Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

I got up this morning and the Internet was still out!  This is pretty ridiculous that being in Texas, in a major metro area, in a super expensive resort area, on the most expensive high end strip of that area that our Internet access is less reliable than it was in Spain, Panama or Nicaragua and our power is no better than those!  This is the longest that we have been without Internet access for this entire year.

Dominica and Francesca came down to Galveston to pick me up this morning and we went to breakfast at Miss Kitty’s.  There they said that their power and much of the power around was still out and that they were running with all of their appliances having have to have been moved to different outlets and whatnot as only some outlets had power.  Unlike me, they had Internet access, but unlike me they did not have power.  So they were struggling this morning to make the food.

We all got breakfast and coffee.  Excellent food as always.  Not a big crowd today, but we were not alone either.

After breakfast we drove south on the island to an area that I have never been to before.  I have really not taken the time to explore Galveston Island, I probably should before we leave here.

We spent an hour or two shopping at a neat beach store down there.  I shopped for a while then hung out with the owner, Steve, for a long time while Dominica and Francesca continued to shop.  It is a huge store that I would have never guessed was located where it was.  Full of really interesting stuff.

We returned to the Grices’ for the afternoon.  It was the middle of the afternoon by the time that we got there.  I brought the Asus ROG with me and hooked it up in the media room and I set it up to get downloading again.  Other than our Internet access being out, downloads at the Grices’ are no faster than they are at our condo.  Speeds in the Houston area just are not very good.  Even if we were not using shared Internet access at the condo it would still take us a full month to download all of our games!

Garrett got addicted to playing HexCells today.  Liesl tried to help him.  They are adorable gaming together.

For dinner, as it is Saturday night, we went down the street to the Toccos’.  We got Mexican tonight, it was awesome.  I got the most amazing tuna steak fish tacos.

I love this picture of Clara (left) and Liesl (right) sitting at Joe’s Bar in his house cracking nuts.  You can just picture them doing this when they are fifty, too.

We pretty much did dinner and then everyone took off right away.  Francesca and Dominica had wanted to go back to the house early and have me bring the kids later so that they could wrap presents and try to get some of that done.  I offered instead to take all six kids out to the condo for a sleep over.  That way the girls could wrap all night instead of just getting an hour or two.  They thought that this was a great idea.

So after dinner all six kids loaded into the Toyota Sequoia and I drove them all out to Galveston to hang out for the evening.

Once at the condo we set up the Steam machine and Madeline set about playing Back to the Future: The Game with all of the kids watching.  It was a very successful evening.  Everyone loved the game.  I had to make food for half of them even though we had just come from dinner.  But other than that, everyone gathered around and watched the game.  A perfect way to wind down the night.

Emily was the first one down.  She took the guest room and was asleep and Clara went in and joined her very early, almost as soon as we started the game.  Luciana tried to hang on for a while but only got about an hour before falling asleep on my lap in the living room.  I carried her in and put her to bed in her own bed around eleven.

Garrett stayed on the couch with Liesl and Madeline but fell asleep at some point and slept there all night.  Madeline played the game until just after eleven when she went to bed moving Clara out to the couch with Garrett.  Liesl came in and snuggled with me.  She acted like she was wide awake but she passed out immediately upon getting into bed and by a quarter after eleven she was down for the count.

I got ready for bed and played my evening allotment of The Enigma Express on my iPhone before falling asleep.  Dominica texted me just before midnight to see if the kids were asleep.  I was already nearly asleep.  They had not gotten nearly as much done as they had meant to tonight.  It took them hours to get set up and moving on the wrapping.  They have a lot to do tomorrow, too.

Today is Friday.  We got up this morning and put on Christmas music around the house since today was our first day with access to Bluetooth speakers on which to play the music.  The girls barely got to hear any, though, as they slept through most of it.  We played quite a selection before they got up, though.

I made a new analogy this morning that Dominica especially liked: Renaming a Chinese Gooseberry to kiwifruit and having it work is like shutting down American Thanksgiving because we had a political dispute with Turkey.

Once the girls were up and ready they all went up to the Grices’ for the day and to spend the night.  I am going to see them tomorrow.  This gave me much of the day to be productive with the house being quiet.

I got a bit of posting and writing and some miscellaneous stuff done today.  It was not too bad.  I really appreciate my quiet time to myself when I am able to get it, which is pretty rare.

Sadly, this evening, the power went out for a moment and the Internet died with it.  The power came back almost instantly.  The Internet, however, did not.  I had been watching Mamma Mia, too.  I was over halfway when the connection went down.

I gave it about an hour before going to the front desk of the hotel to see what was going on.  They said that they had called the ISP and that someone was coming out to look into it.  But right then they said that their WiFi had come back.  I checked my phone and could see that it was up so was relieved.  I went back to the condo and by the time that I got there the Internet was out again.  Argh.  It never ended up coming back tonight at all.

So much for being productive with my time off.  I walked over to Sonic to pick up dinner.  On my way there I got waylaid by the security guard who talked to me telling me his life story for a minimum of half an hour.  I learned all about his time in the marines, serving in Vietnam, when he was deployed to Nicaragua and Lebanon, his retirement, his new career, what his kids do for work and how their jobs are going, his son’s new truck and on and on.

I got food and came back and played some games on Steam since those were working with the Internet out.

Thursday.  Christmas is coming quickly.  It doesn’t really quite feel like it yet but there is just over a week left.  It sneaks up on you so fast.

I was on the phone quite a bit this morning.  That always drives Dominica crazy because it always happens right when she is trying to do school stuff with the girls and, of course, there isn’t enough space in the house to get away from each other in any meaningful way so we are right on top of each other and it makes the phone calls very much an interruption to everything else.

I did lab work today.  A bit of work on Solaris 11.3.  I’ve not worked on Solaris in a long time.  Nice to see it up and running again.  This is on the new, giant Scale cluster that we are using in the lab.

I spent a bit of time watching the girls today while Dominica was out shopping with Francesca.  The girls and I played a lot of puzzle games like HexCells Plus and Lyne.  Liesl loves Lyne, it is her favourite puzzle game right now.

Dominica bought a nice, small Bluetooth travel stereo speak while she was out an Walgreens.  It is attractive and seems like we will be able to be mobile with it pretty easily.  We played with that a bit this evening getting it set up and working with the gaming system and then getting it working with the Amazon Fire TV system that we have in our master bedroom here.