Medifast Status: Day 219, Down ~71lbs
I totally forgot to write yesterday about our first fire in the fireplace of the “new” home. New being a funny term for a house that we have already lived in as long as we lived in the Peekskill house. We have been in the Carrollton house two months longer than when we found out that we were moving out of Peekskill. Our renters in Peekskill have lived in the house for several months longer than we ever did and will be there nearly twice as long as we were by the time that we next renew their lease there. It is really weird to think of them living there more than us. But that house really does seem like a blip along my life’s timeline. An important one, but a distant one that I barely remember. It was so quickly that we moved in and moved out of that house. We still feel like we just moved into Carrollton and it has been a whole year already!
So Dominica really wanted a fire in the fireplace. But we have no wood for it. I said, “Well, we have that deck in the atrium that Art ripped out.” So we set about finding pieces of the deck that would fit into the fireplace and I spent at least an hour feeding cardboard into the fireplace in an attempt to dry out and cook the soaking wet deck wood enough to get it to burn.
The wood did eventually light and smolder for a while. It was not much of a fire but it has been raining for three days so this wood, which has been completely exposed in the atrium, was about as wet as possible. We have a small amount of wood in the house drying out now. Maybe next time it will work better. We seem to have a limitless supply of cardboard to use as kindling so that makes things easy. We are constantly struggling with the amount of cardboard of which we need to dispose so this actually works out rather well. We have a huge stack of boxes in the garage that we can bring in and feed up the chimney.
This was Luciana’s first fire in the fireplace ever and the first one that Liesl can remember, I am sure. We have not had a fireplace since Peekskill and she was barely a year old when we moved out of there. Liesl thought that it was pretty cool but since it was unable to sustain itself it lacked a bit of something. We really need fireplace implements and a lot of replare done on the fireplace itself. It is in rough shape. Silly things like the doors don’t quite fit right.
Today is even colder here in the DFW than yesterday. Today it is 26F degrees! We only dropped to 30F yesterday. When I got out to the car at seven thirty this morning it was coated in frost and I had to run the car for a while to get it warm enough for me to be able to see out of the windshield.
Today was a bit busier than the last few days. We are getting really close to the December freeze so things are picking up as people do last minute prep and deployments. It wasn’t crazy today, just busier.
John and I managed to run to Panera for coffee. They were out of coffee so gave him a bagel to eat while we waited. That was really sad. I’m the one who paid for coffee but on Medifast I cannot eat bread products. So he got to eat a delicious cinnamon crunch bagel with cream cheese which I have been craving for so long while I just sat there and watched knowing that a free bagel awaited me as well should I cave to the pressure.
I came home during lunch but we didn’t eat. I spent the time working on the server that needs to ship out and playing with the girls.
I didn’t get to leave work until a little on the late side. Not too bad but closer to six. Liesl had been having a great morning but had gotten too tired for some reason and was a bear this afternoon. Dominica had had all that she could take and really needed me to come home.
I was home for about an hour before Dominica couldn’t take the kids anymore and had me watch them so that she could escape to a shower. I got Luciana to bed around seven thirty, a little early for her. Liesl calmed down and hung out with me for a little bit and then voluntarily decided that she would go to bed herself at eight. She went and told Dominica that she needed pajamas and told me to read her a bedtime story and put her to bed.
Recently we have been reading “Tickle Monster” and “Can’t You Sleep, Dotty?” She has me read each, in that order, each night as she goes to bed. We are starting to get into this story reading routine. The advent calendar helps with that because mommy reads that story in the play room, then Liesl puts it on the tree, then daddy takes her to bed and reads her books and tucks her in. It is really helping her to move from daytime play to nighttime sleep.
We were really impressed that Liesl was in bed so early and we were thankful too as we were both really exhausted and had a lot of work to do.
I spent the evening primarily working on the Juniper firewalls and some on the server. It was a long night. I worked until half past twelve. Then Dominica and I watched one twenty-two minute episode of How I Met Your Mother. We watched the first two seasons years ago and love the show but for some reason never continued with it. Dominica can’t remember the second season so we are rewatching it now. We are watching it because Netflix just got it so we finally have access to it now.
It was about one when we finally got off to bed.