Sheep Guarding Llama

It is Monday after a nice, relaxing weekend at home in which we did effectively nothing.  The theory is that we are going to be heading down to Costa Rica at some point this week but we do not know what the plan is yet.  Paul and Karen are supposed to be arriving today but we did not hear any news all day so we do not know what the status is at this point.  We are just hanging loose ready to head down there whenever we get the chance.

This morning I tried to help Dominica with her laptop.  That darn Lenovo just never works no matter what we try to do with it.  We always have issues with drivers, weird hardware or something.  Now it will not allow games to go into full screen mode and she has a lot of games that I have gotten for her from Steam and GOG that she wants to try playing but she is not able to because they show up so small that she can not even see them most of the time.  I’ve gotten her a collection of hidden object games that I think that she will really like but she has not had a chance to try out at all.

The “new” thing that has arisen in the world of casual gaming and hidden object games is that they are now commonly making them more in the vein of traditional adventure games with voice acting, great graphics and a strong plot or story telling but having hidden objects as the puzzles rather than dialogue (a la Back to the Future) or inventory (a la Ankh) or puzzles (a la Myst.)  Dominica has never gotten to play one of these new styles and the hidden object genre is very heavily focused on the female audience and I am pretty sure that she will really enjoy many of these games and very often they are extremely low cost as well.  Law & Order Legacies that we are working on playing through is actually a mix of dialogue and hidden object challenges which she did not notice until I had pointed it out.

After the girls were done with school we all walked uptown to go grocery shopping as a family.  We do not do this very often because it is such a production to get everyone ready and walk all of the way up there so that everyone is hot and then we shop and have to get the girls back home while carrying all of those groceries.  It is actually easier when I do it all on my own and  have to carry everything back alone, but it is nice to get to have everyone go up there too.  It is a bit fun and the girls love to grocery shop.  It is amazing to me that Dominica used to ever be able to grocery shop without me – she does not use lists and forgets almost every item on them.  I’ve been the primary grocery getter for the family this year, at least since March, so I have my systems now.  Before Spain it was always Dominica getting the groceries, but I can not figure out how she was doing it from how she does it now.  It is a bit funny that I have become the family grocery shopper at this point.  I do at least eight perfect of it.

This evening was an early family game night, starting before seven!  Tonight it was Liesl taking the controls as we played Episode Four of Back to the Future: The Game.  We did not complete the fourth episode in the series but we did make some serious headway on it and there were plenty of challenging bits for Liesl to tackle and she did an amazing job.  This is a game that she is able to play nearly as well as we can for the most part.  She is such a good gamer and so good at game navigation.  We broadcast the game on Steam, which I have set up to do automatically, but I have no idea if anyone watched.  I did not get any feedback tonight.  Luciana snuggled and watched the game for a while but requested to be taken to bed and tucked in long before we were done playing.

I got up at seven thirty this morning.  My body is going back to its more natural rhythm now, even though we were up late gaming last night.

Luciana got up and immediately started the day by playing more of Super Panda Adventures which she had been playing last night.

Late this morning I went to the panedaria and got donuts and cupcakes.  Dominica made smoothies.  Trying to increase our fruit intake rate but it is a struggle.  There is just so much fruit to eat.

This evening we sent the kids to do their own thing and Dominica and I played through two episodes of Law & Order Legacies from Telltale Games.  It was quite good.  Not hard and not a style that I would normally want to play but Dominica has been wanting to play this one and as it is heavily story driven and there are so few games that work out like this for us I really wanted to get to watch her play it.  We played until just after eleven and we broadcasted it on Steam and even had Rob Dunn out in Chicago watching us play!  Playing a story based game like this with a broadcast is fun and adds some interest to it.  The game was good and we enjoyed getting to play.

We all must have been really exhausted because I was the first one up at just after nine this morning and by ten had not heard anyone in the house stirring!  I know that I was really tired from getting nearly no sleep yesterday; I felt it all day.  But everyone else had slept normally.  I am quite surprised that everyone was so tired.

I got up and came downstairs and did some posting and writing for a while.  Checked out the weekend Steam and GOG sales.

I found out from Dominica after she had finally gotten up that apparently I had been sleep walking last night!  That is something quite surprising to found out in the morning.  From what she tells me, we lost power early on in the night last night.  This would have caused my CPAP to start to suffocate me so I would have reacted immediately.  This would also cause the air conditioner to shut off and not come back on due to how it works.  The AC reprograms itself every time that the power goes out and Dominica has to take the remote and reprogram it before turning it back on.

So apparently I got up and opened up the one side of the window and then went back to bed.  The power was only off for a few seconds so I might have done this after the power was back on and so slipped the CPAC back on and been right back asleep.  Liesl was still awake and asked us about the power going out in the morning.  Dominica did not find the window open and the AC off until hours later when she turned it back on and shut the window.

So that explains partly why everyone was so tired and slept in so late this morning.

Later in the morning I went to Cafe Isabella and got a big breakfast for me and Dominica.  Scrambled eggs, potatoes and gallo pinto.  There was one other table at the cafe getting breakfast while I was there.  Very clearly tourists, but it was amazing to see anyone as typically I am the only customer, especially that early in the day.

We ran out of propane last night.  Today we had more delivered.  This was our first propane delivery here in Granada.

Luciana did her first non-Minecraft PC gaming today playing at least half an hour of Goat Simulator.  You would never expect this to be her first foray into 3D third person gaming but there you have it.  Strangely, at the very same time that Luciana was playing this game, Dominica’s mother texted Dominica to tell her that Goat Simulator was free on the Amazon Fire and that she was downloading it as soon as she got home.  So weird.  We’ve owned it for a while, though.

Liesl played a bunch of video games today.  Liesl started off playing Farm Frenzy 4 for what was probably an hour. She played some new platformers like Ethan: Meteor Hunter, Oozi and Braid.  Then she played Broken Age for a while.

I went out to Taco Stop and picked up dinner for everyone.  That always takes half an hour minimum, probably a bit more.  We ate down in the dining room for a change.

After dinner I did the second half of Luciana’s homeschool for the day; Dominica had done the first half while I was out getting food.  It is Saturday and we tend to take the weekends off from school except for when the girls request that we do school and Luciana had been asking for it today.  So awesome that our girls actually ask to get to learn new stuff rather than us having to cajole them into it.

I did a little reading with the girls.  Then we talked Dominica into having a family game night.

We started off exploring some new games that we had just bought or at least had downloaded.  We fired up Super Panda Adventures and instead of Liesl wanting to take the controls (mostly because she had just found a new game on her iPad) it was Luciana who decided that she wanted to play!  SPA is an action platformer and the first that Luciana has ever played.  So this was a big day for her, her first two “real” video games all in a single day.

Luciana played for what was probably an hour at least.  She made it through a few levels and while she played I worked on getting Steam working with streaming or broadcasting which we have wanted to do for a while.  That was not too hard to do and we managed to get dad able to watch Luciana play for a while which was really neat.  Of all games, this one was probably not very interesting to watch remotely as there is essentially no story and all just jumping action.  But the idea is really cool and we often play much more interesting games.

Luciana got so into the game that when the antagonist first showed up and destroyed the castle and took the princess and killed the protagonist’s mentor she felt like a failure for not protecting them and cried and cried.  She was much more emotionally attached to the game than we had expected.

From there we played Back to the Future: The Game which Luciana stayed around for a little bit of but after not too long went to her room to watch YouTube and fall asleep.  The girls have been watching Cupquake videos much of the day.

Tonight it was Liesl who took control and played most of the game for us!  She is getting so good at playing any kind of game.  She played through to the end of Episode Three “Citizen Brown.”  Only two episodes left to go.

I got woken up just enough and at the right times last night so that I never ended up managing to get to sleep.  So at around two this morning I decided to give up on that idea, come downstairs and at least do something rather than laying in bed with insomnia.  That’s the worst thing to do – never let the insomnia win.

So I put in about four and a half hours of writing and posting downstairs.  It was nice as it is a bit cooler at that time of day and I got to watch the sun come up.

At six thirty I was super tired and falling asleep in my chair so I made my way back to bed and this time fell asleep and slept for about an hour and a half.  Not a lot but enough that it would let me remain functional for the day.

I did a little writing before attending a webinar at eleven this morning.  It was horrible though, such a waste of time.

I am very excited that with this week’s release of the new Steam Machines (PCs that are basically video game consoles but managed by Steam) the small gaming PC that Dominica and I had decided that we were going to get when we were back in the States in December (the Zotac Magnus 970) has been used as the basis for building Zotac’s first Steam Machine but has a lower price point (overall, technically it is higher but it comes with way more) and has a one generation newer CPU, twice as many cores (quad rather than dual), 8GB RAM included and a 1TB SATA hard drive and it comes with one Steam Controller of its own too and the Steam Controller’s dongle is internal to the little device.  Super excited.  I have not had a new desktop of my own since 2002!  Thirteen years, it is time.  And this one is seriously built for gaming.  And it is just awesome to support Steam and their vision for a Linux-based PC platform video game console system.

Luciana is playing more and more Minecraft these days and not just on the iPad but mostly on the PC now.  She uses my HP Folio 13 laptop for that when Liesl is not using it.  So happy that she has managed to get into the gaming with the rest of us and that she is getting so good at it so quickly.  In many ways, Minecraft is for Liesl and Luciana what Legos were to me at that age.

I got openSuse Leap 42.1 downloaded today and switched my laptop back from Hyper-V to VirtualBox which is easier to manage and works quite a bit better and did some early experimentation with the new openSuse Leap release.  It looks really great.

Luciana wanted to swim tonight but Liesl would not swim with her.  So daddy swam with her and after a while Liesl was jealous and came down to swim too.  We swam for probably an hour and we had a great time.

Once done swimming the girls changed into pajamas to prepare for family snuggle time upstairs.  The girls wanted to play Back to the Future: The Game but that was not for tonight.  Liesl said that she was wearing her princess pajamas because this was “such a great night” and she did not want it to end.  We really had an awesome family night tonight.

We thought about playing some games tonight but Dominica wanted to watch a movie, Liesl wanted to play Broken Age and I really wanted to sleep. So we just did our own things.  Luciana watched Liesl play her game and I went to sleep.  At least they were there snuggling with me while they did their gaming.

Slept in until after six this morning.  Liesl had stayed with us all night.  Still no cat again today.  I am pretty sure that it is really gone now.  Hopefully it is happily back with its kitty family now.  But we will miss it, it was a very cute little cat and it added some interest to the house.

Our big event for the day was that our house was fumigated again for mosquitoes.

Mosquito fumigation is a major concern in Nicaragua.  Mosquitoes are prevalent because the entire country is covered in tropical rain forest and tropical diseases tend to be pretty nasty; malaria is only one of many things that mosquitoes tend to carry and while it is probably the worst it is not the most common.  Mosquito-born diseases are no laughing matter.  So in this area they tend to take the eradication of mosquitoes very seriously.  (It should be noted, too, that the infamous Mosquito Coast is partially in Nicaragua.)

After last week’s adventure in getting fumigated while in the house and without any warning, today we were paying attention, saw the fumigation spraying up in clouds from the courtyards of the neighbours right behind us and were listening for the sound of the leaf blowers.  When the fumigation team got to our front door Dominica had already hustled the kids upstairs into a front room and sealed themselves off with nothing but street facing open air and I let the fumigation guy into the house for the full treatment.  We have had many mosquitoes and have figured out that we have not been getting the fumigation that we should have been getting and we really wanted to have this done.

It is, of course, everyone’s responsibility to help with mosquito removal.  It only takes one house with standing water to have mosquitoes breed there.  It is critical that as a community we all work together to eradicate them to protect everyone.

Getting to watch them fumigate the house was intense.  The fumigator started at the back of the house by the pool and worked his way forward.  I ran into the dining room, grabbed my phone and filmed what I could.  Rapidly the house filled up with the mosquito poison, to the point where I could not even see through the house.  The house went instantly from sunny to dark. I was only able to breath to keep filming by holding the phone behind me while I pushed my face out of the front door’s grating to get what fresh air that I could from outside of the house.

It got so dark in the house that I could not see the open doors or even my own feet.  At one point I tried to run from the garage door to the front door which are along the same wall and only twenty feet apart at most and I could not find either door or the floor even with what should have been broad daylight coming through the open doors!  It was very intense.  I have no idea how these crews do this all day long.  It is really impressive the lengths that the city goes to to keep the mosquitoes under control.

It took at least twenty minutes before I could venture back into the house and nearly at hour before it was starting to get back to normal.  We got to watch the crews go down the street blowing fumigation through the drainage pipes, into the storm drains and in the houses.  Houses that had had it done were “smoking” for a really long time after being treated.

This is definitely one of those unique Central American experiences.

We called it a day early today and I managed to convince Dominica at five thirty to go out for dinner.  Of course, that means that we did not make it out of the house until six thirty but it was still hours early for us.

Tonight we went downtown to a Mediterranean restaurant that Liesl and I had investigated a few weeks ago.  Dominica checked the menu and agreed that it sounded good.  It was much better going out for food this early in the evening.  We were able to eat and get home at a reasonable time.  The food tonight was excellent, especially the spicy hummus that they made.  The girls split a pizza that was very good too.  Everyone enjoyed their food.   I got a huge salad with mine and was so stuffed.  Dominica got baklava to take home as she could not eat anything more while we were there.

On the way home we made a stop by the corner store and got a few basic supplies and more Kinder Sorpresa for the girls.

Once at home we did a little bit of extra Liesl school time together as a family and then we spent the evening playing some video games and watching some video game videos from bed.

I got to bed at a good time but the girls got me up a few times in such a way that caused me to be wide awake with an hour of sleep tops maybe quite a bit less.  So I ended up with insomnia.