Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

It is Sunday.  Our first day in our “new home.”  With this move, for the first time, we are treating Texas just like any other foreign destination and we have rented a home here in exactly the same way that we have rented in Spain, Panama and Nicaragua and this is our first day in it.

Today was our down day.  Nothing scheduled and we need some time to just relax and have Miller family time.  It was a short day for us, we all slept in late needing time to catch up a bit.  We’ve been pretty tired and the stress is catching up quickly.

For lunch today, we ventured out and explored our condo complex.  Right in the centre of it is a place called Kitty’s Seaside Café which is awesome.  So easy to get to, just a quick walk without needing to leave the complex at all.  Unfortunately it is not in the same building as us so we need to go down to the ground floor and walk outside between buildings to get to it, but it is as close as could be.  Kitty’s is open six days a week (closed on Mondays) and is a diner with a large menu including breakfast all day and lots of shrimp options.

We did a late breakfast today.  The girls got pancakes and Dominica and I both got enormous omelets.  Dominica also discovered that they do biscuits and gravy with a vegetarian gravy.  So excited, that is something that we have not been able to get in a very long time.  The girls liked their food and ate well, too.

This evening I ran Dominica up to the Grices’.  We hung out for a while before leaving.  She is going to spend the night there so that she can get the kids off to school in the morning and will likely hang out there for the day.  Then the girls and I returned to the condo for an evening together.

Liesl requested Panda Express so I stopped there and picked up food on the way back down to Galveston.  That was at five.  Liesl still loves their chow mein and I am always happy to splurge on some honey walnut shrimp for me.  Panda threw in two fortune cookies so each girl could have one.  They love their fortune cookies.

Mario, a friend from SpiceWorld, was in town this evening and thinking about stopping by.

So I set up Liesl with hidden object games on the Fire TV.  Liesl was so cute about the games, she knew that those were “relaxing games” and she knew that the idea this evening was to just relax and rest and so she said that she wanted to play them this evening in order to relax.  She is adorable.  She also “gamed” the games in a matter of seconds figuring out that she could click wildly all over the screen and get nearly all of the hidden objects immediately without needing to actually look for them or get up from the couch.  So she spent a few hours doing that and had a very good time.  She did so well that she completely beat her first game and had me get her a second one so that she could play that one as well.

Luciana spent the evening playing Disney Princess games on the laptop sitting at the dining room table.  She loves her collection of Disney Princess games and can really play them.  They make her very happy and her video game skills are improving quickly.  We are very thankful that we bought this game collection.

I spent the evening getting the condo all cleaned up and put away.  After a few hours the place was pretty much spotless.  There were no toys out, no clothes out, no luggage out.  Everything was away and neat.  It looked like it was in “show condition.”

Mario ended up having to run back home as his young son got a fever while they were out tonight.  So it was just the girls and me all evening.

Luciana ended up demanding to go to sleep in a coat tonight.  She is so goofy.

Saturday.  Dominica managed to make contact with the people who are renting us the condo on Galveston Island for the month and they do not have anyone else renting the condo at the moment and were happy to just extend us at the same daily rate that we were already paying for our month there.  So we are going to be able to move into our own place tonight and be out of every one’s way.  This is a really big relief for us.  It really stresses Dominica out being an imposition on everyone and it makes it really hard for all of us not to have our own space to do our own thing, set our own schedule, etc.  We are very excited to be getting into the condo and the upside is that while we lost time at our place in Nicaragua we gained it at our place in Galveston and it was mostly the time floating around in different parts of Nicaragua that we had to give up so we are actually gaining, not losing, longevity and stability by being back early.

The girls and I had to be up early this morning, the alarm was set for seven thirty but I was actually up and getting ready before seven.  Dominica stayed at the hospital last night with Francesca and I needed to get Emily to her football game at school quite early.  So I got the girls up and out the door very early.  They were terribly groggy.  Liesl actually dressed herself in Luciana’s clothes, which we did not realize until it was too late, and she had to spend the early part of the day in ridiculously small clothes.  She is so goofy.  Both girls struggle to figure out whose clothes are whose at the best of time and they were exceptionally tired when getting dressed this morning.

Madeline was awake to watch the kids and Garrett had just gotten up and Clara was still asleep when I dropped Liesl and Luciana off at the Grices’ and picked up Emily to drive her down to Dickinson.  I had to have her there by a quarter after nine which meant leaving the house at eight thirty.

On the way back from dropping off Emily I stopped at the Taco Bell in Dickinson, right off of I45, and picked up breakfast for Dominica and I and drove it back to the house.

Bennie, Francesca and Dominica got back right after I returned from dropping off Emily.  So that was getting close to ten as it takes about twenty minutes to get to the high school from the house.

I set the kids up with my laptop hooked up to the television in the “media room” again today.  They loved it so much yesterday and were asking for it again today.  Garrett, especially, was interested in getting to play more games on it.  This is still my HP Envy that we have been using in Nicaragua that only has the anaemic Intel GPU and not a discrete NVidia or Radeon.  So it is pretty bad at games but can play some of them.

We ran over to the Toccos’ place and gathered up all of our stuff and got packed up so that we could move everything to the condo.  Since we did not have the kids with us at this point we were able to load up the little green Spark with all of our luggage and take everything in a single load – just barely.  That car is just a little bit too small for moving us around.

On the early side we ran down to Galveston and dealt with getting checked into our new home at the Victorian Condos.  It was a quarter till one when we got our keys and into the condo.  We are so lucky not only to have gotten in early but also that our two and a half bedroom condo is absolutely ideal, possibly the best unit in the entire complex, with amazing waterfront views.  We sit right on the beach, basically, and the view from our living room, master bedroom and balcony is right onto the gulf.    Standing even in the kitchen you look at the water, it fills the view.  This is an amazing spot.  Another perfect home find from Dominica.

We were barely moved in for twenty minutes when we started talking about potentially reserving this place a year in advance for December so that we could get the same deal or better and know that we would have a place that we love like this and not have to worry about it.  Having a great place to be able to come back to year after year and knowing the area would provide a tiny bit of stability, even if it is only for a month at a time, in our very hectic lives.  This place is just perfect.  It turns out that there is a restaurant on property too, a diner.  That is going to make things really easy for us.

Our location is pretty ideal.  It is super fast and easy to get here from the mainland and we are right in the middle of things with food and shopping options within easy walking distance and lots of stuff that we pass on our way on and off of the island, too.  This really could not be better.  I think that my dad is really going to like his room here too, although his room does not have an ocean view.  The layout is a master bedroom that has ocean views and a television, a second bedroom that has a sideways view onto the ocean and no television, two bathrooms and an alcove, rather than a room, with a bunk bed that the girls are going to use.  The kitchen is small but very functional.  There is a decent balcony off of the living room with two chairs outside.  The living room is very comfortable and there is a television there.  Internet is complex-wide wifi.

We spent a few hours moving in and getting settled without the kids.  That made things much easier.  Then we headed back to the mainland but swung into Best Buy on the way to see if they had the Amazon Fire TV, which they did not, but they said that the location up by Hobby had it in stock.  We decided that we needed something for the condo and we needed a diversion for everyone so we drove around a little and managed to get the Gaming Edition of the Amazon Fire TV and then went back to the Grices’ for the afternoon.

We needed to pick up Emily from the high school after the football game which ended up being around seven.  What a long day for her – she had to be at school, on a Saturday, from nine till seven.  That is longer than a normal working day and that’s after a week of school and takes up nearly all of her time to do things like homework.

Dominica rode with me to pick up Emily in Dickinson and on the way back we stopped at Panera Bread and grabbed dinner for the family.  We took that back to the house, ate rather quickly and hit the road to go down to the condo with the kids.  Dominica is staying with us tonight, the only time for the last few days and she will not be staying tomorrow so this is our one family evening.

We stopped at Walgreen’s on the way to the condo and did some shopping for basic necessities so that we would be able to function in the condo.  Then once back we had a very short evening that mostly consisted of setting the girls up with the laptop so that they could entertain themselves with Disney Princess video games while I worked on getting the Amazon Fire TV hooked up and working in the living room on the television.  This is the first that we have had laptops or anything here so we had to get the Internet working everywhere, but that was not too bad.  The signal is okay and the speed is not horrible, but it is not fast either.

There was not enough time for the slow Internet to get things loaded onto the Fire TV so we set some things to download and hopefully it will be usable tomorrow.

Today is my baby Liesl’s seventh brithday!  She had slept with me last night and slept in long after I had gotten up.  At one point she was asleep and I went to check on Luciana and when I returned Liesl was wide awake with a huge smile on her face.  I said “Happy Birthday” and she was ready to explode.  She is so excited about being seven.

I had a talk with her about how she was was not going to get to celebrate her birthday today or really even get to see her mom.  She was so understanding even though she does not know what is going on. She is so mature and sweet.  Such a good girl.

Dominica was already gone this morning when the girls and I got up at the Toccos.  We got up relatively early and went over to the Grices.  I am the only adult around for the bulk of the day.  Everyone was gone by the time that we arrived.  Madeline and Emily were watching the little ones.

Once we arrived, the four little ones ran off to play together. Madeline and Garrett were playing games on the Wii when I arrived.

I set up my laptop in the media room and nearly everyone played video games for much of the day.  We tried a lot of games.  I even got Madeline into the Back to the Future: The Game which she played for hours.  All of the kids moved into the media room and watched her play for a long time.  She has never really played video games before and definitely none like this and she had a good time.

It was a long, rough day.  I took care of getting dinner for the kids.  We got Panda Express, of course, because it is Liesl’s birthday and she got to pick.

I made two trips out to the hospital.  One to do deliveries early in the evening and later, when I was taking the girls home to go to bed at night we stopped by again so that Dominica could see the girls at least once and say happy birthday to Liesl, our little trooper.

The hospital decided to keep Francesca tonight.  So Dominica is sleeping at the hospital tonight, too.  Bennie went back late at night to stay there and I took our girls back to Joe’s.

It was a late night for my girls getting them back to go to bed.  We were exhausted by the time we got to bed.  Both girls decided to sleep with me tonight.  Luciana did not want to be alone.

I can’t believe that my little Liesl is seven now.  She is getting so old and growing up so much.  And she did such a great job today even though she did not get any real presents or anything.

When we got back to the house I gave Liesl a Lego Minecraft set that Emily and I had found today to surprise Liesl with.  Liesl and Luciana were both really excited about it and spent a while putting some of it together tonight before bed.  But much of it will be saved for later.