderella, the live action version.  I sat in the media room where I could see Liesl on the couch sitting with Francesca and I watched reruns of The Drew Carey Show on Laff.  I’ve not seen that show in easily a decade!  What a great show it was, too.  Luciana started the movie but was tired and asked to go to bed almost immediately.  So she was in their bedroom at the Grices’ sleeping most of the time that I was there.

After the movie was over we packed up the kids and drove back down to the condo.  It was an early night for us.  Luciana was so tired, she was straight t bed and asleep in minutes.  Liesl was up for thirty minutes, tops, but did not want to go to bed but we sent her as everyone needed to get sleep tonight.  Dominica was the most tired and was in bed before I could even turn around.  I managed to get myself to bed in about an hour.  I put in twenty minutes of playing the Enigma Express on the iPhone before I fell asleep.

It was easily only ten when I nodded off.  A very early night indeed.

Tomorrow the plan is to sleep until everyone wakes up.  Then I am going to drive the family up to League City and drop them off.  Dominica is hoping to do this around nine.  I know that more realistically it will be closer to noon.  Everyone is tired and getting sleep is important.  I will be home alone again tomorrow all day and they will spend the next two nights at the Grices’.  I will join them on Christmas Eve in the afternoon and spend the night there that night as well as it just makes Christmas a lot easier to deal with logistically when we don’t have to drive half an hour or more in the morning after waking the kids up to get up there to celebrate.  Way easier to already have us all in one place.

Dominica is still sick with horrible heartburn this morning.  She went up to League City this morning on her own and spent the morning and afternoon there working on Christmas preparations again, mostly baking and some shopping.  I stayed home with Liesl and Luciana.  Luciana got up early and hung out on the sofa playing video games like Lego Worlds and Minecraft.  Liesl slept in until around ten.

Once Liesl was up, they opened their Advent calendar to get their latest Playmobile toy and then Liesl set about doing her schoolwork for the day.  No vacation for her.  At least not an organized vacation.  We try to get her schoolwork in whenever we can.  Less work at once but more steady is better for learning anyway.  We just did reading stuff this morning and it was just her and me.  I worked with her on study habits and we managed to make her word learning go so much faster.  We were able to do in a few minutes what often takes her an hour or more.  I am hoping that we can turn this into a trend and speed this process up a lot more.  She and her mother butt heads so dramatically over this kind of stuff.

It is hard to believe that we are only here for another nine days in Texas.  Time is running out quickly.  We have to start our “no more food” policy at the condo.  It is time to empty out the fridge rather than to fill it.  Just about time to start panicking about being ready to go.  Except we have a major holiday between now and when we leave.  Eek.

I did some cleaning this morning.  The condo is a bit of a mess after having had all of the kids here.  Dominica said that keeping the kids really made a huge difference and was extremely helpful.  Good thing, as I am exhausted.

Dominica and her dad came down in the middle of the afternoon and picked up the girls.  Dominica and the girls are going to stay up in League City tonight and I will see them tomorrow evening when I go up to join everyone for dinner.  This way they get a lot more time with their cousins and grandparents and I get time to actually get some things done and some down time as it is a bit overwhelming to have people around non-stop and my weekend was spent watching all of the kids so my normal time to catch up disappeared on me this week.

I did a bit of getting video games tested and working today.  I have started a labeling system in Steam that denotes each game as “Working” or “Not Working” to make filtering easier.  This way we can view all of our games that we can actually play by simply going to the “Working” list and I can find all of the ones that need me to work on them to get them running by going to the “Not Working” list.  Those that I deem unable to get working will eventually get deleted but most just will require some manual intervention, patching, modification or tender loving care of some sort.  But I need a method for tracking them.  So right now I am going game by game and testing them out to see what runs correctly.  That way when other people want to use the Steam Library they just have to filter by Working and they are good to go with whatever shows up.

For dinner this evening I went for a walk down to Subway on 61st next to the CVS just before the bridge over the bayou.  It was not a bad walk at all.  Very easy to do.  I got a tuna salad sub and walked back to the condo to eat it.  I put on Mamma Mia which I had been watching last week but had been unable to finish.  The ending always makes me cry, it is very emotional the scene where the mother is getting her daughter ready for the wedding and is singing about wanting to freeze the memories and seeing her little girl go.

I enjoyed having a quite evening to myself.  I need that regularly and now that we travel so much I rarely have a change to get it.  It can be exhausting never getting a chance for quite and time to center oneself.

Work is going to be super slow this week.  There is almost no one around both online in the communities as well as in offices.  So hoping to have a chance to do some catch up on writing and just get my brain ready for more stuff.

I discovered a guy on YouTube that takes video games and edits them into feature-length movies which sounds awesome.  I tracked him down and found his series on the Uncharted series from the Playstation 3.  I own all three of those games and nearly beat the first one but do not have access to a PS3 any longer and they were the last games, or only games, that were exclusive to that platform that I had any interest in so I am quite excited to be able to sit down and watch the trilogy as a movie and seeing it all edited together into a movie rather than a play-through is a really interesting idea.  So I started watching the first one tonight and it is well done and really does feel like you are just watching a movie.

I stayed up a bit too late tonight.  It was about one when I got off to bed.  I left the windows and door open tonight, the weather is great and there is no one here but me so no worries about moths or whatever, although I did not see any at all anyway.  Without the girls here the lights are not on so things are not attracted to come into the condo.  It is a bit humid, we are still in the fog from this morning, but nice and cool.  I miss the continuous fresh air that we had in Spain and Nicaragua.  I am hopeful that we will be living in the fresh air all of the time once we are in Crete.

We had to be up rather early this morning so that we could get to the Rainforest Cafe to do the breakfast with Santa event that they are having there.  We have reservations for the 8:15 seating which would not be bad if we didn’t have six kids, eleven people and people driving down from League City and Friendswood.  It is a logistically challenging morning, but far better than it would have been if the kids had not all spent the night here at the condo.  That worked out incredibly well.

Dominica and Francesca were here, at the condo, by around seven or just after and it was a bad scramble to get all six kids ready to head out by eight when we needed to leave.  It was such a bad dash that, in reality, we were all ready by just around seven thirty and left wondering what had been forgotten because we were all ready so quickly!

Getting down to the Rainforest Cafe was easy.  Emily and I drove down in the Spark.  Everyone else trailed behind.  They ended up being ten minutes after us because Madeline lost her iPhone and they had to look for it to make sure that she had not dropped it but they could not get into the condo to check for it there because I had the only set of keys.

Breakfast ended up being really great.  There were not very many people there, surprise surprise, as who things of the Rainforest Cafe in association with seeing Santa, but they did a good job and we enjoyed breakfast.  The kids all got their pictures with Santa while we were there and the food was very good.  It was a buffet.

After we ate Garrett and Dominica’s dad went and did the dark ride that they have there.  All of the girls (all five of them, not just the three littles) decided that they wanted to do “Build A Bear” instead.  I held down the fort in the restaurant for forty minutes because it took that long to pay and there was supposed to be a raffle that we had to wait for but never happened.  So I just sat there alone playing Trivia Crack on my iPhone (in Spanish and Greek) while I waited.

The girls had so much fun doing Build a Bear.  Liesl decided to get a snow leopard that she named “Cuta” and Luciana got a panda bear that she named “Spot.”  I’m told that the entire process was completely adorable and that they were really into it and had an awesome time.  And they both completely love their stuffed animals.  They were so excited to show them off and have been totally attached to them ever since.  The older girls have been collecting these for years, I hear.

It was more than two hours at Rainforest Cafe by the time that we were all done.  A very long morning.

Dominica and Francesca decided that they had more work to do at the house so asked if I could watch the kids for another day.

Back at the condo we set up with the Steam system and Madeline set out playing more of Back to the Future: The Game.  By the end of the day she was into the fourth episode.  Getting close to the end.

Liesl decided that she wanted to stay in the condo with Madeline, surprise surprise, while Emily and I took the other three, Garrett, Clara and Luciana, out to the beach for a while.  Emily and I stayed dry while the three little ones went out into the Gulf.  Luciana stayed pretty close to shore never letting the waves go over her pants.  Garrett managed to go fully in and swam for a while.  All in all we were probably out there for close to two hours.

After swimming, Emily and I went to Sonic down the street and got food and ice cream for everyone.  Liesl never manages to get ice cream from Sonic because the moment you say the name she insists that she “doesn’t like Sonic” and refuses to discuss what they have or if she would want to get anything.  She has some weird, stubborn thing about it and has missed out on a lot of ice cream because of it.  But she never complains.  Although tonight she did say “I didn’t know that Sonic had ice cream.”  We explained that that was what all of us were eating but as soon as you try to tell her she jumps right back to “I hate Sonic and won’t discuss it.”  So that is that.

I never got a chance to relax for the rest of the afternoon.  Madeline, Liesl and Garrett kept playing Back to the Future: The Game, what a huge winner that has turned out to be.  That was our top game that we played in Nicaragua and now it is the most popular one since our return to Texas.  It is looking like it might get a full two play throughs in a three month period.  A first for our gaming library.  I was stuck making food, one item after another, or trying to get kids ready or cleaning or whatever.  Emily took a nap.  Everyone else watched the game.

At five we left to go up to Dickinson to meet up with everyone to go to the Festival of Lights, there.  You park along the highway and take a school bus over to the park where the lights are set up.  The family goes every year but this was my first year going.  Christmas light displays are not my thing.  Turns out, they are not Luciana’s either.  She was miserable the entire time and needing me to carry her the whole time that we were there which was exhausting and everything hurt by the time that we were done.  Liesl did a bit better.

After we were done with the lights and got back to our cars the Millers Family took the Chevy Spark, went to Panda Express and picked up a small dinner for Liesl and me and returned home.  Luciana was totally passed out by the time that we got back to the condo.

We watched one episode of “The Brady Bunch” while we ate dinner and got Luciana to bed while that was on.  She went to bed happily snuggling her new panda bear.  Liesl took her snow leopard and climbed into our bed for a while where she took the snow leopard and watched shows on her iPad with it just like it was seeing the shows for the first time.  It was adorable.

Dominica and I stayed up a little bit and watched the first episode of “Webster”.  I have not seen that show in reruns, ever.  My only time having seen it was the first time that it aired so I would have not seen this episode since 1983!  Thirty two years later.

Dominica has very bad heartburn tonight.  She was unable to sleep for a long time.  I ended up going to bed with her still up for a change.