February 10, 2012: Buttery Elephant Nipples

Medifast Status: Day 283, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

I was pretty tired this morning but woke up on my own on the early side.  I had a tummy ache, probably from some late night snacks, and so got up more or less right away.  Oreo was so snuggly though, it was tempting to sleep in very late.

The weather is quite nice today after a couple days of being a little chilly.  The sun is bright.

At lunch I went to Medifast and had a good weigh in.  I am only four pounds away from the official target weight that we planned for when I started.  That is very encouraging.  But now that I am closer to that weight I really do want to lose a lot more than I initially did.  I neither had a good idea of how much I would actually be able to lose nor did I realize how much I really needed to lose.  It feels great having lost what I have but I sure don’t feel in any way that I am near to where I should be with my weight.

I went straight home after my Medifast appointment and spent an hour with Oreo.  I did some chores around the house and took him out for a walk.  On the way back to the office I swung into Brookhaven and picked up a grilled salmon salad to take to the office with me to eat.

I ate in the office and the afternoon proved to actually be a light one.  I was able to pack up and leave the office at five… and it is a Friday!  This really never happens.  Now to be fair, I had to get home and log back in immediately and work for about another hour but that is not bad at all and I was able to be home with Oreo a little more.

Oreo has started sleeping nearly all of the time.  I’m assuming that this is because he is getting older and his age, combined with his lack of eyesight for the last three years, he just doesn’t have the energy anymore which is understandable.  But he is literally sleeping continuously now.  He doesn’t get out of bed until around seven in the evening and he only gets up because he is hungry.  I feed him, he goes out… but that is his entire day.  By eight or nine he lays down and is fast asleep out with us.  Then we carry him in to bed.  So at most he might be awake for two hours of the day.  When he is awake it is clear that he is getting a lot more confused and is having a harder and harder time finding his way around which, I am sure, leads to him not getting out of bed which, in turn, leads to his increasing confusion.

Overall Oreo seems to be keeping pretty healthy.  Except for not finding his way around well his skin is improving as is his eye.  He really is just getting more and more sleepy.  It is possible that his body is just healing after several weeks of fighting off infections and other problems and maybe this is a temporary thing simply caused by the exhaustion of healing himself.

I tried to work on the DL145 G3 tonight but after doing just a little bit of work on it I rebooted it and it never came back.  The hard drives in the server, barely ever used, gave out after having been shipped by car back and forth across the country several times.  How depressing.  So that machine is probably nothing more than scrap now as it really is not worth the cost of the replacement drives.  Argh.

So I spent the remaining hours of the evening redoing the work that I had been doing on the server on a virtual machine on my desktop so that hopefully tomorrow I can get around to doing what I was actually trying to do this evening which was to be writing Ruby on Rails code.

I tried some new drink mixes this evening.  A traditional buttery nipple is a shot made of 1/2 shot of butterscotch schnapps and 1/2 shot of Bailey’s Irish cream.  I made my own modification of this using the same butterscotch schnapps base but replacing the Bailey’s with Amarula which is a similar cream liqueur but flavoured with a rare South African fruit – the marula.  It is quite tasty.  Dan at work introduced me to Amarula recently.  So I call this new shot the buttery elephant nipple.

I started using Pandora for streaming music tonight.  Dominica and Francesca use this all of the time to listed to 80s music but I never stream music so I never got into it.  The streaming music over the Internet crazy kind of passed me by.  I kept up with the technology over the years, of course, but never really utilized it myself.  Tonight it occurred to me that Pandora would likely be a really handy way to find new jazz so I turned it on, set to to “music like Pink Martini” and let it go.  It came up with some great music.  I really enjoyed listening to it and finding a lot of new stuff that I would never have found on my own.

While I was working this evening, Dominica, Francesca and Brittany went out to a piano bar down in Houston.  Coincidentally, they were doing buttery nipple shots while they were out.  I don’t think that the three of them have every actually gone out together before.  Dominica says that they had a really good time and there were some funny pictures ending up no Facebook while they were out.  Dominica has been wanting to go to a piano bar for some time as I have had the opportunity to go to Pete’s Piano Bar in Addison twice in the last six months and I used to go to Jellyroll’s in Orlando with Eric and Mark back in the late 90s.  Okay, I guess that is not very many trips to the piano bar considering that experience spans a decade and a half.  Ha ha.  Anyway, the occasional piano bar is a fun outing.  It will be a long time before I am looking to go back to Pete’s, though, because being there twice in the same year really highlighted how much they play the same songs and tell the same jokes every time.  You need a significant amount of time between trips to make it make sense.  No wonder they are so popular as a special occasion outing place for birthdays, anniversaries or out of town guests.

Oreo and I headed to bed around one.  I get to sleep in tomorrow which will be awesome.  I’ve been needing to catch up some on my sleep.

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