Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 234, Down ~72lbs

I am working today, not taking it off even though I am down in Houston.  I decided, as things have been so insanely slow at the office, to see if I would be able to make it all day without a computer, though, and to work purely from my Blackberry just keeping an eye on the emails.

Francesca made me a batch of egg nog cupcakes.  This is going to be awful for my diet.  The house is completely full of baked goods!  And there are not that many people to be eating the baked goods.  There is way more food than there is people to consume it.

I had to give in and go off of my diet.  There is just no good way around it.  So I’m taking the next few weeks off.  I’m going to try to limit the damage but it is not going to be easy.  Christmas food is some of my favourite so this is really going to be a struggle.  The egg nog cupcakes are especially tough because they are actually soaked in Maker’s Mark bourbon.  Mmmm… delicious.

Today was a very relaxing day.  We had nothings scheduled since originally I was supposed to be driving down from Dallas this evening but instead got the entire day here.  Liesl and Luciana were very excited that I can down.  They really miss me when we are apart – even when they have their cousins with whom to play.

Luciana is really close to crawling now.  She is scooting this way and that and getting up and almost ready to crawl but not quite able to get the coordination down of moving all of her limbs together.  Only a week or two before she is going to be highly mobile.

ikoniMedifast Status: Day 233, Down ~72lbs

I spent a bit of my morning dealing with an issue with UPS.  I had to get on the phone with customer service and they actually have no means of doing that.  I was really treated poorly and I was very painfully reminded why I prefer to always use FedEx if possible.  UPS really went dramatically out of their way wasting tons of their own resources just to make me a very unhappy customer.  They even had the audacity to tell me that I needed to call Canada to get what I needed – even though I had looked up Canadian customer service and called them rather than the American customer service.  They refused to answer why they were saying I needed to call another country and would not tell me in what country they were in.  I got passed from person to person, each one saying that the next person would help me but each one couldn’t and eventually they couldn’t even transfer me and had to give me a different phone number – the one that the web site claimed that I had called.  Their IVR system, the phone prompts, doesn’t even have a means by which to reach customer service.  If you have a problem you have to pick a choice and no choice leads to a human, none.

Considering that four UPS staffers had to assist me this was not a cheap process for UPS and at least two admitted that every single person who gets through to them is furious because of how poorly they have been treated by the IVR before reaching them.  I found that the only way that I could get through to someone was to swear at the IVR loudly and, from what I can tell, that finally triggered the voice detection algorithm to determine that it had failed.  I have no idea what got me through to someone and I could not reliably reach UPS every again if I had to.   So not only did UPS completely alienate me but they paid a lot of money to several workers to do it.  That the IVR is set to completely screw with their customers just highlights that this was no accident and required a lot of planning to make me so dissatisfied with them.  That they knew that it was an issue and were not changing it just show that the results were what they actually wanted.

Simple solution – stick with FedEx.  I’ve never had customer service issues there.

For lunch today, Nicki and I went to Brookhaven.  After lunch we ran to the house and let Oreo out.  The living room carpet is really starting to look good after I began my process of boiling a pot of water on the stove, mixing in Oxyclean and dumping it out on a bad spot of the carpet and letting it set for five to ten minutes.  That works great.  I can’t believe how well the floor cleans up from that.  It is labour intensive work but the carpet is starting to look, more or less, like new.  One spot at a time.

I went in to the office this morning and things were very slow.  Very, very slow.  I talked to my boss and told him that I was going to leave a day early and go to Houston this afternoon rather than waiting until tomorrow night.  He was like… “whatever, there is nothing going on here.”  We all agreed that this is the slowest that we have ever seen it.  Absolutely nothing happening.  No point to me being in the office at all.  There is no one here and no work needing my attention.

So I left around three thirty to run home and get everything packed up for the drive.  It always takes a while to get everything packed.  I don’t need to bring all that much, though, since I am only going for about five days and Dominica already has most of everything that we need there.

It was probably five thirty or so when I finally managed to hit the road heading south.  The drive went pretty smoothly, nothing really to report on the trip.  While driving I listened to Bill Bryson’s At Home which Dominica and I had been reading together at some point, probably over the summer.  I have given up on saving books to read with her because she can easily go years in between wanting to read something and I want to finish them and know what happened.

I did not quite finish the book on the drive but listened to the end of it in bed.  We are staying at Joe and Britt’s house while down here.  We have the entire upstairs “suite” to ourselves giving Dominica and I a room, Liesl a room and Luciana a room all to ourselves plus out own bathroom.  It really makes it easy for us to keep living normally.  The girls would not sleep well if we had to start sharing rooms all of a sudden.

I was tired when I arrived and Oreo and I went to bed a bit before everyone else.

Medifast Status: Day 232, Down ~72lbs

The Whitehouse needs your voice to know that Americans want the SOPA Bill to be vetoed.  SOPA will cripple innovation and freedom and is a means of big businesses to squash competition.  This link is directly to the president’s office and is Obama’s official petition.  Please raise your hand and be counted.  This is a critical protection of our freedom.  It is very encouraging to see our government finally entering the digital age

I decided to work from home today.  There is nothing whatsoever going on at the office and no reason for me to be there.  I’m trying to figure out if I should head down to Houston early since there is so little going on and I really miss my family.

Late this evening I decided that I really needed to buckle down and complete Dragon Age 2.  I have been putting it off because I am up to a really large battle that is way too much work (I have already died several times trying to get through it) and so I don’t have much incentive to pop in the game and work through it.  But Francesca wants to borrow the game and I am anxious to have it over and done with so I moved Oreo onto the play room couch and we snuggled while I worked my way through the last several battles of the game.

The ending of Dragon Age 2 was, in some ways, a bit of a let down compared to Dragon Age Origins but in other ways it ended with some surprises and is very much setting up the next installment and I have to admit that I am very excited to see where Dragon Age 3 is going to take us.  If Dragon Age 2 is just a setup for the third installment, I am pretty psyched.

I have not played any of the downloadable content for Dragon Age 2 as of yet.  There are basically three small expansions and I am unsure whether or not I will decide to play them all.  I know that I definitely want to play Legacy as it expands on the main story or at least on the main character.  I am less inclined to pay to play Exiled Prince and Mark of the Assassin but as the second one leads to the new webseries, I might just have to play it.

I am very happy to have completed another video game.  It is so rare that I fully complete one that it is a bit of a momentous occasion.  My plan now is to move on to Mass Effect, which I already own, on the 360.  At the very least I want Oblivion and Mass Effect completed before I make any attempt to undertake Skyrim.  I figure that Mass Effect will keep me busy into spring at the very least since I have not even started the game yet at this point.  Mass Effect is made by BioWare, the same people as Dragon Age.

After finishing the game I continued working for a little while and finally gave up around one in the morning.  I put on the Hudson and Day classic Lover Come Back and did some work on building a Solaris storage server.  After that I watched some of the beginning of Down with Love which is heavily based on Lover Come Back but filmed forty years later.  It was about three when Oreo and I finally went to bed.

Medifast Status: Day 231, Down ~72lbs

Found this awesome video from OSCON 2010.  Not a convention that I normally suggest that people outside of the industry attend but this particular talk by Paul Fenwick on the world’s worst inventions shows just how enjoyable these conferences can be.

Today is day two of my week of bachelorhood.  Oreo is always super snuggly when I am the only one home.  Luckily I have a bit of flexibility to sleep in this week since even if I get up late I can just run out the door.

I listened to some IT Conversations on the drive in to the office this morning.  For months now I have been listening to music while commuting rather than books or podcasts and that is like eating junk food all of the time.  Tastes good right at that moment but you don’t feel all that great after doing it for a long time.

Work is so slow.  There is just nothing going on.  I can go for hours without getting a single email.  The office is pretty much empty.  I am just going to stay home tomorrow.  Really no need to be in the office.  Oreo will like having me around all day.

For lunch I first had a quick Medifast appointment and then just went home and took care of Oreo and did a little work around the house and then returned to the office.

I spent the afternoon working on teaching myself Ruby on Rails.  I’ve done Rails work before, but it has been a long time and there have been some massively significant upgrades to the platform in that time.  So I am working through learning the latest Rails 3.1 framework and Ruby 1.9.  A lot has changed since I last used it so I am going through a large scale tutorial trying to really learn each step as I go.

After work, which I left just before five, I drove up to Brookhaven and did dinner out all alone.  It was kids night, so pretty weird to be eating alone.  I would have opted to eat in the Five Five rather than in The Grille but being in my work attire meant that I was not appropriately dressed for the Five Five so I just hung out with all of the kids running around.  The chef’s table this evening was very meat heavy and not well suited to me at all so I just got a salad with grilled salmon.  I ate pretty quickly and headed home a bit before six thirty.

I got home and spent most of the evening just hanging out with Oreo.  I did a ton of Ruby on Rails programming.  I got a little more of the house cleaned up too.  I did all of the dishes today and some more spot cleaning on the carpets.

Medifast Status: Day 230, Down ~72lbs

I slept in a little with my snuggly Oreo.  No need to get into the office much before nine during the holidays.  There is just nothing to do.  So getting a little extra sleep is nice and Oreo appreciates the company.

Oreo is loving having the house to himself.  He would prefer if there was someone around all day but he prefers having no one there to having lots of chaos.  He gets a lot of sleep and always seems to have his healthy and temperament improve during these stretches.  Little kids are very hard for an old, blind Boston Terrier to handle.

It was warmer again today with light rain on and off.  It was dark and drizzly all day mixed with the occasional serious rain from time to time. There is some light flooding going on all over.

I went home at lunch and ended up spending the entire time on the phone.  At least it was a productive lunch time.

Back to the office for a slow afternoon.  I spoke to Dominica and she and Francesca were out for an exciting afternoon of eye doctor appointments in Houston.  Dominica got an eye exam which she has been desperately needing for some time and decided to get herself contacts today.

My commute home was terrible today.  Instead of twelve minutes it took fifty.  The roads were all at a stand still – presumably because everyone panics in the rain.  Pretty silly.  There is hardly any rain.  Although, to be fair, there is quite a bit of standing water on the roads and you do hit some pretty massive puddles without much warning on a regular basis.

I stayed in tonight.  Did some work, watched a little of the first season of How I Met Your Mother, decided that I just was not in the mood for a video game and then spent a little over an hour working out with the Wii Fit Plus.  I had a good workout tonight.  I really need to get into a routine of doing this every day.  I enjoy the Wii Fit workout just because it is interactive and provides an automated recording of my activities.