Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Monday and dad’s last full day here in Galveston.  He is heading back to New York tomorrow.

Dominica and I both slept in this morning.  It was nearly eight when we got up.  We were tired.  I did some posting this morning until ten.  Everyone just sat around till ten when Dominica and I took the Chevy Malibu and returned it to Enterprise Rent-a-Car down the street.

On the way back we stopped at Randall’s to do some quick grocery shopping.  We needed to get a birthday cake for Liesl because we are going to celebrate her birthday tonight!  It is our last chance to do that.

We got home and pretty soon thereafter set out for the Golden Corral for some lunch.  Dad has not had a chance to go there yet.  We had a very good lunch.  The girls love getting the variety.  Liesl especially loves Golden Corral’s broccoli.

It was a busy day of posting for me.  MangoLassi maintained its massive performance all day with 145K views for the day!  That is just crazy.

So I was busy at the laptop nearly all day.  We had the door open today, a nice breeze all day.

Dominica and Liesl got in a full day of school today.  Luciana played a lot of video games today.  Mostly “Lego Worlds”.

Dad went for a walk over to Walmart this afternoon to get a can opener as the one in this condo is just unusable.  It is totally broken and does not open anything.

We celebrated Liesl’s birthday tonight.  She had her pink princess cake and got her big present – a Minecraft stop motion video kit.  Both she and Luciana are super excited about it.

Dominica cooked chili for dinner.  Once the chili was cooking down, Liesl requested the evening be spent watching The Book of Life because she wanted to show it to grandpa.  It is possibly her favourite movie.  She was squealing, she was so happy as she watched it.

We were pretty tired when we got up this morning.  We all slept in quite late.  Dad was up before Dominica and I got up for a change.  It was nearly nine when we got up!  It is a very cold and extremely rainy day today.  Huge storm pounding the island.

Our first order of business this morning was to get to Enterprise Rent-a-Car and get a vehicle so that we would be able to get to the Dickinson Christmas Concert as we do not all fit into the Spark.  Dominica and I drove across the island in the Chevy Spark.  The rain was very heavy but Enterprise was easy to find.

We got a nice, charcoal grey Chevy Malibu for $49 for the day.  It was positively pouring when we picked it up.  The poor people working at Enterprise were having a rough day.

I followed Dominica back to the house.  We had to work our way across the island and there was some heavy standing water on the roads.  At one point we saw cars parked with water up to their doors.

We ordered in delivery from Miss Kitty’s Seaside Cafe.  Dominica and I both got the country scramble which is a huge cat head biscuit, scrambled eggs, hash browns and white gravy. It was amazing!  We wanted to get more of it right away!  Liesl ordered the shrimp basket again.  She is addicted to Miss Kitty’s shrimp.

Before we left to go to the concert Dominica managed to get signed in and pay for our flights to Europe.  We are now officially all booked with our flights taken care of for the full first half of 2016.  We leave Texas on December 30th to fly to Istanbul, Turkey and immediately on from there to Athens, Greece where we will attempt to catch an immediate flight down to Crete.  It is going to be an insanely long leg and the longest any of us has ever done at once.

We are returning from Bucharest, Romania to Istanbul to New York in mid-June.  Another long, long trip.

We have our home in Greece all booked and paid for.  We have contacted a home in Transylvania that we are really interested in but do not have any confirmation about that one yet.

We had to leave at eleven thirty to drive up to Dickinson for the concert.  The Malibu was perfect, we fit into it easily.  The rain kept up the entire way up there.

We met up with the Grices going into the concert.  The girls and their cousins ran around like crazy people all over the school lobby while we waited for them to open the concert hall.

The concert was great.  We all really enjoyed it.  And I cannot believe how well the four littles did!  None of them was an issue at the concert – although they did all have iPads to play games to keep themselves occupied.  But they all made it through the entire concert.  Liesl’s cough was the biggest issue but Dominica was well stocked with lollipops to shove into her mouth if she started to cough.

Both Madeline and Emily are in the top band, the wind ensemble.  It was insanely impressive.  This is the first time that I have gotten to see them play in this group.  It is really something.  I’ve not heard any high school perform like that.

On the way back we stopped at Buc-Ees to get gas in the rental and to show dad the staple of Texas culture.  He was suitably impressed.  He even checked out the “Best Bathrooms in Texas.”  This is the newest and largest of all of the Buc-Ees so he really got to see it in all of its glory here in Texas City.

On our way back to the house we drove out to the north on the island and went to Joe’s Crab Shack.  Dad has never been to a Joe’s Crab Shack and he loves seafood so we figured that this would be a good stop for him.

We had a great dinner and the girls ate well too.  We always enjoy having dinner at Joe’s Crab Shack.  They are very consistent and have a very large menu that we really like.

Back at the condo we were going to watch a movie and dad did not know the song “Everything is Awesome” from The Lego Movie so I put the movie on for a minute to show it to him and he ended up getting addicted and wanting to watch the whole movie!  So we watched that which make the girls very happy.  They love that movie and have not watched it in a very long time.  Not since we were in Peekskill.

After The Lego Movie, we finished up our annual viewing of White Christmas.  Good thing that we got it done, it is now officially the Christmas season for us.

Dominica was up and gone long before seven this morning.  She and her sister are spending the day baking cookies for different functions that are coming up.  I was expecting Dominica to be gone all morning but she ended up being gone for the entire day!  I got up around eight and had no idea how early she had left.

So today was just dad and I hanging out at the condo with the girls.  It was mostly dad playing with he granddaughters all day.  We had a nice, relaxing day.  I got a bit of posting done.

We spent a bit of time just hanging out out on the balcony today.  We have two rocking chairs out there.  Throughout the day mine kept getting worse and worse with first the arm falling off and eventually the chair starting the sag and it had to be avoided.

It was a nice, quiet day.  Dad and I watched a few shows on Greece with the girls today.  Luciana talked again about how she wanted to go to Greece and hopes that we can get there soon.  Good news for her that we will be there in two and a half weeks!  We have not paid for our flights yet, do to our credit card issues the other day, but in theory everything will be paid tomorrow.

We ordered in Dominos pizza for lunch.  It was so windy that the receipt blew away before the delivery guy ever made it to our place.  It was crazy windy here all day.  At one point dad went into his room and found his coat still on a doorknob but blown out the window.  He was pretty lucky that it had not blown away completely!

Dad and I watched My Life in Ruins today which he has not seen in a very long time and did not remember too much.  The girls watched it with us.  They are starting to know it a little.

It was surprisingly late when Dominica finally got home.  Nearly time for bed!  We tried watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding which I bought for Dominica today because she has been asking for it for a week or two but she did not manage to really see any of it when we tried to watch it and we stopped it about halfway.

We have a busy day tomorrow.

Today is Friday.  We were originally supposed to get a storm today but it is scheduled for tomorrow now (as if storms can be scheduled.)  It ended up being just  gorgeous, sunny morning this morning with the sun rising over the Gulf of Mexico.

Not much to report today.  Busy day but mostly just posting.  The weather was perfect so dad and Dominica took the girls out for a walk on the beach.  I could see them out walking from where I was sitting at the table.

It was very windy and warm today.  I wanted to cool off the condo but I could not get a through breeze without opening the front door.  But it was so windy that most things would not hold the door open.  I ended up propping it with an iPad because the gummy case is so sticky that it held it without a problem.

I’ve started putting pictures back into the posts at my father’s request.  He said that it makes the blog a lot more interesting.

In the middle of the day, the family went without me to the beach and probably spent half an hour or more on the sand.  They had a great time. The weather was just perfect for this today.  I got to watch them from the table where I was writing.

This evening Liesl played Child of Light on the laptop.  She had been wanting to show grandpa this game for a few days.  Luciana insisted on playing it too, but found that it was too hard for her.  Luciana struggles with really wanting to play the games that Liesl plays but many of them are already too hard for Liesl or right at the edge of her ability and for Luciana they are far too difficult.  So she gets upset.

After the work day was over, dad and I walked over to Sonic and picked up dinner.  We came back and the family attempted to watch White Christmas to finish it up but the Internet access was so bad that we were unable to get the movie to play.

After the games, we ended up doing a slide show of our pictures from Nicaragua.  This gave us a chance to go through them and tell dad all about the trip while it was still fresh.  It was nice to get to go through all of the pictures and remember our time down in Central America.  We will do this for the Panama pictures another night.

I had hoped to maybe play a game this evening but there was not any time.  The downloads continue unabated.  My GOG downloads are nearly done and I will be going back to working on Steam downloads again very soon.

Tomorrow, Dominica is getting up early in the morning and heading up to League City to spend the morning baking cookies with Francesca.  Dad and I are going to stay at the condo and just hang out with the girls.  We are supposed to be getting a big storm tomorrow and, in theory, it is going to be raining all day.  So we plan to just stay in.

Thursday.  I slept a bit much last night as well. I am still making up a little bit of lost sleep.

This morning Dominica worked on getting all of our plans for our next six months in place.  We have had our apartment in Crete rented for a couple of weeks now, since we were still in Nicaragua, but we do not have our final plans for an apartment after that finalized yet and we do not have our flights yet.  We were going to buy our plane tickets while we were in Nicaragua but I had not been paid yet and we were unable to do so while we were there.  But now it is getting to be a bit of an emergency that we get it finalized so that is being worked on today.

It was very stressful as we had to deal with the bank today and remembering why we hate dealing with an incompetent small town credit union.  Between their lack of security and zero customer service and being completely stupid about not allowing us to spend enough money to do single transactions large enough to, you know, buy plane tickets they are pretty much useless!  It was a very upsetting day.  We spent the whole day waiting for the bank to release money after we went through all kinds of hoops to placate them and in the end, they just ignored us.  I’m talking about you, ESL in Rochester.  You are not impressive.  I’m very unhappy.

So we do not have our plane tickets and we are very worried that the price is going to shoot up again because of this.  Getting flights is extremely complicated as it is.  Having to do it over and over again because of pay and bank issues makes it just impossible.

We did lunch at Miss Kitty’s Seaside Cafe today.

Had a busy afternoon, on the phone for much of it.  Late this afternoon Dominica and the girls packed up and went up to Dickinson to see the girls’ cousins in the Christmas parade up there.  Dad was going to go but decided that he was not up to it and that knowing that he was going to see the band play this weekend he decided to just stay home with me this evening.  So we had a nice, quiet evening at the condo.

The girls had a great time at the parade and were very excited about the first that they had candy thrown to them.  They came home with a big bag full of candy.