Medifast Status: Day 97, Down ~43.5lbs
I’ve been asked to go into work at six thirty again tomorrow morning. So I am back to being awake very early in the morning. Not that that is bad, I seem to get more and better family time by going to work really early. It means that I am home earlier and more in line with when the children are awake.
The heat was unbearable today. The house climbed to eighty eight degrees and it was all that the air conditioning could do to hold it at that level. My office had to be very near one hundred degrees. You start sweating the moment that you go in.
I did some work this morning for a little while. Then at eleven I showered and at eleven thirty Madeline and I drove up to Vista Ridge to go see Harry Potter 7.2, the very last film in the series. This is my first time seeing it and Madeline’s second. She and I saw HP 7.1 together when it came out as well.
I have to say that without a doubt the final Harry Potter movie is far and away the very best in the series. This is probably true about the books as well that they kept getting better and better as they went but the movies did a very good job in trying to keep up with the books more and more by the later ones and especially the seventh one. The early movies really dropped the ball on character development by trying to focus on action and keeping everything moving but as the series went on their were able to make the movies a little longer and focused slightly more on the relationships and character development that needed to happen. Splitting the seventh book into two movies each over two hours long really let them do more of what needed to be done compared to the other. It really makes you wish that they had just made fourteen movies from the very beginning to allow for all of the action that they wanted to squeeze in while still getting the good, emotional parts across.
This final movie really makes you wish that the Harry Potter universe would continue. I think that the movie does an even better job of this than did the books – which is unusual for me to say because I greatly prefer the books in general. But this last installment goes so far towards keeping up with the books that it is able to surpass them from time to time. The emotions of the ending are very strong and really make you wish that it would not end. I have no idea where the stories would go from there but because the value of the characters is in their emotional ties and not their adventures you don’t even really care that the adventure is over – you want to know what happens to them, what they do with their lives, etc. You just want to stay connected to them.
After the movie we went back to the house and I spent much of the day working. The markets are highly volatile today. Middle East markets saw Sunday drops of around 7% which is pretty crazy. Asian markets tonight saw 2-3.5% drops. Tomorrow morning on the open of the New York Stock Exchange it is going to be a madhouse. Standard & Poor’s drop of the US from AAA to AA+ rating is a pretty unbelievable event and no one is really prepared for what it means. The G7 were meeting today to come up with a plan to stabilize the world markets.
Francesca and Dominica spent much of the day playing Dragon Age: Origins. Francesca is around twelve hours into the game already and really liking it.
The really, really big news of the day, however, is none of that. The big news is that today Liesl officially started potty training! Francesca is a whiz (no pun intended) at these things and Dominica has been hoping that she would help to train Liesl while she is visiting this week.
Liesl managed to use the potty successfully on her very first try! Overall today she managed to use it four times and had no accidents! She is batting 1,000 on her first day of potty training. She is going to be comfortable going without diapers in no time. This is very exciting.
I stayed up until after midnight. That was probably not a good idea. Now I am starting off another week with very little sleep. I have to be up at five so four and a half hours of sleep is the maximum that I am going to be getting tonight.