Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is Tuesday.  One week until grandpa comes to Texas to visit us.  It is still chilly today.  Dominica was up before me and after getting up Luciana sneaked into our room and crawled into bed and fell asleep with me.  Like yesterday, she was sleeping with a coat on.  She is so goofy.

Francesca came over this morning and brought bagels from Panera Bread.  It was a busy morning in general and a tough one.  The funeral director came over to the condo this morning and that was dealt with.  She turned out to be from Cohocton, New York which is unbelievable.   We did not know any mutual people, she was too much younger to know the few people that I knew from the area.

Around one we went to Kitty’s Seaside Cafe and got lunch before they closed.  We were the only people there the entire time that we were eating.  That was nice, though.  The owners put on cartoons on the television for the girls and they were able to watch that while we ate.  Francesca and Liesl got breakfast.  Dominica, Luciana and I all got shrimp meals.  We all enjoyed our lunches.

Francesca stayed until around four before heading back home.  Dominica and I spent a bit of the evening trying to figure out what to do about the inability to get a Steam Machine.  We have been trying to get one for weeks to no avail.  We desperately need a gaming rig for when we travel and have gone for a year without one now and really know that it will not work well doing that for another year.  If we do not have a gaming machine figured out before we leave for Greece we will be looking at a minimum of six months without one, not including the month that we are here in Texas without one.  Likely it would turn into at least eight months, which would be pretty awful.  All of us love getting to game and Liesl is really, really into it and Luciana is starting to get into it and already there are so many games that we can’t play and the ones that we can play do not play well.  The whole situation is less than ideal and we really want the girls spending their screen time doing things that are interactive rather than passive as much as possible and if we don’t have good gaming options that is just going to be impossible.

We looked at all of the options that we could find and talked about whether we should just make do with something cheaper that is not nearly as powerful as we had been thinking or if we should try to build something ourselves but struggled with how to do that without the device ending up being far too physically large and heavy and being a major problem for travel.  I brought in Mike to discuss the options and he eventually said that we just had no desktop options and that we really needed to just look at gaming laptops.  We were reticent to look at laptops and we did not want more big, fragile laptops to carry around but he talked us into it and the pricing ended up coming out pretty good.

We looked at a lot of options and talked about it for a while and decided that Mike was right and a gaming laptop was what we needed for a lot of reasons – including what if we ended up in a place that did not have a television for us to hook into!  So we finally decided to go with an Asus ROG GL552V 15.6″ unit that Amazon had for $999.  I looked and Fry’s in Webster carried it and they advertise that they do Internet price matching.  So, because we needed to get whatever we were going to use and start getting things set up as soon as possible and tested, I ran up to Webster and Fry’s had what we needed in stock and did not give me any hassle with the price matching even though it was $200 off from their normal price and by around eight I was back on Galveston with our new gaming rig!  We are all pretty excited.

I stopped at Walgreen’s, CVS and Subway on the way home stocking up on milk, holiday scented candles and getting dinner for the family before returning to the condo.

Most of the rest of the evening was spent getting the new laptop set up.  It is a quad core Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SATA drive, 15.6″ 1080p display, Nvidia GTX960M 2GB GPU with Windows 10.  It has a great keyboard and runs really cool.  It is 5.6 lbs which is pretty good for a gaming rig, we were unable to find anything else this light.  Some of the other laptops were over 10 lbs and there was at least one of the Steam Machine options was going to be 12 lbs!  We know how much every pound counts when we are travelling so getting something light was important even though this was not a particularly thin laptop option.  But Mike had warned us that really thin laptops would suffer from heat dissipation issues and would likely have much shorter lifespans so this seems like it was a good choice.

I spent the evening getting the laptop set up, Steam installed and the first video games downloading.  Our Internet access was terribly slow tonight and we were not able to get any games downloaded to test the system before it was bed time so hopefully we will get to see some games tomorrow.  We are anxious to see how the new system does.

Dominica tried to watch some shows on the Fire TV tonight but with the bad Internet we were unable to get anything to work and had to give up on that.  Some shows would start but we could not get them to keep playing and it was just too frustrating to try to watch things.

Dominica and the girls played a hidden object game on the Fire TV for maybe half an hour but she was tired today and wanted to go to bed early.  I set up the laptop so that it would attempt to download games through the night as well as the 1511 Windows 10 update.  Hopefully we will have some things to see tomorrow.

Today is Monday, our first weekday in the condo.  Dominica stayed on the mainland last night so it is just the girls and me for the day here at the condo.  We are spending the day just relaxing and hanging out together today.  We are planning on a very quiet day just the three of us.  It has been quite a busy last few days and all of us are very much in need of some down time.

Dominica had to be up very early this morning to get the kids off to school; she had to drive them so had to really be up early.

The girls and I relaxed for a bit today.  We had a lot of fun today and managed to mostly just play all day.  Much of the day the girls begged to get to use my laptop in order to play their bevy of Disney Princess video games on it.  I set them up in our bedroom with the laptop on the luggage rack and they played it in turns for much of the day.  They are really good at those games and they both love them, Luciana especially.

We tried to order in lunch from Kitty’s today but I had forgotten that they were closed on Mondays.  So no luck there.  I tried to talk Luciana into walked to Golden Corral but she said that she did not want to go anywhere.  We finally agreed on getting Dominos delivered.

Since I had a long time with no laptop to work from I checked out some shows on the Amazon Fire TV.  I watched several episodes of the new Muppet Show which was quite good – like a Muppet’s take on the show 30 Rock.  I also started watching Pacific which seems like it will be decently good.

Liesl played several different games today, too.  She explored what there is on the Amazon Fire TV and played Leo’s Fortune, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and some others.

I got both girls to take showers today, which was rather a victory.  But Liesl was just getting out of the shower when Dominica texted and said that she was ready for us to come up and pick her up.

Dominica was not ready for us to pick her up until rather late.  It was after seven.  So I rushed to get the girls ready and we were out the door.  It takes thirty two minutes to get from the condo to the Grices’.

We picked up Dominica and returned to the island.  Before returning to the condo we stopped at Walgreen’s for some supplies as we have just nothing in the condo.

I had tried really hard to keep the condo clean after having worked so hard to get it clean last night but the girls just made a huge mess and it did not resemble the nice, clean place that I had made it last night.