February 7, 2012: Expanding Stories for Liesl

Medifast Status: Day 280, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

In the office today.  I accidentally left the house this morning without getting my morning hug and kiss from Liesl and she was horribly upset.  She ran after me but I did not hear her and she waved to be out of the living room windows.  Dominica said that she cried for forty-five minutes.

I have been doing really well on my diet for a few days now.  I can feel that I am getting back into groove and I am feeling good.  I am really liking the new ab workout roller thing that Dominica bought for me this weekend.  It really works out the muscles under my rib cage and I can feel the burn.  She got me dumbbells as well.  I am trying to do some weight training to tone up as that is critical now that I am doing so well on losing the weight.

I came home at lunch and Dominica made her cauliflower soup which is one of my favourite meals.  I cannot get over how much I like eating that and yet it is so incredibly healthy.  And it is easy to make too, she says.  It is like the miracle food.

Another quiet evening at home.  I had some work to do so we really didn’t watch anything tonight.  The kids were both in bed very early.  I barely get to see Luciana during the week because she often sleeps during my lunch hours, she doesn’t wake up in the morning until after I leave and sometimes she goes to bed within an hour of me getting home at night.  🙁  I can’t wait until her sleep schedule is more like Liesl’s so that we get more time together.

Dominica decided that she wanted to take a nap this evening as she was really exhausted.  She ended up falling asleep and staying asleep all night.  She was asleep as much as thirty minutes before I managed to get Liesl to bed!

Liesl and I read another classic from my childhood tonight: “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.”  This is one of the stories that I remember from my childhood best.  I loved this book and I am sure that dad still has my original copy kicking around somewhere.  The book is actually from 1939 so Liesl might be the third generation in our family with this book.  I wonder if my parents read this one when they were little.  I can still remember mom reading Mike Mulligan to me and I totally remember the entire story now that I read it to Liesl.  This book, like the one that we read last night, really stuck in my mind because of the illustrations that went with them.  Just looking at the pictures as we read really brings the memories flooding back.  Liesl really like the story of Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, his steam shovel, and how they deal with the coming of the new, more modern types of shovels.

I spent the evening and well into the night working on the DL145 server that I got powered up last night.  It is running well, thus far, and I wanted to make it usable today.  I needed to get a monitor on it and Dominica had the only analogue monitors in the house so I had to take them from her desk to use there.  So while I had the desk cleaned off I took the time to actually clean it getting all of the food and papers and pens and knick knacks that collect there off and to then clean and disinfect the desk.  I also installed some speakers for her that she had been wanting but had not gotten around to plugging in.

I got the server working without a problem.  I was surprised by how out of date the operating system was.  I could have sworn that it was a lot more recent than that.  It was running OpenSuse 11.4 which is two versions behind.  So I got it updated to OpenSuse 12.1 and Xen 4.1.  I am looking forward to being able to work with both of those.  I am happy with how little noise the server is making and how well it is able to run in the server closet without affecting me when I work in the office.  And the server room is not done.  On the long “to do” list is to replace the paper thin, hollow door that is there now with something filled with foam to seriously deaden the remaining noise.  That will make a big difference.  I will likely get acoustic panels and apply some in the server room as well to absorb even more noise.

It was pretty late when I got to bed.  Maybe two or three in the morning.

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