Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 284, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

I slept in until ten this morning.  That is not something that I can do when the kids are here.  Liesl has become my organic alarm clock.  She wakes up at almost exactly eight o’clock every morning and now that she knows that she is allowed to get out of bed on her own she does so.  But she wants other people to be awake too.  So Liesl gets out of bed and comes in to our room and stands right in front of my face and wakes me up every morning.  That makes sleeping in very hard.  She has a routine.  Wake up, scare the crap out of daddy, have daddy turn on a show for her to watch and have daddy retrieve for her her morning’s “chocolate milk” – chocolate flavoured Pediasure.

I got to work straight away this morning on working on teaching myself Rails 3.2 which I had set aside this weekend to do since I would be home sans interruptions for nearly two and a half days.  As always happens when I do something like this – disaster strikes.  I know that there was a similar long weekend sometime in the not too distant past where I was doing something similar and a ridiculous amount of crap happened causing me to not get to do what I had been planning to do at all.  Well this weekend is no different.  It started last night with the hard drives in the server that I was working on dying on me causing me to lose many hours of work and effectively scrapping my Friday evening altogether.

I managed to get in quite a bit of Rails time today which was nice.  But I did not get the solid time to work on it that I had been so looking forward to having this weekend.  I ended up getting stuck working on PBX security and reprovisioning issues that ate up a huge chunk of my day.  That was not fun.

I did a little cleaning today, mostly dishes in the kitchen and running the Rug Doctor in the play room.  I did quite a bit of exercising today too, especially with the ab roller and my new dumbbells.

After being stuck working on things that I did not want to work on all day I took some time late into the night to work on my Ruby on Rails tutorial project.  I got a ton of stuff done but I had to stay up until three in the morning in order to do it.  I was pretty tired when I grabbed Oreo and retired for the night.

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.

Medifast Status: Day 282, Down ~76.5lbs (23.5lbs to go)

Another day, another pound lost!  Yay.  I was very excited to discover that for the second day in a row that I had weighed in down another pound.  I won’t keep that up for long but I have just four pounds left to go before I hit my original target weight with Medifast so I am really anxious to get to that mark and move on to my “extra” weight loss beyond what we had originally planned.

I worked from home this morning at Liesl’s request last night.  She asked if I would stay home “a little bit”.  She loves it when I stay home.  Dominica and the girls were packed and out the door a few minutes before ten in the morning so I worked until they left and then went in to the office myself.

For lunch Nicki and I went to Brookhaven and ate there.  My lunch was quite devoid of protein as the closest thing to protein was pan fried eggplant which was very tasty but not a lean, protein meal. I hope that I don’t have to pay for that tomorrow when I weigh in at Medifast.

I had nothing on the schedule for this evening.  I did some work and got my new Linux development server built.  I am hoping to be doing some Ruby on Rails work this weekend and I wanted a new development server on which to get it all installed and set up.  My development server is an OpenSuse 12.1 text-only server.  I also plan on firing up a Git repository server to use for version control of my code.  In the last year or two everyone seems to have migrated from Subversion as the version control system of choice to Git so I want to give it a try and learn how to use it.

Oreo was not too happy about his lonely day today.  I had a bit of cleaning up after him to do, if you know what I mean.

Medifast Status: Day 281, Down ~75.5lbs (24.5lbs to go)

Another pound down.  I am feeling like I am in the home stretch now.  Past the 75% mark of my total hoped-for loss.  Seeing weight come off day to day again is awesome.

Normal day in the office for me today.  Came home at lunch and we ate at the house.  We were supposed to go to a new member reception at Brookhaven tonight but neither of us really felt like taking the effort.  So we think that likely we will skip that tonight and just stay in.

The afternoon was kind of busy and I did not get home until a little on the late side.  Luciana was already in bed and we thought that she had gone down to sleep for the night but it turned out that she got up later on in the evening and stayed up pretty late hanging out with her daddy.

There has been a change of plans and Dominica and the girls are packing tonight and leaving for Houston around the time that I leave for the office in the morning.  So they are going to be down there for four days.

We watched most of one episode of Up All Night but could not even make it through the pilot due to there being so much to do.  Dominica was doing laundry and packing.  I got called and had to work for several hours.  It ended up being a rather frantic night, in reality.

When I put Liesl to bed this evening she asked me to read her the same book that we read last night , “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel“, because she really liked it.  I am so glad that she likes that book.  I have such fond memories of that one from being Liesl’s age myself.

 

Medifast Status: Day 280, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

In the office today.  I accidentally left the house this morning without getting my morning hug and kiss from Liesl and she was horribly upset.  She ran after me but I did not hear her and she waved to be out of the living room windows.  Dominica said that she cried for forty-five minutes.

I have been doing really well on my diet for a few days now.  I can feel that I am getting back into groove and I am feeling good.  I am really liking the new ab workout roller thing that Dominica bought for me this weekend.  It really works out the muscles under my rib cage and I can feel the burn.  She got me dumbbells as well.  I am trying to do some weight training to tone up as that is critical now that I am doing so well on losing the weight.

I came home at lunch and Dominica made her cauliflower soup which is one of my favourite meals.  I cannot get over how much I like eating that and yet it is so incredibly healthy.  And it is easy to make too, she says.  It is like the miracle food.

Another quiet evening at home.  I had some work to do so we really didn’t watch anything tonight.  The kids were both in bed very early.  I barely get to see Luciana during the week because she often sleeps during my lunch hours, she doesn’t wake up in the morning until after I leave and sometimes she goes to bed within an hour of me getting home at night.  🙁  I can’t wait until her sleep schedule is more like Liesl’s so that we get more time together.

Dominica decided that she wanted to take a nap this evening as she was really exhausted.  She ended up falling asleep and staying asleep all night.  She was asleep as much as thirty minutes before I managed to get Liesl to bed!

Liesl and I read another classic from my childhood tonight: “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.”  This is one of the stories that I remember from my childhood best.  I loved this book and I am sure that dad still has my original copy kicking around somewhere.  The book is actually from 1939 so Liesl might be the third generation in our family with this book.  I wonder if my parents read this one when they were little.  I can still remember mom reading Mike Mulligan to me and I totally remember the entire story now that I read it to Liesl.  This book, like the one that we read last night, really stuck in my mind because of the illustrations that went with them.  Just looking at the pictures as we read really brings the memories flooding back.  Liesl really like the story of Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, his steam shovel, and how they deal with the coming of the new, more modern types of shovels.

I spent the evening and well into the night working on the DL145 server that I got powered up last night.  It is running well, thus far, and I wanted to make it usable today.  I needed to get a monitor on it and Dominica had the only analogue monitors in the house so I had to take them from her desk to use there.  So while I had the desk cleaned off I took the time to actually clean it getting all of the food and papers and pens and knick knacks that collect there off and to then clean and disinfect the desk.  I also installed some speakers for her that she had been wanting but had not gotten around to plugging in.

I got the server working without a problem.  I was surprised by how out of date the operating system was.  I could have sworn that it was a lot more recent than that.  It was running OpenSuse 11.4 which is two versions behind.  So I got it updated to OpenSuse 12.1 and Xen 4.1.  I am looking forward to being able to work with both of those.  I am happy with how little noise the server is making and how well it is able to run in the server closet without affecting me when I work in the office.  And the server room is not done.  On the long “to do” list is to replace the paper thin, hollow door that is there now with something filled with foam to seriously deaden the remaining noise.  That will make a big difference.  I will likely get acoustic panels and apply some in the server room as well to absorb even more noise.

It was pretty late when I got to bed.  Maybe two or three in the morning.