Medifast Status: Day 227, Down ~72lbs
Yes, I am down another pound since yesterday. My few minutes of yoga must have paid off 😉
Dominica and the girls left for Houston a little after I went to the office this morning. I am driving down to Houston to join them tomorrow but returning to Dallas on Monday while they stay down there for several weeks. At least it will give me a chance to really get the house cleaned.
It is colder today but clear and bright. Not bad. Cold by Texas standards.
For lunch John and I went to Brookhaven. With Dominica not around, I have little reason to ever go anywhere except for Brookhaven. For the price it just makes no sense not to use it for every meal. If I ate lunch there six days a week it would be only $30 of food for a full week minus Mondays when they are closed. I can’t possibly cook at home for that price, not for the size of the meals that I get there.
After lunch we ran to the house and let Oreo out. Oreo didn’t need to do anything so now I need to figure out where on the floor he went. But no time to do that at lunch, had to get back to the office. At least John got to see the house for a minute. He had seen the old apartment but not the house yet. Really, just about no one has seen the office. John is only the third person from work to have seen it. We had always meant to have had a house warming party but never got to it. We still feel like we are still moving in.
I think because we move so much, so far and so often we do not have the “show up and set up the house” mentality that most people tend to have when moving into a new house. We now show up and only get enough set up to get us up and running. We don’t decorate or get everything “just right” as soon as we arrive. The mentality that we are probably just going to have to pack up and move again right away is so strong that it really keeps us from doing that. And for good reason, the apartment in Newark is the place that we have lived the longest since the house in Geneseo and that house we only lived in as our primary residence for three years and even then both of us were working away from Geneseo quite a bit so we never lived there as much as people who normally buy a house. We had put a lot of work into getting that house set up and then we moved with so little warning so soon and have never been anywhere were we were really sure that we were going to put down long term roots. Peekskill felt that way a little bit when we first moved in but it was only ten months before we were packing up again so even though we were planning on staying put we didn’t have enough time for it to really happen.
So the house is still in a state of flux. We still need to do our “move in” painting and to hang pictures on the walls. We still need clocks and basic decorations. We still need our garage door opener back from our incompetent contractor. The list goes on.
I also found today that the front pillars moved a little more and some mortar fell from the top of one of the pillars onto the front walk. We need to be careful out there as bricks could come loose and fall.
Work was quite slow this afternoon. I did not get stuck in the office late like on a normal Friday. It was great to get to go home and have nothing to do.
I had decided that I was not going to go down to Houston until tomorrow. I wanted some time to just unwind.
I got home and spent several hours cleaning the house. It took very little time for the house to really perk up. I got the living room, through which you could barely walk before, completely clean without a single rogue object sprawling about on the floor. I did the same for the play room and then I vacuumed both. I managed to get the front table cleaned off – something that almost never happens when I am not home alone. I got the bar partially cleared off too, but did not manage to finish that.
Just from the work that I have already done the house is looking so much better. It makes me actually want to spend time in the house. It reminds me why we bought this house – it really is an attractive house with a comfortable living space once we get it cleaned up. Now that the furniture is out of the house it is wide open space. Oreo loves it. He just rolls around in the middle of the room without fear of crashing into anything.
This evening I went out to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar for the evening. Chris was going to join me early on and hang out but he got stuck at work until really late so I only got to see him for about half an hour.
Tomorrow I am sleeping in and then heading down to Houston in the afternoon. Liesl and Luciana will be busy playing with their cousins and visiting with family so I would not really get time to be with them anyway. Might as well relax and get things done up here. Dominica’s parents are flying into Houston tomorrow evening. I’m just going to be down there for the weekend returning back to Dallas on Sunday night. Then I will be home, along with Oreo, for the week.
My next task is to finish working on the kitchen. I got it cleaned up a bit but not nearly as much as I had hoped. There are dishes to be done yet. So that will be my first cleaning task on Monday following by the “eat in” area. I want to get the kitchen table cleared and the general mess there all cleaned up. We’ve had Liesl’s easel there for a while as well as her little Dora the Explorer folding table and those take up so much space and cause everything else to just pile up there which now includes a bunch of wood for the fireplace and two bins of things from the garage. Oreo has a bed taking up space in there too but it is behind all of this stuff and he cannot get to it no matter how much he might want to do so.
All of that is before I even begin looking into cleaning up our bedroom. That is going to be a major challenge to be sure.