Sheep Guarding Llama

We got up this morning and it was such a beautiful day and we had all of this new gear for our European adventure trip so we decided that it would be a great morning to take the girls out for a walk.  We have the new stroller to test out, the new Ergo Baby carrier and the new Nikon AW100 camera all to test out for the first time.  We packed up and headed out on foot.

On the way “away” from the house Liesl rode in the new stroller and Luciana rode front mounted on Dominica in the Ergo Baby.  Luciana really liked it and was very sleepy the whole time.  It is a very snugly way to travel.

We walked to Cafe Brazil and, while we were there, decided to get brunch.  We sat outside and had a really nice time.  The weather was perfect.  The girls had fun too.

We walked back to the house and this time Dominica pushed Luciana in the stroller and I carried Liesl in the Ergo Baby carrier on my back.  That gave me a handy extra thirty pounds to increase my exercise for the walk.  The total walk was more than three miles!  Pretty good for a Saturday morning for the Miller family.

We got home and Dominica set right about painting Luciana’s room.  We’ve been talking and with the hopes that we will be moving to Europe in the next few years it is just crazy to invest in converting the attic into a second floor playroom for the girls.  It would be six months from now before it was done and Luciana might never be old enough to use the stairs before we move away.  That would be quite the waste of money.  So since no construction will be done in there we no longer have an excuse not to get it painted.  It is being painted a pale yellow.  Very much like the colour of the kitchen before it turned green.

This evening we decided that the walk to Cafe Brazil had gone so well and that there was so much food there that we wanted to try that we would walk back again and eat a second meal there and skip our Medifast meals for the day.  This is my first time skipping my Medifast meals in about ten months but I figured that if it got Dominica out and walking that it was worth it.  It is always a struggle to get her to walk a long distance with me and Cafe Brazil seems to provide much needed motivation.

We walked back as it was getting dark.  We ate inside tonight, rather than out on the “patio” like we did earlier.  Really the patio is just the sidewalk next to the parking lot.  This is a cafe in Texas.  It lacks a certain something, to be sure.  I can’t wait to be eating at real cafes in Europe again.

I got the barbecue salmon for dinner, it was quite good.  The broccoli there is amazing.  Really good produce.  We were pretty happy that we returned to Cafe Brazil.  That was a good decision today.  It made for a nice change of pace – all this walking and hanging out as a family and going to someplace new.  Good exercise too as not only is it a good walk but we are carrying the kids or pushing a stroller the whole way for extra exercise.  Dominica did half of the carrying this morning but tonight I am doing it all.  That will wear her out quickly.

On the way back we decided that we were doing pretty well so walked away, rather than towards the house, from Cafe Brazil and took a really long way around and approached our house from the far side.  Altogether this evening walk was just over five miles for a total today of nearly eight and a half with about seven of that with me carrying either Liesl or Luciana on my back.  That’s some serious walking.  It was nice getting to show Dominica around our neighborhood too as she really doesn’t know the different areas that well.  This will get her used to it quickly.

 

It is Friday.  I got into the office on the late side.  It was a nice day in general.  I decided that in order to keep productive that I would skip coming home today and instead worked through my lunch break trying to catch up on things.  There is always just so much to do and commuting home during lunch means two more context switches, another hour in the car, money for all that fuel and half an hour of sitting at home not being able to do very much as it is such a short period of time.  So I stayed and got work done.

Today was not all that busy.  Not slow, just not super busy.  I mostly worked on getting my mailbox and ticket queues trimmed down, which overall, went well.

I am very excited because my new camera, the Nikon AW100, arrived today while I was at the office.  This is the camera that I bought specifically for our trip to Europe.  Dominica thought that I was crazy to need a new camera for the trip but once I explained why I needed it, she agreed that we really did need to get it.  This is a small, pocket sized point and shoot camera but rated as being excellent for image quality – according to some reviews it is supposed to rival my Nikon D90 for image quality!  It is a 16MP camera, which is more than we need but a nice feature and results in good low light performance which is very nice as I hate using a camera like this with a flash, it never looks good.  You need a good off-camera flash like I have for my D90 in order to get good flash photos.

I got home this evening and I played with the new camera for a little bit.  Not very long because as soon as the girls were awake and ready we went out to Brookhaven to get some dinner.  It’s not all that often that we manage to get out on a Friday night so that worked well.

This afternoon I had a half hour meeting planning for the upcoming SpiceCorps Philadelphia event which I am helping to coordinate.  I used to help with that group quite some time ago but it has been dormant for a while so I am assisting in getting it fired up and running again.

After work I ran right home and we headed out to go to La Cima for six o’clock reservations.  We were nearly half an hour late, of course, but they are used to us.

This is our first time back to La Cima in nearly five months – our first return since we left to go to Brookhaven.  Since our last time there a lot has changed, most notably the management.

Everyone was excited to see us, mostly because of the girls.  They have both grown a lot since they were last at the club and Liesl was very excited to be back and to see everyone.  Dominica is very glad to be back too because she really misses the food there.

This is our first time seeing the new menu.  There was a new chef at La Cima who started just before we left so we never really got to experience the changes that he made before we had left so this gave us some new variety.  Overall the menu is really good but we did not feel that it was as good, or as varietal, as the older menu and there is now no regular whitefish on the menu so there is even less for Dominica to eat than there used to be.  So she will be struggling to eat at La Cima very often.  Sadly the amazing smoked gouda mac and cheese has been removed from the menu.  It is good because we should not eat it but it is bad because it was one of the best items on the menu.  I wonder if they could make it for us if we asked.

The new manager of La Cima came over to make sure that he greeted us while we were there.  He seems really nice.  I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do with the club.

Dominica got the lighter, Macadamia crust fish option and I went for the flash smoked salmon which was excellent.  The new salad selection is good as well.  We also split a crab cake appetizer, which we should not have, but splitting it isn’t too bad for us.

We had a nice evening.  We were very happy to learn that our ONE membership with Brookhaven just recently changed and we now no longer have one meal per month to use at either La Cima or at the Tower Club but instead have unlimited ONE privileges to use at either, anytime after five in the evening.  Obviously this is because both clubs are extremely busy for lunch and relatively slow for dinner.  It makes perfect sense – get the country club set out to the business clubs more often for fancy dinners.  We are definitely going to start using them both more.  Now that Dominica is comfortable getting to the Tower Club via rail we will go that much more.

I had to get up really early this morning so that I could take the Acadia in to the shop because of the power steering issues.  I dropped it off before seven thirty and came home to work from there.

I worked from home all day as I had to deal with the car.  It was a slow day at work so a good day to be home.

Originally we had had reservations for La Cima tonight but we had to switch them to tomorrow night because tonight I had to attend a live class session for my class at RIT.

This evening, after the girls had gone to bed – even Dominica, I decided to go out for a walk in the nice, evening air and get some much needed exercise.  I have been needing badly to start getting into the habit of exercising regularly and walking is about the only thing that I can bring myself to do on a really regular basis and mostly because it gives me an opportunity to both explore the area in which I live and because it gives me a chance to listen to my audio books which, otherwise, I never get a chance to hear.

So the weather being really nice this evening I set out for a serious walk.  I started going south when I discovered that there was no sidewalk heading off in the direction that I wanted to go but I then decided to venture eastward out into some residential neighbourhoods and found my way, eventually, back up to the road that I had originally wanted to take.  While walking I finished listening to Janet Evanovich’s “Seven Up” and started listening to the eighth book in the series “Hard Eight.”

By book seven the Stephanie Plum series is already starting to get pretty boring and eight makes it even worse.  The story is the same in every book and the lead character is mechanical and predictable.  It takes a bit to stick with the books but I am a bit invested in the series at this point.  It’s like a bad sitcom, though, where everyone can see that Lucy is about to do something foolish and clearly time after time Lucy knows that she is doing something foolish but does it anyway, and Ricky comes to save her.  The books are no different.  Over the top formulaic.  The formula is simple.  Vacuous Jersey Girl gets job, gets in over her head, acts macho, gets man to save her.  Ho hum.  In every book Stephanie leaves her gun in her cookie jar, is surprised when gun is needed, refuses to put bullets in gun when someone forces her to take it and, the moment no one is looking, puts it back into the cookie jar and needs saving again.  Also, you can bet that she will come home and someone will have broken into her apartment and she will be surprised… again.

The weather was perfect for a walk and I had a really nice time.  I walked down the main drag near our home which works out great for late night walking because there are loads of businesses nearby including a few twenty-four hours places where I can stop for food, drink or restroom breaks.  Having access to those things on a long, late night walk can be pretty important.

I walked due east, taking no side streets.  Living in a city like Carrollton actually gives me a ton of stuff to explore on foot.  It has been a long time since I lived someplace so conducive to long walks.  The area is very safe, pretty flat and you actually can get to a lot of different things pretty quickly.

What is interesting is that there is a sort of natural barrier between our local neighbourhood and the main road off of which we live quite closely.  For the first several months in our new home we really didn’t know what lay in that direction at all.  We are heavily “associated” with the businesses located to our southwest, not to the east or north nearly as much.  So walking to the east reveals a lot of businesses that I see only infrequently when driving.

I walked several miles tonight, nearly eight miles in total by the time that I returned to the house.  It was a good walk.  I covered all of the reasonable ground that I could along my one path and have a much better understanding of the route now.  I am looking forward to doing it again but branching out along different side streets, there is a lot of area to explore out there.

One thing that really caught me off guard was the large number of bars that were open and quite active late on a Wednesday evening.  There were a lot of people sitting outside on patios as I walked.  I had no idea that there were so many, or really any, bars so close to my home.  And bars that I can easily walk to.  Many of these were only a little over halfway into my walk.

I found several restaurants that I did not really know were there before as well.  Walking is really the best way to discover this stuff.  There are so many little, local businesses around that you would never know are there.  I wonder how half of them make any money.  It is so hard to know when or why you would use many of them.

Overall it was a very good night and I felt good when I got back home.  My trainer will be happy with me if I can keep this up.  I need to get in shape, not just lose weight, quickly as well because when we go to Europe (which is only about six weeks away) we are going to be taking the train and walking everywhere.  So being ready for some serious walking without stressing my knees is very important.

It was about two when I got home.  I was pretty tired.  Right off to sleep for me.  I calculated that I burned nearly nine hundred calories tonight and walked about seven and a half miles.

Medifast Status: Day 314, Down ~77.5lbs (22.5lbs to go)

Had to get up this morning and drive in to my Medifast appointment.  I was pretty excited, though, as I was actually down when I weighed in at home this morning.  By the time that I got in to Medifast I was down even more and the scale was teetering on another half pound.  I am extremely close to my original Medifast target weight.  I could hit it any day if I can stay away from Dominica baking.  I cannot resist freshly baked cookies in the house.  It’s just not something that I can resist.  I don’t have that kind of willpower.  Boy does it feel good to finally be at a new low weight.

Today was supposed to be the first day of classes for the semester at RIT but I was unable to talk to the school to get anything worked out yet for this semester.  I tried to talk to my adviser last Friday but everyone was out.  So I called today and her schedule was full.  You would think that when they told me on Friday to call today that if being booked in advance was necessary that they might have mentioned that at the time.  So today I made an appointment for tomorrow.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to book a class for this semester.

Today the family went to the Dallas Children’s Aquarium in at Fair Park while I was at work.  Now that I have taught Dominica about how to use the DART rail system, she is addicted.  It is just way too convenient to get downtown not to do it.  They had a really good time today and I was able to get out of work at a decent time so drove to the Green Line at Royal, parked the car and rode downtown to join them for dinner.

I got off of the train at the West End and met everyone waiting for me on the platform.  Liesl was so excited to see me – screaming from all of the way down the platform and jumping around like crazy.  Apparently she had gotten really sad when another train had come and gone and she thought that I had forgotten to get off of the train.

We all walked around the West End for a bit trying to decide on where to eat. It is tough between our Medifast diets and being pescatarian and the girls being really picky eaters in really unpredictable ways.  We ended up settling on the Spaghetti Factory which was the only restaurant that Dominica and I have eaten at in the West End previously.  But now that we know how easy it is to get here we can easily come back anytime.

Dinner was pretty good and we had a nice ride back home on the train.