Medifast Status: Day 258, Down ~73lbs
I finally got a really good night of sleep last night. I slept in until nine this morning and it felt great. I think that having the bed in a different place in the room made me sleep better.
The Grices left about an hour after I got up. School starts again tomorrow so they need to get back. We will be heading down to Houston to see them again in three or four weeks depending on when we manage to schedule Madeline’s birthday party. That is the next major upcoming family event.
Today’s big project in the house is more painting of our bedroom. Dominica decided that the accent wall in our bedroom needed another, third, coat of Indiana Clay paint so she applied about half of that and I finished up the second half. Now that we can see the wall in daylight after it has mostly dried I think that the colour is really excellent. Francesca described it as orange with a hint of peach. It is a great colour.
Dominica set up the paint for Crab Bisque and she edged the south wall of our bedroom, the one with the window. Then I followed behind and did the roller portion to finish off the first coat of that wall. I didn’t realize just how much lighter the Crab Bisque was going to be than the existing, awful sickly colour that is there now. I thought that it was going to be slightly darker, which I suppose the Indiana Clay is, but it is significantly lighter so rather than darkening our room we are actually brightening it up.
After that wall Dominica edged and I rolled the north wall as well. Now we are getting a good feel for how the room is going to look and it is pretty good. Much cleaner and more modern than the old paint. The old paint felt like it was ancient; it was really bad.
We are saving the east wall with the television mounted to it. That one is going to be a huge pain because of the television, television stand and dresser all blocking it. All of the other walls were easy to reach.
Now that we see the colours on the walls we are thinking that we want to not paint the “sink area” between our bedroom and bathroom the same colour but will instead paint that something dark like chocolate brown to set it off from the rest of the room. That area is in desperate need of a new look. It is dated and awful. We really hope to completely replace that in the next two years with new walls and layout but that will be expensive so that has a while before it can be realized even though we really want to have that all new while we are actually living in the house.
I cannot believe how much of the house is now freshly painted. Nearly the whole house is “new” now. The kitchen, bar, my office, the playroom, the hallway, most of our bedroom and one wall of Liesl’s room have all been painted this year, most of them this month. And don’t forget that the playroom cabinets, fireplace mantel and trim and the wainscoting under the bar are all newly changed from dark veneer to bright white paint too. Our bedroom will be all painted soon and one of Luciana’s walls this week too. The living room is up next and is the single largest and most ominous painting project. That one is going to be awful and I suspect that we will be tackling that all of next weekend. Once the living room is painted the house is going to look completely different. The house looks tons better now than when we bought it.
Dominica read an entire book in the “Hunger Games” series today that Francesca lent to her. She read the second book in the series from cover to cover.
Liesl and I did a puzzle together today. She has done about four puzzles in the last two weeks, we do one every few days, but today it was really apparently that the idea of how to do puzzles – I’m talking about real jigsaw puzzles here – is beginning to take hold and she is actually able to do them. She still needs a lot of help and doesn’t know where to start or how to organize herself to make the puzzle efficient, but she does an excellent job of matching up pieces and figuring out where things go. I am quite impressed. She has always loved puzzles on the iPad so I am guessing that that has built a lot of the thinking skills used here.
I got a ton of important work today including wrapping up some really critical Xen to vSphere migrations including migrating a Vyatta router and firewall appliance. That has been hanging over my head for some time and I am quite glad to have it done and see that it went so well.
At five I drove down to Las Colinas to go to Sfuzzi for Tamara’s birthday party. I was there until eight thirty and then came home. I had a light dinner there, just some portabella mushrooms and a Caesar salad. I planned on picking up dinner for Dominica and I on the drive home but she had already eaten so I decided to just figure that I had eaten enough and call it a day.
Luciana was already in bed when I got home and Liesl was heading towards bed time. She sat in my lap and watched Dinosaur Train for a little while then I put her to bed. She is continuing to love our reading books at night routine. We do about four books, of her choosing, as I put her to bed. For the first time in as long as I can remember she chose not to wrap up with “Tickle Monster” and “Can’t You Sleep, Dotty” but went for some new books instead.