Sheep Guarding Llama

I slept in until eight this morning.  That was three hours of sleep.  Not a whole heck of a lot.

Today is my fasting day.  Tomorrow is my weekly weigh in at Medifast.  I weighed in first thing this morning and I was at my record low.  Not a new record, just equal to my record.  But that is an entire day ahead of my weigh in and this is my chance to really get the weight down and get a good weigh in.  So no food today.  My last meal was early yesterday afternoon so it will be a full day and a half without food.  I will have no water once I got to bed tonight.  Hopefully that gives me time to process what I have drunk before the Medifast appointment tomorrow morning.

As of first thing this morning I have one and a half pounds to go to reach my original Medifast goal.  That should be very doable for a fasting day.  I will be drinking water like crazy all day to desalinate.

Today Liesl decided to come into my office and point to her wrist and tell me that she needed a clock.  She handed me a marker.  So I drew a watch onto her wrist.  She thought that that was awesome.  She would come into the room, look at her wrist and say “Look at the time, I have to get going!”

I had to work all day as I am the on call for the office this weekend.  The on call really seems to be a twenty-four hour weekend.  It is rather exhausting.

Dominica decided the other day that she is giving up on the Medifast plan until we are back from Europe.  She has been craving food horribly and really struggling for months to stay on diet.  Her being half on, half off of the diet makes it nearly impossible for me to stay on it.

It was pretty much an all work day, even though it is Sunday.  I have to be up at three in the morning to deal with some stuff in the UK so not much sleep coming for me tonight after getting not very much last night.

I woke up on my own very early this morning, around five.  I lay in bed for a while contemplating whether to get up or to attempt to fall back asleep.  Oreo wasn’t snuggling with me this morning so getting up was more of an option than usual.  I tried going back to sleep for a while but the weight of all of the tasks waiting for me was weighing on me.  I tried playing Triple Town but only got five minutes of it or so before Oreo got up and had an accident on the floor.  So, at around five thirty, I was out of bed and cleaning the floor and taking Oreo out for a walk.

No point in going back to bed after that.  So I logged in to begin working, wrote some updates, did some SpiceWorks posts, updated some tickets, cleaned up the kitchen, did some general cleaning around the house, put Oreo’s food away that Dominica had cooked yesterday but that we had forgotten to put away last night, etc.

Dominica and the girls got up around eight thirty so I had about three hours to myself to be productive alone.

This afternoon Liesl came up to us and said something that we thought was “Mr. Lumley!”  We were very confused.  She was wearing a toy on her head as a hat and kept coming up to each of us stating “Mr. Lumley!”

Finally I figured out that she was pretending to deliver mail and was saying “Special Delivery.”  She was pretending to keep mail in her hat and was taking it off and handing it to us.  She has such a vivid imagination that sometimes we have real problems following what she is saying because she responds to questions from inside of her fantasy context but when we are trying to figure out the context, that can be nearly impossible to do.  Once we repeated “special delivery” to her she said “Yes, Special Deliver!  I’m the post officer.”  We were dying.  “Post Officer” is a perfectly logical name for the mailman but heaven only knows where she came up with it!

Last night she did something similar telling us all about this yellow cat that she used to have that ran away and that she doesn’t have any longer.  We were so confused as we have never had a cat.  Today it finally occurred to me that she was referring to the pretend cat that she used to pretend to be.  At times she would not answer to her name but only to “kitty.”  She would meow and in her mind, she was a cat.  She no longer pretends to be a cat, but is a dog more recently, so I guess she sees it as the cat having left.

I am the on call for the office this weekend so I was tied to my desk for most of the day.  I swear that there is more work to do as the on call than there is to do when you are in the office.

For dinner Dominica cooked a lean Medifast style meal of shiritake noodles and mushrooms in a cream sauce.  We re-watched the new travel video that we got yesterday about Belgium and The Netherlands.  Liesl watched with us with interest and mentioned that several of the places that she saw were places that she would like to get to go.  That works out pretty well since we plan to be going many of those places in just one month!  It is hard to believe that we are two days fewer than a month until we fly off to England!

I was working in the office pretty late this evening when I found that my friend John the storage engineer from Houston was in town.  We were both posting on SpiceWorks at the same time when he mentioned that he was down in Preston Hollow, practically down the street.  So I ran, showered and headed out to pick him up.

John and I headed out to Sfuzzi to hang out for the evening.  We ended up hanging out very late then going back to his friends’ place in Preston Hollow where they were having a party.  It was nearly five when I straggled home.

The weather is a little bit cooler and overcast today.  It felt like there were going to be storms coming when I walked out of the house this morning to commute in.  No rain came today but it had that feeling about it.  The weather report shows a weekend of intense storms expected with tornado warnings coming, already, for Sunday.

Overall work was slow today.  I went home at lunch and hung out with the girls.  Luciana has started colouring now.  She was playing with Crayola Color Wonder markers today.  At one point she and Liesl both sat at their little picnic table colouring together.  It was quite adorable.  Dominica and I watched a couple episodes of Lie to Me.  Then back to the office.

The afternoon was decently slow.  I was able to wrap up in the office by around five thirty which is pretty nice for a Friday.  I had some late work to do so I came home and just did that from there.

On the way home I ran over to Fry’s and picked up two travel BluRays for us.  We watch our European travel videos so much that having some more makes a lot of sense.  We’ve watched every episode of Rick Steves several times and we’ve watched our “Visions of…” series multiple times as well and we’ve exhausted what little travel stuff there is on Hulu+ and Netflix, at least what we are able to find.  It appears to be a generally lacking genre of television altogether.

The one video that I got was an adventure travel video of Switzerland.  The other is a more traditional travel video of Belgium and The Netherlands.

I went to Brookhaven and picked up dinner for Dominica and I and then came home so that we could eat and watch our new travel videos.  While we were watching the first video our package that we have been waiting for from Amazon arrived.  It is the LittlePims DVDs for Liesl to help her to learn Italian vocabulary before we travel.  It is a three DVD set (heaven only knows why as the running time is not long enough at all to justify that) designed for kids up to Liesl’s age (yes, she is at the older end of the spectrum) to pick up some words especially around food, animals, household items, etc.

Liesl enjoyed watching her videos and watched all three of them tonight.  She watched the first one out in the playroom with us but then when we wanted to watch our travel videos again she went into our room and watched her new videos in there instead.  She does that pretty regularly, going into our bedroom to watch shows on her own.  She really likes that our good leather chair, the non-recliner, is there and she takes her Dora pillow and her pink polka-dot blanket and climbs into the chair and watches her shows.  That television is much bigger and nicer than the one in the playroom and instead of television built in speakers it has the nice receiver with B&W speakers.  So the viewing experience is a bit nicer there as well.

Liesl went to bed around ten and Dominica and I were right behind going to bed at ten thirty.  Better to get to bed and get rest than force ourselves to stay up just because we think that we should.  Once we are just up watching television or whatever it really should trigger to us that going to bed would make more sense.

I am the on call for the office this weekend so will be home and working much of the time.

I slept in a bit this morning as did everyone else.  I don’t think that people were out of bed until eight thirty at least and maybe nine.  Even Liesl slept in late and she was in bed pretty early last night.

I got stuck at the house this morning on one phone call after another.  So I was pretty late going in to the office but I did log in and work from home earlier this morning.  So I decided to skip my lunch break and just worked straight through in the middle of the day.

This afternoon Dan and I made our regular, weekly run to the liquor store.  Their selection there has been getting weaker and weaker each week, though.  They used to have a pretty good selection but now the shelves are mostly empty and there are whole ranges of drinks that they don’t have any longer.  They are fine for stocking the basics and the average liquor shopper probably would not notice but I am a bit beyond the basics these days and if I am buying stuff it is likely something more obscure.  So we did some basic restocking but that was about the best that we could do.  So we decided to go across the street and see what there was there as well.

Going across the street was well worth the effort as the Big Daddy’s there had an amazing selection and we found tons of items in which we were very interested.  I picked up a couple of interesting items like actual Maraschino Luxardo and Biscotti Famosi.  The Biscotti Famosi turned out to be one of those complete gems of a find.  Completely, amazingly delicious.  It actually tastes like you are drinking a cookie!

Dan made a good find as well, Tres Leche liqueur which we dried and liked very much too.

This evening I got home and Dominica decided to send me back out to pick up dinner at Brookhaven.  I drove down there and just got us salads and grilled Rainbow Trout.  I came back home and we ate while we watched the last two episodes of Hot in Cleveland that had recently released.  It was funny because in the last episode that we watched they set the show in a Cleveland area country club – the one in which we are associate members.  The events and club in the show were fictional but the name and the rough location were not.  It was very odd to watch a sitcom joking about the members of a country club to which we are associated while we were eating dinner cooked in the kitchen of the club that founded that one.  Likely we are the only members or one of only a few ever to have had that happen.  It could only have been weirder if that was our home club or if we were actually at the club at the time watching the show.

Dominica went to bed early tonight.  I stayed up until around two doing some work that needed my attention.  It was a bit of a long night.  Quite tired when I turned in finally.

This morning I had a ton of stuff to do so I just stayed home and worked from there through lunch.  It was a very busy morning.

I rushed home after work, ran into the house, grabbed the family and we turned right around and ran straight out to get to Brookhaven for their new member welcoming event this evening.  We have been trying to go to one of these for months and our schedules just never allow it.  Finally today it was on a Wednesday evening and we were able to squeeze it in without too many problems.

We got to Brookhaven right as the event started at six.  They had a tennis court set up specifically for the younger children which ended up being perfect for Liesl.  They had oversized tennis balls and a low net and there were several kids there.  Liesl was definitely the little one on the court but she tried hard and had a really good time.  She probably played tennis for an hour.  It was adorable.

We got a table right next to the “tennis court” do that we could keep an eye on Liesl.  Luciana was pretty fussy wanting to crawl around and to do something active.  I walked around with her a bit.  We have been working with her a bit recently as she is really close to walking.  She will hold our hands and walk with us.

Tonight, Luciana decided that it was time to walk.  So, while Liesl was on the tennis court playing, Luciana took her first six steps by our table!  Liesl took her first steps a few days before her first birthday across a table in Ariel’s Grotto in Walt Disney World.  Luciana is nearly the same age with her birthday just two weeks away.  We are very excited as Luciana being able to walk while we are in Europe is going to be a big deal.  She won’t be able to crawl around on the train to get exercise or in restaurants but walking she will be able to do and that is a big relief for us.  We were really worried that she would wait to walk and would not be doing it before we left.

They had a light dinner for us tonight.  Crackers, cheeses and fruits for the adults.  The kids’ buffet was out and there were mini pizzas (bit sized ones, much smaller than their normal small pizzas for the kids), corn dogs, fried mac and cheese bites and French fries.  No veggies or other healthy fare so we were pretty limited in what we could eat.  We cheated a bit and had some of the mac and cheese bites because they are amazing, especially with the chipotle ranch dipping sauce that they had out tonight.  Yum.

At a quarter after seven, long before the event was supposed to be over, Liesl threw a bit of a tantrum and got into some serious trouble so we had to leave immediately.  The hazards of having little children.  Luciana was pretty restless as well.

Liesl was pretty unhappy being in so much trouble so she mostly pouted in the back seat.  Dominica really wanted to go out, again, for frozen yogurt and we needed some food, so we drove up to Frankfort instead of going back home and we ran into Subway and got salads there and ran into Yogurtland and got some fat free, sugar free yogurt with fruit and went back home to eat.

We watched the remaining episodes of Happily Divorved tonight.  Liesl was put straight to bed without any stories.  After a while I went in to check on her and she was laying in bed with her head propped up on her arm glaring at the door.  We had a talk and she was allowed to come out and stay with us for a little while.  Then I put her to bed again and she got some stories.