Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 289, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

After my long day yesterday I refused to get up early this morning and slept in until a quarter to eight.  Not really “sleeping in” per se but more of a normal time.  Definitely did not get up early.

I went into the office this morning.  Work was busy today, just like it has been all week, but not so busy that I had no time to relax whatsoever.  What we did have today was Hewlett-Packard in the office giving a two and a half hour presentation on the new Generation 8 Proliant servers which was really interesting.  Unfortunately that happened during my lunch break so I was in that meeting from noon until two thirty which meant no time at home to relax and visit with my family and it meant that the rest of the work day was that much busier because I lost all of that productive time, but the presentation was valuable so it was time well spent.

HP did provide lunch, of course, during the presentation.  I made sure that no one else was going to eat the food provided before getting some for myself.  It was totally cheating on my diet – it was sandwiches from Jimmy John’s.  So I really, really was not supposed to have that but this was a surprise meeting and I had been planning on being home for lunch and did not bring any food and they provided food so I didn’t want to pass it up if no one else was going to eat it.  I am really going to pay for this on my weigh in tomorrow.  This week has been horrible for my diet.

We had our regular terminate slash pest control visit today.  Being from New York we are still not used to having to do that on a regular basis.  I’m glad that we have a contract and someone that comes out all of the time.  It does not take much for your house to get overrun with insects down here.  We don’t have that many when we step outside – it isn’t like we are overcome by insects.  But the ones that we do have seem to have little issue finding their way into the house.  The ants are especially bad down here.

The afternoon was not too bad and while it was busy I did not have to stay late.  I got home and Dominica had food waiting for me.  We had had some miscommunications there.  I thought that she knew that I was eating at the office.  It was a lean dinner, though, so I went ahead and ate two meals today.  I’ve got a very rough diet fortnight coming up.  Today was quite bad.

Medifast Status: Day 288, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

The problem with going to bed early is that inevitably, being used to getting so little sleep, means that I wake up early.  So today I woke up at four  and could not get back to sleep.  I tried for nearly forty five minutes but eventually gave up and went to my office to get some early morning work done.  Having so much work hanging over my head all of the time means that anytime that I am awake I can just lay in bed thinking about all of the work that I could be getting accomplished and it makes it pretty hard to get back to sleep.

So I got up and got to work nice and early.  I was working by a quarter to five this morning.  It was a good thing that I did as I ended up being really busy all morning.  So I stayed home today.  This whole week has been so busy and today was just nuts so there was no reason to pack up and head into the office.

It was a good thing that I stayed home because I would have been really exhausted if I had gone in.  I worked through lunch for the second day in a row and worked solid until around seven in the evening and worked here and there until nine.  A very long day to be sure.  That is sixteen hours.  More than enough.

Dominica and I watched a little bit of Jackie Chan’s 1987 classic Armour of God but only got a little ways into it.  We probably will not managed to wrap it up until this weekend.

Next week is going to be very busy for us for sure.  On Tuesday night Dominica and I are hosting SpiceCorps DFW at our house.  It is the first time that I know of that a SpiceCorps is being held at someone’s house and we definitely do not own a large house.  Our living room is decently large so it will hold people fairly well and we have no furniture in it so that makes it easier than it might otherwise be but overall this is going to be a really cramped house.  When we first decided to go for hosting at our house we were thinking that we would probably get a fairly average SC DFW turnout which is less than twenty people.  Seventeen is a reasonable number.  We got barely thirty when we did a big even at La Cima just before SpiceWorld in October and a good number of the people attending that time were people from all over the country just stopping in on their way through to SpiceWorld in Austin so the attendance number was kind of artificially inflated because of that and we really pushed that meeting hoping to hit attendance records for SpiceCorps.  So the RSVP list for this event was pretty surprising.  It is still climbing day to day but is currently at forty-one people at “yes” and another dozen at “maybe!”  That is a LOT of people.  We are not really prepared for so many.  This is going to be interesting.

The the day after our house gets trashed by SpiceCorps my dad is flying down from New York to spend a week with us.

Medifast Status: Day 287, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

Work was insanely busy today.  So busy that I did not even get a chance to leave for lunch.  And I got stuck late at the end of the day.  Not a fun way to spend Valentine’s Day.

It was an exhausting day.  Running from one thing to another and never getting a chance to relax.  In the middle of the afternoon I ran over to the gas station across the street just to get diet Mountain Dew and some almonds to eat at my desk as my food for the day.  I had been planning on going home at lunch and getting something to eat there but I was just so busy that I never managed to leave the office.

We made reservations to go to Brookhaven this evening for their kids’ night special event in the main clubhouse.  But I got stuck at work late.  I had already buffered knowing that I couldn’t get out when I wanted but I figured since we can often get there at a quarter after five on Tuesday nights that we would be safe scheduling for six.  Nope.  We ended up arriving at seven – with only minutes to spare for the kids’ activities.  Had we been just ten minutes later we would have missed the show and that would have been really sad because Liesl had the most amazing time.

For the kids they did a marionette show with a real puppeteer from puppetry.org.  Liesl thought that this was really awesome.  I took her up to sit on the floor with all of the other kids, there were twenty or more easily, but she was probably the youngest so I sat on the floor with her and she sat on my lap.  This was the first live show of this nature that she has ever seen so this was really novel for her.  She had so much fun.  She was riveted to the whole thing.  It was so adorable watching her watch the show.  We are so glad that we made it out for this tonight.  This was perfect.

After the puppet show Liesl went and did facepainting.  She got a unicorn on her cheek.  She was very excited about that.

Dinner was good but very much cheating for our diet.  There was almost no protein for us which was tough so I ended up having two salads and some pasta.  We cheated and got some dessert too.  But the food was good, just not as healthy as it should have been.  I will likely be fasting tomorrow to pay for this.

Luciana had a good time but we were so late getting to Brookhaven that she was exhausted and just wanted to go to sleep for the last half an hour that we were there.  She tried eating a cupcake tonight, well, the frosting at least.  She shared one with Dominica.  Luciana had fun overall and she did come sit and watch some of the puppet show but was much more interested in watching the people and spent much of the time facing backwards trying to get peoples’ attention because that is how she is.

We got home and Luciana was practically asleep in the car which never happens.  Liesl was awake but tired.  She watched one episode of Blue’s Clues and it was right off to bed.  I read her some stories and she was happy to climb into bed and call it a night – still with the unicorn on her cheek.  It was a good evening for a little Liesl.

Dominica and I went straight to bed.  We were both pretty tired.  Today was a really long day.

Medifast Status: Day 286, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

My “tight” 34″ jeans that I bought recently are starting to get loose now.  I can’t believe it.  I never thought that I would even begin to squeeze into 34″ jeans again and now I have to worry that these may not be the final size of jeans that I will own before my diet is done.  That is crazy.

I got up this morning and, not surprisingly, there were phone issues and I had to jump on that right away.  I worked for probably forty-five minutes, trained Dominica on some stuff and then got showered, dressed and drove in to the office.

I came home for lunch and spent the entire time doing more phone work but, when my lunch break was done, it appeared that everything was finally working the way that it should be and, it would appear, that there are no more pressing issues.  Pheww.  Four days is too long to be working on a project like that.

After lunch the remaining issues seem to have been resolved, at least for the moment.  So back to the office with me.

I had a very short evening between getting out of work and having a dinner meeting.  So I ran home so that I could get a little bit of time, a little less than two hours, with Liesl and Luciana.  I was home long enough that Luciana went to bed before I left.  Then at seven I drove back down to Las Colinas to meet some people at Sfuzzi to discuss phone systems.

We had a nice dinner, Sfuzzi does an amazing eggplant parm, and were there until probably ten.  Then back home.  Liesl was already asleep when I got home.  Today was a long day following a long weekend.

I went to bed on the early side.  Dominica stayed up later without me.

Medifast Status: Day 285, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

What a disaster of a day.  I started off with getting paged out at seven in the morning.  I got up and worked for a while but was so tired that it was straight back to bed for me.  Oreo appreciated that I came back to bed.  We snuggled for another four hours.  I’m sure that he liked that a lot.  He got back under the covers and acted like I never left.

I really needed the sleep both after working so hard yesterday and getting to bed so late.  It was afternoon when I finally got up.  I checked my phone and Dominica and the girls had left Houston before nine this morning so they would be rolling in in the not too distant future.  So I got up and hit the shower.  It might seem like I slept a really long time but when you take into account when I went to bed and that I got up in the middle to work for a while it turns out that yes, I got a full night’s sleep, but no, I did not get even nine hours.  So hardly a dramatic case of sleeping in.

Dominica called to say that she was home whilst I was still showering.  I got out and got dressed and helped her unpack the car.  The girls were really happy to see me and I them.  Liesl had to tell me all about her trip and Luciana just wanted me to hold her and hold her.

Pretty much my entire day ended up being consumed by working on the phone systems still from yesterday.  That sucked a lot.  I had been hoping to have a nice, fun day and get to spend it working on my Ruby on Rails project but no such luck.  I never even made it to my desk – not once all day.  I set up in the playroom so that at least I could be near to the family and I worked from there all day.  And by all day I really mean it, from the moment I got out of the shower and was done getting everyone into the house until one o’clock in the morning.  That was all that I did.

While I worked Liesl and Luciana played and Dominica and I put on the oldish television show Grounded for Life which failed to be a classic but wasn’t a bad sitcom from the early 2000s.  It’s entertaining and it is our kind of show.  It makes a good example of a generic sitcom of the era.  Very middle of the road.  Good to have on in the background.

We really did nothing else today.  The day was completely consumed by the telephony project that needed my undivided attention.  No fun at all.

Luciana has a cold that she picked up in Houston this weekend.  She is still happy, just a very runny nose.

Liesl was very glad to have her daddy back to read to her her bedtime stories again.  I offered to read her one long story and she said “No, daddy, three books” and held up the appropriate number of fingers.  Too cute to resist.