Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 254, Down ~73lbs

I stayed home from work again today.  I’ve been home nearly all week.  Not a lot of need to be in the office.  No one is there for me to see so it is pretty silly to be sitting there all alone attempting to work when I could be just as productive from home and not have to pay to drive in and back twice a day (because I always come home during lunch to see the girls.)

The floor in the living room is still pretty wet today but it is looking pretty good.  The Rug Doctor definitely does not get out the stains like my boiling bleach water method does – because the hot water does not sit for five to ten minutes on the floor working its chemical magic.  So it looks like I will need to do that a bit more on the toughest spots.  But the Rug Doctor does a good job of getting the floor to look more even as it hits everything.

Our plan is to start doing the Rug Doctor once a month until the floors are really clean and then moving into a seasonal schedule of doing the entire house four times a year.  Overall, though, the carpet looks great.

Our friend Andrew stopped by this evening to do some computer training and Dominica used the opportunity to pick his brain about places to go while we are in Belgium.  So he was at the house for a while.  He is going to be in Belgium with us for a little bit and we might reschedule things so that we are there for about a week all together.  He has friends all over Belgium and knows everywhere to go.  So we will get a guided tour of the country.

It is looking like our latest plan is that we are going to fly into Germany and spend a lot of time in Belgium skipping the Alsace and only seeing Germany briefly.  We will get a lot of time to get to know Belgium though.  That will be nice.  I much prefer staying in one spot and getting to know it really well rather than zipping from place to place trying to see and do everything and not ever getting a feel for anywhere.

Medifast Status: Day 253, Down ~73lbs

I finally weighed in down another pound!  This has taken forever.  I am really anxious to get this diet back on track but boy has it been hard.  The holidays make it such a struggle and now I am in to the habit of eating food that I shouldn’t.  That is going to be really hard to break myself of.

Today was a pretty normal day.  Dominica did some more painting.  The main hallway is now completely painted as is the one wall in Liesl’s room.  Liesl has been very excited to get a wall painted pink and she went with Dominica, I believe yesterday, to Lowe’s to pick out the paint that she wanted on her wall.  So three walls remain purple, the lavender-like shade that came with the house, and now one wall has a fresh coat of pink paint.

The hallway being done looks great.  So bright and new.  Really improves the look of the house.  The bar is the last remaining piece of this current round of painting.  Luciana’s room is going to get a pink wall as well but that is held off until after the Grice family visits this weekend since they need to be able to use that room and having wet paint is a bit of a pain.

The Rug Doctor arrived today!  We are very excited.  The living room was already empty so I went ahead and Rug Doctored the entire living room.  Now the floor is very wet.  That will take some time to dry.  We wanted to get it done before the Grices came with plenty of time to dry.  We have about fifty hours before they will get here so that should be enough.

Medifast Status: Day 252, Down ~72lbs

We are slowly getting back to normal life after the holidays.  We only have three more days until the Grices come up from Houston for the weekend so all of our house work as to be completed quickly.

I ended up working from home today.

Dominica started doing more house painting today.  The first stage was to begin painting the main hallway.  That went pretty quickly and the difference in the house is amazing.  We never realized before just how dark that hallway is but once the light, modern paint went on it (and we replaced a burned out light bulb) it really brightened up.  It is like a completely new hallway.

Dominica only got half of the hallway painted today but wow, what a difference. It also really makes a difference because that wall of the hallway is the most visible from the main part of the house and had the large patch of any of the walls from the electrical work done many months ago.  It looked awful because the patch was never painted over.  So this fixed that in addition to being a fresh coat of paint.

I can see very quickly that the house is going to be increasing in value very quickly.  I’m surprised that they never painted it and did some of this basic stuff before selling it before.  Maybe they would have and just never got to it.  We have done a lot to improve the house already.

This evening we went out to kids’ night at Brookhaven on the early side but ended up being there in an unexpected crowed.  It probably took us twenty minutes to get a seat.  The place was completely packed and for a restaurant doing a buffet that is pretty surprising.

The kids went to bed early tonight.  Luciana’s schedule is starting to change.  Her regular naps during the day are starting to dissipate.  Pretty soon she is going to be keeping Dominica running all day long.  Liesl was pretty tired and was able to go to sleep on the early side.

Medifast Status: Day 251, Down ~72lbs

Today is my first day back in the office after the freeze.  Our team has a holiday lunch scheduled today as we were unable to get everyone together during the holidays themselves as people are out of the office almost continuously during the seasons.

We went to Blue Ginger, the Thai restaurant that Dominica, Liesl and I ate at our first night in Irving over two years ago.  The owner still knows me and lunch was very good.  I went off diet for lunch and had some amazing fried rice.  Oh how I miss fried rice.  Before we went on the Medifast diet, fried rice from Blue Ginger and Coconut Thai Grill were major components of my diet.

So our big news for the day is that I got approved to do my office time in Europe from London rather than from Warsaw.  This changes everything in our plans for the trip.  It will save us a fortune in flight and hotel costs but now we have to start our planning process over again.  We have a lot more flexibility now in our travel plans and we can begin our trip wherever we want rather than knowing that we are in Warsaw for several days and figuring out where to go from there.

We were originally locked into flying into Warsaw and staying there for several days – which was going to suck because Dominica and the girls were pretty much going to be stuck in a hotel room for several days doing nothing.  That was not going to be fun and it was not going to be cheap either.  Flights to Warsaw were a lot more expensive than to elsewhere in Europe and the hotels there were not particularly cheap, partially because it is the business district of a large city rather than a rural area like we will be staying in for much of our trip.

So now we can start anywhere that we want and just need to be in London during specific days.  So at least we have a “pivot point” in our schedule that coincides with the last days that I will be working out of the office and once my time in London is done then I go straight into my furlough time and we are free to go completely off of the grid.

We did some paint planning tonight too and now have a pretty good idea of what we are going to be painting the majority of the house.

Medifast Status: Day 250, Down ~72lbs

The freeze in the financial industry ended last night and this morning I got up around nine and signed into the office so that I could get to work with some application deployments and system changes that people needed done at the first possible moment.

There was not that much work for this morning so it was probably under an hour before I was free for the day.

Dominica did some painting in the kitchen today.  We have been discussing this for a while.  Some time ago she painted half of the kitchen in a very 1970s green.  Now people might think that this eccentric and 1970s colour choice was made by me and I can see why people might think that but I assure everyone that I had nothing to do with the choice of colour for the kitchen and this was totally Dominica’s doing.  She had gotten halfway through the kitchen and then wasn’t sure if she liked the colour or not and stopped.  So for a few months the kitchen has been half fresh, bright green and half dull, dirty yellow.  The mix of the two was horrible.

I finally convinced her to at least finish the kitchen in all green and have it be all one thing.  Nothing is worse than half and half and honestly the green has been growing on me.  I think that once it is all green that she will see that it is actually a pretty good selection.  So she gave in and finished painting the kitchen in green.  It took hardly any time as the portion of the kitchen left was incredibly small.

The finished kitchen looks really good.  The green actually works now that we can see it.  It really goes with the style of the house.

I got word from Toronto this afternoon that the server is racked and powered on.  I logged in and started working on it today.  That consumed much of my day and I was very productive.

Oreo broke out in horrible hives this afternoon.  We have no idea what triggered it but it was very bad.  We had to medicate him and give him and bath and keep an eye on his all day.  Poor little dog.

This evening I ran out to Walmart and did some quick shopping.  I picked up some popcorn for us to eat while watching a movie tonight.  I also did some searching for some XBOX 360 Kinect dance video games that Dominica wants but was unable to find a reasonable price on any of the ones that she was interested in at Walmart, Target, Game Chop or even the dreaded Game Stop so I gave up on that.

I came home and we watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 on BluRay this evening after Liesl had gone to bed.