Medifast Status: Day 117, Down ~50.5lbs
It was a very big relief when I weighed in this morning and discovered that I had passed the fifty pound mark on my Medifast diet! Fifty pounds! That sure sounds good to say. I still have a very long way to go. But this is a very big milestone. This will re-energize me, I’m sure.
We did a bit of cleaning today and the house is looking pretty decent. It was really nice to have a basically empty weekend in which to stay home and just deal with normal things. I need some downtime and some time just hanging out with my girls.
I was logged in to work all day. We are watching to see what is going to happen because New York might really get slammed by the hurricane. We might have a lot of work to do over the weekend depending on how the storm goes.
The heat is just continuing and continuing. It is about 104 today and we are projected for 107 for the next two days! There is some hope of some rain in about a week which will make a huge difference. We can’t wait for there to be rain again.
Overall today was decently relaxing. Dominica hung out in the office with me some today and did more research into our trip to Europe. We are thrashing on our planning, I think. Just going from one idea to another.
The current plan now is completely different than anything that we had talked about previously. We are now looking at skipping Ireland entirely and flying directly from New York (or possibly New Jersey) to Warsaw, Poland and skipping our time spent far out west because that makes the whole trip that much harder trying to add in Ireland. That would be like going to both NYC and LA in the same trip trying to hit Belfast and Warsaw. So cutting off Belfast makes everything so much easier.
Once we decided to do that we were very relived as the trip is now far, far simpler. This will save tons of money and time. It will be far less stressful. NYC to Warsaw is eight hours on a plane. Our original plan was NYC to Ireland, Ireland to Krakow and Krakow to Warsaw for a total of twelve to sixteen hours not including layovers.
We are now planning to eliminate Croatia and most of Italy. Instead, since we have the girls who are not going to be happy traveling all over the place, we are going to attempt to focus on Austria, Switzerland and the Alsace-Lorraine and minimize how much traveling we have to do. The upside is it saves tons of times, effort and travel costs. The downside is that we see far less of Europe and the places where we primarily spend our time are the most expensive ones. So hundreds of dollars a night for a hotel instead of forty. That is going to be rough. We are attempting to find apartments in Austria and Switzerland that we can rent to lower the cost. We might spend a night in Budapest to make that one night cheaper too.
I got a lot of time with my daughters today. They are growing up so fast. Liesl is doing great on her potty training. That is going to save a lot of money in diapers. And it means that she will be ready for the trip to Europe too!
We managed to relax this evening. We watched some of Star Trek: The Next Generation which Dominica and I had started watching back in Geneseo and never got around to continuing with. We are still partway through season two.
It is funny watching the old TNG episodes. In my memory they were so incredibly modern and the acting and people still feel that way. But when you actually watch it, especially as it was filmed on tape rather than film, much of it actually feels like watching the original Battlestar Galactica. The models, the landscapes, the film quality – it really reminds you of how close in time those two shows actually were to each other. To me, being a child at the time, the distance between them was significant. One was from my early, murky memories and the other was a show that I looked forward to as I already knew the original Star Trek well and looked forward to a new series. But now, looking back, TNG was much longer ago than I feel that it must have been and definitely looks like a product of its time period. It is very enjoyable to watch still, though.