Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 263, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

The weekend is here.  We all slept in a bit this morning, but not too much.  We are long past the age of really sleeping in.  Now sleeping in means sleeping until Liesl demands that we get up.  Liesl is the morning child.  She gets up like clockwork and when she is awake she is awake.  And that is that.

Liesl’s new thing is to get herself up and come into our bedroom and stand at the side of the bed pestering us until we get up and take care of her morning routine which includes turning on Dinosaur Train and getting her a drink of Walmart’s own version of chocolate pediasure which she likes to refer to as “purple chocolate milk.”

Early in the afternoon we packed up the girls and drove on out to Arlington to go to Ashley’s diaper drop.  Ashley has just moved back home to Texas from Virginia and the baby is due in the next month.  We were there for about two and a half hours.  We ate dinner there at the party and cheated a little on the diet.  Liesl loved some turtle cake balls and ate an astounding amount of them.

Liesl had a lot of fun playing with the kids.  She loves going out and meeting new people.  Luciana had a lot of fun too and was awake the entire time.  She spent the party getting passed around from person to person.  She, like her older sister, is a social butterfly and just loves getting to be with new people.  As long as there are people with her, she is happy.

Once we were home both girls went down for their naps.  They were both really tired.  Pool Liesl was so tired that she passed out in the car on the way home, was carried in and put into our bed because her bed was stripped as it was being washed and so slept the afternoon away while still wearing her coat.  I ended up, late in the evening, carrying her into her own bed and she slept the entire night long with her coat still on!   Luciana, likewise, pretty much fell asleep in the late afternoon and was gone for the entire evening.  They really got worn out at the diaper drop.  Playing with the other kids, skipping the normal naps and seeing so many new people really wears them out.

It was a quiet evening with the girls in bed all night.  We didn’t really watch much of anything tonight.  We did some cleaning and some work on our computers.  Had some coffee. Overall it was an early night.  The kids aren’t the only ones that are tired.

Medifast Status: Day 262, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

The weather has been absolutely amazing in Texas the last two days.  It was seventy degrees yesterday and today is set to be even warmer yet.  Amazing.

I took the Mazda into the shop this morning to have the taillight that is out fixed and to have the new Texas plates swapped on.  Finally I can feel safe driving it again.  John drove with me as he had to get his car inspected too while we were out.

I went to Medifast today and had a better weigh in than I had been expecting, only half a pound up from last week.  But I knew that today was going to be a bad weigh in, sometimes that just happens.  I’m feeling good about coming in low next week.

My Medifast appointment ended up taking so long that I skipped lunch and just had Medifast meals and went back to the office.  That way I can eat dinner with Dominica tonight, save a few dollars and most likely have a far leaner meal than I would have had otherwise.  Probably for the best.  I really need to get solidly back on to the diet plan.  I do not have that much farther to go, I need to push through and get to the end.  I am 73% of the way to my goal weight.  I can do it.  That will not take that much longer.  I just need to stay focused.

This evening was a light deployment load at the office.  Not bad at all.  I managed to wrap up an article that I was working on today too and submitted it for publication.  Hopefully it gets accepted.  I’ve been very lax in my writing over the last few months and I really need to get that back on track.  My latest article was nearly three thousand words.

I managed to leave work at a quarter after five which is completely amazing for a Friday night.  We stayed in tonight, had a nice, healthy dinner and watched a bit of How I Met Your Mother.

It was a quiet night.  Dominica wanted to stay in, I felt like hanging out with some friends.  After the girls were asleep she talked online, posted, watched some television.  I went out and got a drink… but didn’t drink.  Trying to stay away from alcohol per my diet, although that is hard.  I end up taking in way too much caffeine because I substitute caffeine products like coffee, energy drinks and sometimes tea or soda.  I’m sure that the alcohol would be far better for me.

We are working hard to get our diets back on track, though, so trying to curb that as much as possible.

Medifast Status: Day 261, Down ~73lbs

Finally, I am caught back up on SGL!

We all saw it coming for years and knew that they were working on the filing recently but officially today Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy protection.  I find it unlikely that Kodak will ever rise again.  They have been on a downward spiral for so long that bankruptcy protection is not going to help them.  They have had a decade to reorganize and find a way to make money.  Now they are just buying time.  The end is near.

It is odd having grown up in Rochester, New York and being a child of Eastman Kodak.  Kodak was a massive part of my childhood.  Kodak defined the Rochester skyline that we could see from my childhood home.  My father worked there from the time that he left college until he retired.  I did my first competition photography with the Kodak Camera Club in the summer of 1986.  I took many photography classes there in the nineties.  I did my second engineering job at a company that partially made products for Kodak.  I did my first IT “job” at Kodak, a short week or two week intern thing when I was thirteen.  I considered going to work for Kodak Canada in the mid-nineties.

Rochester is not the same town that it once was and never will be again.  Kodak was a product of another era and that era is very much over.  Already people have little memory as to what Kodak even was and no one understands just how powerful film manufacturing was during that era.  Kodak changed the world, but the world moved on without it.

I was in the office today after being home again yesterday.  This morning Dominica made a run to CostCo to go shopping.  She got a ton of stuff.  Loads of coffee, some new clothes, lots of food.  She found some amazingly tempting maple glazed pecans.  Those are just evil.  And she found some cool Korean seaweed snacks.

I went home for lunch.  We ate salads and watched two episodes of How I Met Your Mother.  Liesl was being weird and wanted to take a bath so I drew that for her.  Then back to the office.

I ended up working until nearly six and then went home and hung out with the girls.  We had a nice evening.  Liesl loves making me play “ring around the rosey” over and over and also likes to play “stop / go”.  Luciana stood up on her own for the first time tonight.  I was sitting in my arm chair in the play room and she crawled over to me and just lifted herself up.  After doing it that first time she did it several more times on the ottoman in the play room much to Dominica’s chagrin who now as an extremely dangerous near-toddler to deal with around the house.

We watched How I Met Your Mother this evening and we finished the fourth season and have now watched an episode or two of the fifth season.  We really love that show.

Medifast Status: Day 260, Down ~73lbs

Dominica and I were both exceptionally tired today.  We got very little sleep and Liesl got us up this morning so there was no sleeping in to make up for it.  Well, maybe about half an hour of sleeping in but that is not very much.

Since I had worked for several hours last night I just worked from home today.  Going in to the office would have been onerous given how tired I was and I needed to be on conference calls early this morning so there was no time to shower and commute in.

I managed to do a lot of critical work on SharePoint today and am very happy with my progress.  I am really liking SharePoint 2010 Enterprise so far.  There are a ton of really cool features in there and I am just getting started too.

We did very little today.  We were just too tired.  I played with the girls a lot.  Liesl has been doing puzzles more and more and today she managed to do her Wizard of Oz puzzle that we have done a few times since Christmas almost entirely by herself.  I help her get started and I did one piece for her and I helped her put large sections of the puzzle together but as far as actually finding where each piece went… she did that all on her own.  I am very impressed.

We watched a bit of How I Met Your Mother tonight, but we went to bed at a pretty reasonable time.  We need some sleep.

Medifast Status: Day 259, Down ~73lbs

I woke up this morning at ten till six all of my own accord.  I find it hard to believe that my body thought that I had gotten enough sleep but I wasn’t really very tired.  Maybe having the windows open made me sleep a lot better.  I snuggled with Oreo for a little while and then just got up and showered and got ready for work.

When I got out of the shower I noticed that Liesl had moved into our bed and was snuggling between Dominica and Oreo.  I don’t believe that she was there before so she must have woken up and had a nightmare or something and come in there.  They were all fast asleep so I never found out why she was there.

I did a little work from home this morning, mostly doing some SharePoint work that I needed to do from there.  That was maybe forty-five minutes at most.  I made some coffee, wrapped up my work and headed in to the office at eight thirty.

On the way in to work today I finished reading “That’s Not In My American History Book” and got back to working my way painfully through “On the Road.”  As I listen to it I found “On the Road” improving, but not very much.

It is colder again today after a very warm weekend.  It was so warm that we comfortably slept with the windows open last night. Today we are looking at the possibility of frost again.  Quite the jump in temperature.

I came home for lunch as usual and spent some time with the girls.  I pretty much come home every day now.  It is extremely rare that I eat at work or go out on my own.  Maybe once every other week at most.  I am more likely to work through lunch than to voluntarily do anything other than going home to see Liesl and Luciana.

I got home at a good time this evening and we did some house keeping.  The place is really looking great and we seem to be doing really well at keeping up with it these days.

We just hung out at home tonight.  Thankfully nothing big planned.  We ended up staying up pretty late hanging out, we probably should have gone to bed long before we actually did.  I got paged out several times tonight starting around eleven o’clock and going until about two thirty in the morning.  We are going to be tired tomorrow but at least they cannot expect me to be in the office.