Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Medifast Status: Day 257, Down ~73lbs

We had talked about maybe doing brunch this morning at Brookhaven but everyone decided against it.  So we just stayed at home instead.

Emily and I managed to get a start on her diorama today.  This took a bit of work, partially because we did not have the proper base on which to do it so that made for a lot of extra effort.  We built the frame of the diorama and used packing tape to secure it to a folder microwave box.  A pretty silly way to go about modeling a waterfront but it did the trick and is very solid, if not attractive.

Emily enjoyed doing the plaster work to form the diorama.  She has never worked with plaster before, and admittedly I have barely worked with it myself, and thought that that was fun.  Doing plaster work is one of my favourite parts of modeling as well and I think that I am pretty decent at doing it.  It has been years since I had the chance to do this.  If I remember correctly, the last time that I managed to do model railroading was back when Dominica and I were living in Peekskill.  We modeled a vignette while watching the BBC show Waiting for God.  Isn’t it funny the things that get connected in your mind?

For lunch today we took the Grices to Ruchi Palace for Indian food.  Francesca has been wanting to try Indian for a very long time and they had a buffet on today so we decided to throw our diets to the wind and head there.

Lunch was excellent.  There was a ton of good food on the buffet including a lot of good vegetarian.  Dominica and I really enjoyed our lunches.  Francesca liked hers but found nearly everything to be too spicy and she was unable to eat very much of it. Emily does not like to try new foods and would eat almost nothing except for a little bit of naan.

This evening, pretty late, Dominica and Francesca went out to the movie theatre to see Breaking Dawn which is one of the Twilight movies that I refuse to associate with in any way.  Emily and I stayed home to watch the kids.

Medifast Status: Day 256, Down ~73lbs

The Grice family is staying with us this weekend.  Dominica and I slept with Luciana in our room last night for the first time in many months.  I have gotten used to her having her own room.  We got to hear first hand just how much she talks in her sleep.  It is really hard to sleep with her in the same room.

With our bed moved to the north side of the room and sleeping with our heads against that wall we could hear Liesl especially well through the air vent too.  I was surprised to discover that she appears to talk in her sleep.  I went in to check on her multiple times and she was always fast asleep.  But at one point she was talking quite clearly.

For lunch today Francesca and I went to Brookhaven and got takeout for the family.  This was her first time seeing the club in daylight.  It is a very different experience during the day.  We got there at two and they were just taking the chef’s table down so we had to order normal food.  It was a gorgeous day and the golf courses were very busy.

This afternoon Emily and I went out to do some shopping.  We hit Lowe’s and picked up paint for Dominica and my bedroom.  Dominica finally decided that we could do an Indiana Clay accent wall to the west (behind us when we sleep) and Crab Bisque on the other three walls.  I really like these colours.  She is not convinced.  We will see.  She said that if Emily and I went out and bought paint today that she would get to work painting the room right away.

After Lowe’s we also went to Hobby Lobby, to which I have never before previously.  They have a ton of stuff there, way more than any hobby shop I have ever seen.  And their decorating selection is quite impressive.

Hobby Lobby had some basic modeling kits from Woodland Scenics that we were interested in.  Emily thinks that model railroading sounds interesting so we are giving it a try.  She has never seen a model railroad before, I don’t believe.  But given the crafts that she enjoys I would be surprised to find that she does not find it entertaining.

Medifast Status: Day 255, Down ~73lbs

It is Friday and I have my Medifast appointment today so I went in to the office this morning for one of my few appearances this week.  Work has been surprisingly not busy considering that the freeze is now over.

I went to MediFast today and had my lowest check-in there ever.  Pheww.  I’ve been working hard trying to keep from gaining any weight over the holidays and this was kind of the moment of truth.  I’m not losing much but at least it continues to go down.  It is getting harder and harder to lose anything these days.

After Medifast Dominica and I took the girls to Brookhaven for lunch.  Lunch on Fridays is my favourite time to go there because they tend to have a good seafood selection then.  They had a great clam chowder, seafood cakes and more today.  It was quite good. Dominica is very glad that she came out because so often the chef’s table does not have things that she wants and she finds it very frustrating trying to eat there as often as we do because that limits the variety dramatically.  So this was good timing.

After lunch I just came home and worked from there for the rest of the day.  Dominica and I moved the bed in our bedroom and got the south side of the room cleared out and I ran the Rug Doctor in there.  We are going to save the north half of the room for next week.  So our bed is now up against the north wall and we will have to turn ninety degrees to sleep tonight.

The Grices arrived pretty late in the evening.  The house was looking pretty good by the time that they arrived.  Clean floors, the dishes all done, candles burning, fresh paint.  It is amazing how quickly the house is transforming.  If only we had the money to get the atrium done now rather than waiting a really long time before getting to be able to use it.  But it really does not make any sense to do anything with it, it seems, until after we go to Europe.  We will be returning to Texas in late June, most likely, and that will be a good chunk of the outdoor season that we will be in New York so investing in it now makes little sense.  But I hate not having it to be able to be used.  It is such a key component of the house.

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.