Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Sunday.  Only two days until dad comes to visit us in Texas.  The girls are very excited.

Francesca came out to Galveston this morning and we all went to the Golden Corral for breakfast.  They really have good food there and a good variety.  It is perfect for us because they have a really big variety and they have lots of items that all of us like.  The girls eat lots of different things there and it is really easy for us to deal with all of it.  We will be using them a lot from this condo.  Way to convenient not to.

After our late breakfast, Francesca, Dominica and the girls went back to League City to go shopping.  The girls got dropped off with Emily and Madeline at the Grices’ and Dominica and Francesca spent the day first shopping then wrapping.

I spent most of the day relaxing around the condo.  It is great having a mostly quiet weekend.  I got a lot more time to myself today than I did yesterday.  They all left around noon or before and I did not leave the condo to go to the Grices to pick them up until almost seven thirty.

What did I do with my new found freedom, you ask?  Well, in addition to managing the massive, ongoing Steam games download I played a few video games and spent a lot of time working on getting new games working and set up.  Then I discovered HexCells, a Minesweeper-esque puzzle series.  In almost no time I played through the first one in the series.  The I went on to play HexCell Plus but got nowhere near beating that one.

After I picked everyone up around eight we loaded up in the Spark and drove down a few exits and went to Denny’s for dinner.  Dominica and I both got veggie burgers with sweet bourbon sauce.  Liesl had mac and cheese.  Luciana was going to have cheese sticks but saw the reindeer themed pancakes and had to have those.

It was pretty late when we got home.  Dominica was falling asleep in no time.  I finally managed to get the kids off to bed around midnight.  Dominica was really tired.

Our second weekend in Texas.  This morning I drove Dominica and the girls up to League City and then drove back home so that I would have some quiet time to myself.  On the way up we stopped into Sonic which is right by us on the Galveston Seawall and picked up some breakfast to eat in the car on the way.  It was mostly for me as Dominica had eaten breakfast at the condo earlier, but I had not eaten anything yet.

My day was not a long one, I only had about four hours at the condo but it was really nice having some quiet time.  I spent most of the day managing downloads and going game by game to try to make sure that things had installed correctly and were working properly.  Many games do not work or do not work right out of the box so there is rather a big investment to be made in getting them to work well.  Especially now with the Steam Controller there is all of that effort to also get that set up to work in an optimum fashion on top of everything else.  I did not make it through even a small portion of the games that are already downloaded!  This is going to be a lot of work.

I picked up the family and we went to Waffle House on TX518 for dinner.  Everyone enjoyed that.  Our first time back at Waffle House since returning to Texas.  The girls were excited to get to eat there again.

This evening, once back at the condo, we played the fifth and final episode of Back to the Future: The Game. Liesl took the controls and both Luciana and Dominica fell asleep early.  Liesl was doing such an amazing job of reading everything and playing the game that I stayed up with her until after two in the morning but she managed to complete the episode in a final sitting!

It was a gorgeous, bright day on the Galveston shore this morning.  We are in such a gorgeous spot.  I started the day off with some tea and working from the kitchen counter where I often stand with my laptop.  Today is our first day in the condo of just the four of us.

Today was a relatively slow day.  Nice and quiet here at the house.  I spent the day writing and posting, for the most part.

This evening we decided that we wanted to get dinner from Miss Kitty’s Seaside Cafe here in our condo complex.  We just wanted to eat at the condo.  So I ordered dinner and then walked over in the late evening, just before they closed, to pick it up and carry it back to the condo.

I had the popcorn shrimp salad for dinner.  It is pretty amazing.  Dominica had it the other day and it was really delicious.

Dominica and I were feeling like a movie and we settled on Cary Grant and Doris Day in That Touch of Mink which we have seen before but not for a really long time.  It’s not a bad movie.  A nice, relaxing movie to watch for the evening at home with the family.

The girls spent the evening playing Disney Princess video games on Steam.  They just love those games.

 

Liesl woke us up this morning coughing badly.  Both Dominica and I got up to check on her.  We got her cough “medicine” and she moved into sleeping in our room.  I was not going to fall back asleep, so I set up in the kitchen and got to work.

Being up so early is nice because I get to work in the quiet for a while and I get to watch the sun come up over the Gulf of Mexico which is one of the delights of living in Galveston on the beach.

My big victory for the day was catching up on SGL which was a bit behind from everything that happened this week.  The new laptop had worked through the night as well and there are a lot of games loaded up on it at this point.  Another few days and it is going to be in pretty decent shape.  It will take all month before it has all of the games that we want, but we are nearly to the point where we have a  good enough selection to be really able to play some things.

Francesca arrived at the condo just before eight.  Dominica didn’t join us for another half of an hour.  Luciana was up around nine thirty.  Liesl did not wake  it up until early in the afternoon!  Liesl really needed her sleep, she has a cold or something and needs her time to heal and get better.  Her cough was not gone when she got up today, but it is a little better than it was.  Luciana is very constipated today.  Her whole day was spent being rather unhappy about that.

Dominica found a centipede in our bathroom today.  Pretty small, but up on the ceiling and a big pain to kill.  Later in the day I found a little baby one in one of the cupboards.  We are not happy about that.  Who knows how many that there might be.

I stayed home with the girls when Dominica and Francesca went to Golden Corral for lunch.  They did bring me back food, which was pretty good and very easy as the GC is right next door.  My dad is going to enjoy that.

One of my projects today was getting my smaller ultrabook, my HP Folio, the one that we bought for travel in 2012, upgraded to Linux Mint 17.2 and set up so that I can go full Window-less.  This is the first that I have moved to Linux as my only desktop in a very long time.  This will be a little bit of an adventure.  But Windows just has not been cutting it and the HP Envy laptop that I have been using is ridiculously large and heavy and not good for travelling so it is heading north to Ohio in a few days.

The girls played Disney Princess games much of the evening.  They got my HP Envy once I was done with it and they played games together for many hours.  The new laptop continued to download games all day long.

I finally got paid today.  This is my first time getting something resembling a paycheck since September.  We have been getting a little bit nervous about that.  Hopefully this means that we will be doing okay going forward.

Dominica and I watched several episodes of “Word Travels” on HuluPlus tonight.  It is a 2008 era show about two travel writers travelling the world and writing.  Not too bad of a show.

Dominica put in a ton of work today trying to figure out our flight and travel plans for our upcoming trip to Europe.  The flights are going to be really complex with this trip.  We are planning on most likely doing a very complex trip from Houston to Athens, Athens to Bucharest and then Bucharest to New York City.  And all of this spread out over six months or more.

I was very exhausted for much of the day having gotten not that much sleep and then having gotten up so incredibly early.  So going to bed early for me this evening.  The laptop is set up to process a huge queue during the night.  There should be many more games loaded up by tomorrow morning.

Today is Wednesday, we’ve been in Texas less than a week.  We are still loving our condo, though.  It is really great.  Dominica did such a good job finding this place.  We are very thankful for having this place to live in for this month.  This has made things so much more comfortable for everyone.  We would be in terrible shape at this point if we did not have our own home to go to on a regular basis.

I was up at seven this morning, Dominica was up about half an hour later.  The new laptop ran through the night last night, but with very poor download speeds.  But a couple of games got downloaded with the full night of the machine being left alone.  I looked at it today and figured out that we are really, really lucky that we made the decision to buy this machine last night because we need the full month to be downloading games or we won’t have them before we leave the country in January!  It takes so long to download the games that we really like that it is a big issue.  Some of the bigger games look like they could take a couple of days to download each!

Francesca came over around nine and brought coffee from Starbucks and bagels from Panera.  She had gone shopping at Target en route to the house.

Our Steam Controller had been delivered to Francesca’s house the other day and she brought it over today.  So we started working on getting that hooked up and working today.  It is pretty cool and works great with Steam Big Picture but it is going to take a lot of work to get it set up for all of our games and a long time to get used to using it as it is so different from a normal controller.

It was a rather chilly morning again.  It is so surprisingly cold here in Texas.  We are both amazing by how cold it is and by how not used to the cold we are.  It can be seventy four in the house and we all feel cold!  Spending so much time in Panama and Nicaragua has really changed how we feel about the outside temperatures.

This afternoon Dominica and Francesca went out shopping on the island and I stayed home with the girls.  We did a little bit of video gaming today – it is hard to resist playing with the new controller and the new laptop.  For the first time in forever we are able to play basically all of our games and they look fantastic.  This is going to be so much fun.  We have really been needing this as a family; we are all such big time gamers and we often skip playing games because it is just too hard or we have lacked a lay to do it.

I played a few minutes of Fable: Anniversary and Dominica decided that it looks pretty awesome and thinks that she is going to play it herself.  Liesl put in a bit of time playing Child of Light this afternoon during a break from school.

Dominica had to leave pretty early to go pick up Emily from school so that they could go out shopping for the cotillion dress again.  Francesca left a little after that.

Our Internet was pretty awful all afternoon, it was barely working at all and the girls were struggling to do their Ooka Island and ABC Mouse work.  We lost power once or twice while Francesca was here too.   Already our Internet and power here are not all that much different from in Nicaragua.

The girls worked on class work for almost two hours.  Then they played together for another hour before Liesl got set up to play Child of Light this evening.  She got stuck in some hard parts and I had to teach her about grinding and skill trees.  That helped her a lot and she really took off on that game.  She is doing a great job and it is not a kid’s game at all.  Very proud of our little gamer girl.

Dominica was heading back from dress shopping with Emily around six thirty and attempted to stop at the Taco Bell in Dickinson to grab her and me dinner and ended up getting stuck on a closed road and rerouted to a place that she did not know and had a long, frustrating drive back to the condo.  One of the difficulties in living in new places all of the time is that we do not know our way around at all so when things happen we have a big penalty for things like closed roads.  Even though we are only thirty minutes from the Grices and the Toccos here we are far enough away that we do not know the roads.