Medifast Status: Day 90, Down ~42.5lbs
I slept in a little this morning. Very little sleep last night and we were up very late. Today we are just staying home – there is just a ton of house work that we want to get done and very little time in which to do it.
The first order of business this morning was heading out to the patio to enjoy our new furniture before it got too hot to be outside. It has been so hot that since we returned from New York the air conditioning has been unable to keep the house cool. We have the daytime temperature set to eighty one degrees now and the AC runs nearly continuously. I am really hoping that we manage to get a lot of projects done around the house that include insulation items so that this will not be the case next year. Our old windows and doors leak so horribly that there is just no way to keep anything cool.
It was nice getting to sit outside. I made us coffee and we relaxed for a while. It was still hot, even early on in the morning. Probably in the mid-nineties. It is amazing to us that walking into our eighty degree house feels very cool and pleasant. Who would have guessed. And I don’t wear shorts around the house or anything. I’m in jeans or jogging pants at nearly all times and perfectly comfortable.
Liesl woke up while we were outside and came out to join us. She sat with me on the love seat. She likes being able to go outside and hang out. I think that Oreo is going to like this too once he gets used to the furniture being there. Even with the house as warm as it is he still enjoys laying in the sunlight in the warmest rooms and sometimes like to linger outside. I think that if he knows that he has a comfy loveseat on which to sleep in complete peace – since the girls are inside the house away from him – that he might decide that that is his new favourite place to hide and sleep. I just have to convince him to attempt hoping up on to the furniture outside. That might be hard to do.
Oreo has been doing pretty poorly as of late. He has mange that we seem to have halted its spread but it is not going away. He is incredibly itchy and has lost a lot of fur. I brushed him tonight and a spot on his back actually started bleeding. His left eye has horrible glaucoma now too and is very much bulging. We have been giving him his eye drops two and three times a day now and he is going to see his vet on Wednesday afternoon but that eye is completely destroyed. We just hope that we can keep him from losing it altogether – although I wonder how much more than is for us than for him, there is nothing left of that eye for him anymore.
I worked a bit today for the office. I also helped out Dominica a bit more with painting and other house projects. We did some cleaning and a ton of painting. I did some painting last night too. The mantle and trim around the fireplace are nearly done. We are painting them white instead of them being the dark ’70s stained wood. It is making the living room look both more modern and brighter. But the real brightness came from painting the wood paneling in front of the bar. What a difference that has made.
Coming up quite soon is the painting of the entire living room itself. It is a very large space that is currently done in a rather dark and drab paint. It is not bad, but it is not as bright and lively as we would like. Plus we have a lot of patch places where work was done on the wall behind and the wall had to be fixed so it really looks awful right now with the way that it is. Once we get it painted the house will be brighter and those patches will go away. We can’t wait for that. It will be awesome.
While the girls were napping this afternoon I stayed home and cleaned while Dominica ran to Walmart to do some grocery shopping and to Lowes to get cabinet hardware as we are replacing the old brass-looking hardware on the buffet into modern brushed nickle hardware.
This evening I got the chance to play a couple of hours of Twilight Princess. I am now a good deal past where Dominica has played. Maybe as much as two hours past her. Overall I am not enjoying the game very much. I can only describe it as being exceedingly amateur. I’m used to polished games like Oblivion or Dragon Age. Twilight Princess feels like it was made by interns – everything is done very poorly and they didn’t even hire professional translators to bring the dialogue over, it’s like it was written by children who didn’t understand English very well. It’s hard to believe that Nintendo with all of its resources puts so little effort into one of its largest franchises. But, I suppose, it has great sales numbers regardless of the quality so why bother?
I’m giving Twilight Princess the ol’ college try as I’ve never completed a Zelda title before and I really want to understand what all of the fuss is about. I own nearly all of the Zelda games every made (Oracles being possibly the only one that I have never owned) across all platforms. I have multiple copies of some games like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask – both of which I have the early-release collector’s gold cartridges from the N64 as well as Wii Virtual Console emulated versions, but neither of which have I ever managed to play for any length of time. All Zelda games seem, to me, to share these same elements: bad graphics, horrible controls, poor translations of weak dialogue and shallow, trivial stories. The exception to this is A Link to the Past on the SNES which had good graphics. But I’m determined to play through at least Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time to the end and see if I feel that way the whole way through. Dominica says that she really liked Ocarina of Time and Minish Cap.
I went to bed early tonight. I start my 6:30 shifts tomorrow morning and I need some sleep. I worked for the office until around ten thirty and then wrapped up for the evening. I went in to the play room to tell Dominica that I was going to bed and instantly Liesl started picking up her toys and I said to her “no sweetie, you don’t have to go to bed, daddy is going to bed” and Liesl said “Liesl going to bed too. Snuggle with daddy.” This is easily one to two hours before her normal bedtime. Who could resist that? So Dominica got Liesl ready for bed and Liesl slept in our room tonight. Dominica stayed up for an hour or two doing more painting. She is on a mission to get the cabinets all painted very soon.