Sheep Guarding Llama

I got up and did some catching up this morning.  Dominica came down and made banana, peanut butter and chocolate smoothies.  She likes these thick, calorie heavy ones.  I prefer lighter, all fruit ones.

The city health department stopped by this morning.  This, of course, put Dominica into a panic as she is always sure that we are not supposed to let anyone into the house.  He was quite official, I assured her.  He was doing the treatment of the house plants for mosquitoes.  No fumigation this time.  The city really takes these mosquitoes seriously.  I am very impressed by how involved they are and the amount of energy and resources that they put into protecting everyone.

This afternoon I did an online webinar with Scale and Spiceworks again, like we did last week.  No disasters this time, though.

I bought some new video games for the girls today.  The big one was Octodad: Dadliest Catch.  It turns out that by total coincidence the girls had asked Dominica for that game on the iPads yesterday but it does not run on theirs because they are too old and it needs newer hardware.  So they were sad but no one had spoken to me about it at all.  So I bought the game for the PC completely on my own and surprised the girls with it.  Everyone just assumed that I had been told.  It was not until later that I learned that they even knew about the game.

I set the girls up with my laptop and they played Octodad together for easily an hour.  It is a hard game for them but they really enjoyed it.  Liesl likes getting to play with the gamepad and Luciana feels like she is really involved, sitting with Liesl while she plays.

It is so awesome that they are into video games.  They do so many interesting things. And they are constantly playing more and more games.

Dominica and I talked about the new Steam Machines that came out yesterday and decided that the new Zotac Steam Machine is better for us than the normal Zotac that we have been planning on getting since September when it was not available.  So we are going to attempt to get that ordered very soon so that it will be waiting for us in Texas when we are up there.

This evening I managed to talk Dominica into going out for a nice dinner.  We have not been out for a nice dinner as a family in a while so this was a very nice change.  It always takes a ton of work to convince Dominica that she wants to go out and then we have to get the kids ready and get everyone out of the door.  It is always a big production.

We tried going to the Hotel Plaza Colon which advertised on their website that El Bar there did tapas and it looked like that would be perfect for us.  We got there and got a table and they informed us that they had no feed whatsoever.  Um, not exactly tapas then, is it?  Considering they are listed as the best hotel in the country by TripAdvisor, it seems odd that they both have no restaurant and spend time advertising that they do.

So we left there and want to the Gran Francia Hotel just past the park on the south east side and ate at El Arcangel where Ryan and I had eaten when he was here.  The girls shared some pasta which they really enjoyed.  Dominica got a delicious meal of red snapper on bananas.  I went for the coconut shrimp.  Everything was quite good.  I got the goat cheese salad too.  We also got dessert – cheesecake.  Luciana ate nearly all of mine.  Liesl took one bite of mine and gagged, apparently she hates cheesecake.  She almost had to spit it out.

We walked home.  It was a nice evening, a little cooler than it has been.  It was so nice having a night out with the family.

We got the kids into their room and into bed on the early side.  Dominica and I watched some video game videos from bed.

We got up this morning, after six, and came out to investigate the cat situation.  From what we can tell, our visiting cat and decided that it was time to go.  There is no signs of him still being around.  We are all just a little sad that the cute little kitty face is not staring down on us from up in the rafters today, though.

Today was mostly a quiet day around the house.  We went nowhere.  Got our morning fruit delivery and kept it to a minimum: the fridge is bursting at the seems with all of the fresh fruit in there.  We have nowhere to put anything.

Dominica made cheesy eggs, toast and potatoes this morning.  Way more than I could eat.  She is trying to use up the potatoes that are all in the fridge.

So much is going on with MangoLassi that I was on the phone with Art and Danielle for much of the day.  Art and I did a training session on A Small Orange and cPanel, as well, today.  We had a great traffic day, too.

Dominica made banana, peanut butter and chocolate smoothies today.  Not my favourite but we have to eat what we have to eat.

This evening Dominica sent me out to the corner store for some basics and, for the first time here, I forgot my wallet.  I had to leave everything at the counter, walk all of the way back home, get my wallet and all of the way back to the store.

Luciana and Liesl decided to swim this evening for a little bit then put themselves to “bed” at six thirty!  A big crazy.  But they got up and came downstairs again later in the evening to watch some shows in the living room on an iPad.

We had a heavy rain tonight but it lasted for ten minutes at most.  We have had only one or two rain storms since we have been in Nicaragua that compare to what we had on the night that we first arrived here.

I got up this morning at four and when I came out to see the cat, he was nowhere to be found.  I thought that maybe the tuna had done the trick.  I checked and he had eating about half of what I had put out for him.

I went downstairs and wrote for most of the early morning.  At around six I was walking around and looked up and… the cat was back in his spot!  Where did he come from?  We have no idea.  I guess he must have been hiding around the house somewhere for the past two hours.  Pretty weird.

The cat was much less scared today and instead of laying and staring intently and motionless he would lounge up in the rafters and napped for quite a bit of the day.  He would allow a foot, tail or nose to droop down and be visible.  Clearly he is relaxing.  But he never came down or allowed us to approach him.

From time to time we could hear him calling.  He is pretty young, certainly less than a year old.  Early in the morning I could hear his mother calling to him and he would answer.  Makes us feel quite sad.  But at least he is visibly healthy.

This evening Dominica wanted pizza and we needed supplies, notably cat food, from the store.  So I walked uptown and ordered pizza from Pizza Vale and went to La Colonia and went grocery shopping.  Mostly we needed dairy products, especially cheese, and both dry and wet cat food.  We are well stocked for cats now.

I picked up our pizzas and walked home.  They are getting to know us up at the pizza place.

I got home and we watched about an hour of Oklahoma which we own on Amazon VOD.  At first Luciana was really into it but she got tired of it.  So we watched The Book of Life, also on Amazon VOD.  This is Liesl’s favourite recent movie and was quite good.  We all really liked it.  It was my first time seeing it.  Liesl had previously seen it on an airplane, I think, and the rest of the family all watched it at a hotel in Austin at some point while I was not around.

After the movie, we all went to bed.

The fireworks started at four o’clock this morning.  Four.  O’clock.  In the morning!  By six in the morning the marching band was coming by.  Welcome to life in Nicaragua.  No sleeping in here.  Almost no sleeping at all.  Fireworks from four onward is a bit ridiculous.

And the fireworks never stopped.  Nor did the marching band.  The band played until well into the afternoon at the very least.  And the fireworks continued for the entirety of the day.

It is Saturday.  This is our quiet weekend at the house in Granada.  No plans to do anything and no desire to go anywhere either.  We don’t really even feel like going out for food.  We are pretty excited to be staying home and just taking it easy.

This morning we woke up to a power outage.  It only lasted a few minutes but this was one of those times where I got to experience the surprise of the CPAP attempting to suffocate me in my sleep.  It is an unpleasant way to make up, to be sure.  That was around four in the morning.

The power was out for ten minutes tops, probably less, so I turned the CPAP back on and went back to sleep as I was still in that state where I could jut fall right back to sleep.

By around six the power was out again and this time I just got up.

Today I put in a lot of time working on getting MangoLassi updated to NodeBB 0.9.0.  I worked with the NodeBB team for much of the day.  Lots of changes being made, issues uncovered and work to be done getting things ready for Monday morning.

Dominica made breakfast today.  Eggs and toast for me.  Eggs and potatoes for her.

Today a parrot salesman actually came to our door!  That is not something that you experience regularly.

Tonight I went out to Cafe Isabella and tried to get fish fingers for the girls.  But they ran out of all fish.  So I got them pancakes.  And a vegetarian sandwich for Dominica and a tuna melt for myself.

After dinner we sent the girls into their own room and Dominica and I set up and played Fallout 3 which we have been waiting for years to get around to playing.  We own the entire Fallout franchise (I can say that for another two days until the new game in the series, Fallout 4, releases.)  I started playing the original back in the 1990s and am trying to get back into the series now.  FO3 is the one based on the same engine as Oblivion.

We played through the entire intro to the game until we were out of the vault and out in the wastelands and nearly into Megaton.  It was fun and we have not gotten to do a game like this together in quite some time.  It is, sadly, all that my laptop is able to do to run it.  It is right at the limits of the laptop’s performance capacity and we have to have the resolution and features turned way down which sucks, but the Logitech gamepad works really well with it.

To get Fallout 3 working on my laptop took several hours of work this evening and I was pretty sure that it was not going to work at all.  I am pretty happy that it is.  This is a modern classic.

I am so looking forward to getting a new desktop in December, one that can not just play all of the games that we have but play them really well and rock them with the graphics cranked up and allow us to have our whole (or nearly our whole) collection downloaded and ready to go at once.  Between GOG and Steam we are well over six hundred games now!