We win again! The first match was lost, but ever since we are winning. Alan scores almost all matches, and he dominates the game. He is fast, he looks around and sees opportunities, he scores, but also helps others to score. Overall I’m starting to warm up to the game.
Over 2000 little pieces, two instruction manuals with over 400 pages, without any helping hand! Alan has been working days to build his newest lego set. The Milano. The spaceship used by the Guardians of the Galaxy to move around. The result was really nice, and because his room was already filled to the brim with lego sets we even got him a nice display cabinet!
Lost! I was never a big fan of football. Even though both my parents were trainers, and my brother played pretty well, the only reason I visited the few games I did was to collect grass for my rabbit.
With Alan this changed. In the beginning the lost a couple of matches, some resulted in scores like 35 – 0, but now the team found their place in the competition, and the matches are more equal. Too bad, we did not win, but Alan did score a goal!
Your opinion matters. My opinion also matters but in reality nobody is really interested in hearing how I think about things. However, people are interested in what Alan thinks! He had an interview with a local TV-channel. Alan was very observant and touched base on the subject of using technology in class. Something he is in favor of.
I remember that you used to be able to collect cards from famous players and teams. Fun for the fans, and something that could quickly turn expensive. To get all the cards you needed to buy lots of little bags and make an effort to exchange all your repeating cards. You could place all the cards in an album, and needed to keep collecting until it was complete.
At Alan’s soccer team (before Fomento, but now c.d. Inter Colonia) they thought of something new. They are going to make soccer cards of themselves. It feels like a good idea to take some money of the parents, and make a nice profit for the club. I made a quick concept card to see how Alan’s card might turn out, but for the actual cards I suspect we need to be patient.
About two years ago we discovered two YouTubers that really inspired us. First ‘Bald and bankrupt‘, who made really great videos, like the one I like most, where he visits an off limits Russian production facility to the one of their last space shuttle like rockets. The ‘Buran‘.
The other YouTuber is ‘Kurt Caz‘ with lots of good videos, but the one I like best is where he visited a family in the middle of nowhere, they invited him to some food, and he then did a fundraiser for the family in Haiti, and returned later to give them some money. The family uses the money to buy a motorcycle, to help them with a better future.
We went camping recently at a site called ‘Llanos de la Pez‘, in the middle of Gran Canaria, and tried to make our own video, inspired by these two great YouTubers. See for yourself how it turned out!
The educational aspects of the video, that maybe remain a bit in the background:
– We are camping in a forest that is representative to Gran Canaria a few hundred years ago
– At that time the entire island was covered with forest/trees
– Roque nublo is the place where the original inhabitants (the guanches) used to meet, to discuss important issues
Maybe the video is a bit over the top, but we laughed really a lot during the production, so even if it is not the best video, we can only be happy with the result.
We started the year with Ana’s family visiting us. Juanjo put a very nice impression on how 2024 started for us on his YouTube channel. A few days later we had a visit from Marco and his family, which was fun. We went to Guayadeque for a small walk and some food in one of the caves. Afterwards we visited our home and has a stroll in the Doramas park, where I learned the magical words to get a nice picture with the kids: ‘Backs strait!’.
I, once again, paid Apple 99 euro to be able to develop iOS apps for another year, but my first app is still not done, even after being in the pipeline for over a year. I will see how it goes. Maybe this year I will find some time.
Our apartment entrance is right next to an escape room. It started a couple of years ago, and now we see big crowds standing in front of their door every now and then. This month it was finally our turn to try and escape. Well, we did it, with only seconds on the clock we managed to escape the room within the hour. It was a fun adventure, something different to the things we normally do. The kids told us they had fun, although I did notice some agitation during the game, probably caused by the stress about wanting to escape as fast as possible.
Keeping an agenda is a very simple and effective way to keep track of things you need to do. You make plans, and you write them down on the date for which they are meant to be finished. This way you can select any day and see what needs to be done on that day, because all the plans you made in the past are written down of the day the plan was for. Logical.
Well, it seems that the logical way of using an agenda is not so logical after all. Our kids are learning something different on their school. All their tasks and appointments are written down on the day they initiated, with an indication for what day they are for. For example, the entry for today could be: ‘Tomorrow read biology page 64’, ‘Next week, on Wednesday, exam language’. The result is an, as I see it, useless agenda. Every day you need to look back for one or two weeks to see if there are any tasks for tomorrow. A terrible way of using an agenda, and a terrible thing to teach the kids.
Alan used to have a little crab as a pet. He kept it in his room in a nice crab environment with crab toys, water, plants, and some dirt so she could dig a nice hole. Sadly she kept getting older and older, and when we returned from our last trip she had passed away. To bad. Alan was in favor of getting a new pet, en we started to investigate. A walking stick seemed like a good idea, or maybe a new crab. Maybe even a hamster. The crab was nice but it spend most of its life inside its little hole in the ground. Only to come out to quickly get some food. The care for the little animal was also quickly allocated with Alan’s dad. That needed to change.
Searching for a new animal I also passed for a toy store. I hoped to find maybe a robotic fish, or something similar. Then I noticed the tamagotchi eggs. Maybe this could be interesting. The technology is from the last century, but if it’s fun, it’s fun. For Alan is was the perfect gift. He was so happy. His thoughts of any live animal disappeared immediately, as he started feeding and training the little digital animal. The animal also had a small game, and could be disciplined. The best part was that Alan could take it wherever he went. A great gift for sure.