Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 229, Down ~72lbs

I got to sleep in just a little today, but not too much.  Dominica got up with Luciana and they headed over to Francesca’s pretty early so that Dominica could assist with the party preparations for Bennie’s 40th birthday party that is going on in San Leon today.

Liesl woke up just as Dominica left so there was no real sleeping in for me.  Liesl had me take her downstairs and then put on Barney for her.  Then it was time to send me on a hunt for her “chocolate milk” that she drinks every morning.  That took me a very long time, of course, since I had no idea where it was and no one at the Grices’ was answering their phones.  This is one of the issues with telephone communications now in the “cell phone only, no housephone” era – even with many phone lines going into the house there are still very regular occurrences where every single device is either dead, lost or inaudible and there is no way to reach anyone at all.  This reminds me why I am more than willing to maintain our housephone.  It keeps my house reachable and makes the availability of the phone a household responsibility instead of making the responsibility of being reachable the personal purview of each individual within the house.

Dominica came over to the Toccos’ around ten thirty and we had an hour and a half to get showered and dressed.  Then we loaded up the Acadia and drove a very packed car load down to San Leon, about forty minutes away, for Bennie’s birthday party at his dad’s house.

It was a good sized family party, lots of food. Lots of food that I should not have been eating.  That made it really hard.  Today was not a good diet day at all.

Liesl had a good time playing outside with all of the kids.  Unfortunately she had a run in with an agave cactus that cut her pinky and forehead.  That sent her inside rather unhappy.  And just before we went to leave she got her hand shut very painfully in a sliding glass door.  It was pretty had and we were definitely concerned about broken fingers but she came away okay but cried for a very long time.

It was nearly six by the time that we got back from the party so it was time to pack up the Mazda and drive Oreo and myself back up to Carrollton.

The drive was not bad.  I listened to another five hours of IT Conversations on the trip north.  Ten total hours in two days.  I am still very, very far behind in my queue.  I need to get out walking more often and listen to more podcasts.

It was about ten thirty when I got home.

Medifast Status: Day 228, Down ~72lbs

Oreo and I slept in a bit this morning but not nearly as much as we had hoped because I got paged out from the office.  It turned out to be a false alarm but it managed to wake me up just the same.  So much for sleeping in late.

I did more work cleaning the house and I located and packed up quite a bit of stuff that Dominica wanted to have down in Houston.  Luciana’s bouncer was the big item that needed to go down.  Luciana uses that quite a bit, as did Liesl when she was that age, and she needs to have it in Houston since they are there for so long since that is how she does her leg exercises.  Dominica also had several boxes for me to deliver.  A lot of our baby stuff that Luciana no longer needs (infant clothes, early baby bottles, extra burp clothes) are being shipped out to Jenn make in Philadelphia who is expecting soon.  This is the beginning of the “making space” that only happens once you are done having kids.  After Liesl everything just piled up because we were planning on having another but now we are able to start getting rid of the things that Luciana cannot use anymore.  It is sad to get rid of Liesl and Luciana’s old stuff but it is taking up space and we cannot get emotionally attached to every little thing – that would be overwhelming.

It is hard to give away a large amount of the toys and things that the girls enjoyed when they were younger.  Those items hold a lot of memories, but if we keep them the house will fill with them and they will just go into boxes and we will never see them again anyway.  Best to just get them off to someone who can use them now.

It ended up being one in the afternoon before Oreo and I finally got out of the house and onto the road.  The drive down went fine.  Traffic was not bad at all until I was on the south side of Houston approaching Galveston County.  Then things started backing up around Hobby Airport.

On my drive down I did some serious catching up on podcasts from IT Conversations.  I listened the entire way so that was nearly five hours of technology news and conferences that I managed to listen to.  Very good stuff.  I like getting time to just listen to my podcasts.  I get so much “mental broadening” from doing that but get very little opportunity to do it.

It was a little after six when I got to Francesca’s house.  We were there for just a little while before moving over to Joe’s house for the evening.  Dominica and the girls are staying over there for the month as there is a lot more space so that Liesl and Luciana each get their own rooms while Dominica’s parents will be staying at Francesca’s.

Dominica’s parents got in a little after seven and we all had dinner around eight.

Medifast Status: Day 227, Down ~72lbs

Yes, I am down another pound since yesterday.  My few minutes of yoga must have paid off 😉

Dominica and the girls left for Houston a little after I went to the office this morning.  I am driving down to Houston to join them tomorrow but returning to Dallas on Monday while they stay down there for several weeks.  At least it will give me a chance to really get the house cleaned.

It is colder today but clear and bright.  Not bad.  Cold by Texas standards.

For lunch John and I went to Brookhaven.  With Dominica not around, I have little reason to ever go anywhere except for Brookhaven.  For the price it just makes no sense not to use it for every meal.  If I ate lunch there six days a week it would be only $30 of food for a full week minus Mondays when they are closed.  I can’t possibly cook at home for that price, not for the size of the meals that I get there.

After lunch we ran to the house and let Oreo out.  Oreo didn’t need to do anything so now I need to figure out where on the floor he went.  But no time to do that at lunch, had to get back to the office.  At least John got to see the house for a minute.  He had seen the old apartment but not the house yet.  Really, just about no one has seen the office.  John is only the third person from work to have seen it.  We had always meant to have had a house warming party but never got to it.  We still feel like we are still moving in.

I think because we move so much, so far and so often we do not have the “show up and set up the house” mentality that most people tend to have when moving into a new house.  We now show up and only get enough set up to get us up and running.  We don’t decorate or get everything “just right” as soon as we arrive.  The mentality that we are probably just going to have to pack up and move again right away is so strong that it really keeps us from doing that.  And for good reason, the apartment in Newark is the place that we have lived the longest since the house in Geneseo and that house we only lived in as our primary residence for three years and even then both of us were working away from Geneseo quite a bit so we never lived there as much as people who normally buy a house.  We had put a lot of work into getting that house set up and then we moved with so little warning so soon and have never been anywhere were we were really sure that we were going to put down long term roots.  Peekskill felt that way a little bit when we first moved in but it was only ten months before we were packing up again so even though we were planning on staying put we didn’t have enough time for it to really happen.

So the house is still in a state of flux.  We still need to do our “move in” painting and to hang pictures on the walls.  We still need clocks and basic decorations.  We still need our garage door opener back from our incompetent contractor.  The list goes on.

I also found today that the front pillars moved a little more and some mortar fell from the top of one of the pillars onto the front walk.  We need to be careful out there as bricks could come loose and fall.

Work was quite slow this afternoon.  I did not get stuck in the office late like on a normal Friday.  It was great to get to go home and have nothing to do.

I had decided that I was not going to go down to Houston until tomorrow.  I wanted some time to just unwind.

I got home and spent several hours cleaning the house.  It took very little time for the house to really perk up.  I got the living room, through which you could barely walk before, completely clean without a single rogue object sprawling about on the floor.  I did the same for the play room and then I vacuumed both.  I managed to get the front table cleaned off – something that almost never happens when I am not home alone.  I got the bar partially cleared off too, but did not manage to finish that.

Just from the work that I have already done the house is looking so much better.  It makes me actually want to spend time in the house.  It reminds me why we bought this house – it really is an attractive house with a comfortable living space once we get it cleaned up.  Now that the furniture is out of the house it is wide open space.  Oreo loves it.  He just rolls around in the middle of the room without fear of crashing into anything.

This evening I went out to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar for the evening.  Chris was going to join me early on and hang out but he got stuck at work until really late so I only got to see him for about half an hour.

Tomorrow I am sleeping in and then heading down to Houston in the afternoon.  Liesl and Luciana will be busy playing with their cousins and visiting with family so I would not really get time to be with them anyway.  Might as well relax and get things done up here.  Dominica’s parents are flying into Houston tomorrow evening.  I’m just going to be down there for the weekend returning back to Dallas on Sunday night.  Then I will be home, along with Oreo, for the week.

My next task is to finish working on the kitchen.  I got it cleaned up a bit but not nearly as much as I had hoped.  There are dishes to be done yet.  So that will be my first cleaning task on Monday following by the “eat in” area.  I want to get the kitchen table cleared and the general mess there all cleaned up.  We’ve had Liesl’s easel there for a while as well as her little Dora the Explorer folding table and those take up so much space and cause everything else to just pile up there which now includes a bunch of wood for the fireplace and two bins of things from the garage.  Oreo has a bed taking up space in there too but it is behind all of this stuff and he cannot get to it no matter how much he might want to do so.

All of that is before I even begin looking into cleaning up our bedroom.  That is going to be a major challenge to be sure.

икони цениMedifast Status: Day 227, Down ~71lbs

I got up this morning at six.  I got ready for work and then worked from home until around eight.  Then I hooked up the Wii Fit for the first time in three years, popped in the Wii Fit Plus software for the first time ever and got myself set up so that I can start using the Wii fitness software again.

I logged in and immediately the Wii Fit system told me that it had been a bit over one thousand days since the last time that I had used it.  One thousand days.  That is a bit weird to say.  I got weighed in and it took my BMI measurements.  I am way past the original goals that I had set on the Wii Fit back when we were still using it back before Liesl was born.  I’m not going to take the time to look it all up but it is my guess that we had the Wii Fit in use when we were living in Newark and that it was in the move to Peekskill when it was packed up and never used again.  Maybe we used it in Peekskill but I sure have no memory of it being used there.  I think that it might actually be that only the Ralstons have used it since we had the apartment at 1180 in Newark!  Now that is crazy.

It feels good to get using it again and to have it notice that I blew away my original weight loss and BMI improvement goals.  So I set new ones and set about doing a small amount of yoga today.  I plan to try to use the Wii Fit pretty seriously now to supplement my Medifast program.

Work was not too bad today.  Slow again, as expected.  I came home for lunch and just hung out with everyone.  Then back to the office.

I was in the mood to go out tonight and there is very little food in the house so once I got home we decided to just have dinner at Brookhaven.  So we packed up the kids and off to the club we went.

I was pretty sure that I was going to get the chicken fried lobster tail that is on the chef’s menu this week.  I’ve been wanting that all week.  But I ended up being good and getting non-fried, non-lobster food off of the chef’s table instead.

We got home and pretty quickly Luciana was off to sleep.  Dominica then left me with Liesl and went to Target to get some needed supplies, including new socks for me.  The moment she was gone Liesl decided that she didn’t want to watch her shows but just wanted to hang out with me.

Liesl and I made a camp in the living room by the fireplace.  We took out one of her new birthday books, a Richard Scary one, and I read to her for nearly an hour.  She made a big pile out of her blankets and we snuggled while I read to her laying on the floor.  Eventually Oreo came over and laid down on the blankets too up against me as if it was bed time.  Liesl had a really good time just hanging out.

I was in bed “early” tonight, well before midnight.

Medifast Status: Day 226, Down ~71lbs

Dad sent me this awesome YouTube video of an a capella How Great Thou Art.

Today was again, warmer and rainier than the few previous days.  We are finally getting the water that we need here in North Texas to replenish the water table.  It has been a lot of slow, steady rain – which is exactly what we need.  We’ve been concerned that there would be bad flash flooding due to the extreme drought and the expected onslaught of returning rain.  But we have seen almost no heavy rain all season.

I got up at six and worked from home for a while this morning.  Almost three hours, actually.  I got that server all wrapped up, boxed and out to the car so that I can get it shipped out today.

It was a light rain as I drove in to the office.  It has been quite the wet week.  By afternoon it was really raining and this evening we actually had quite the downpour.  Good thing that the ground was already completely soaked.

Work is awesome and slow.  Yay.

I got the big server shipped off to Canada today.  In theory, if all goes well, it will be arriving in Toronto on Wednesday.

I came home for lunch and we actually ate lunch today rather than saving our meal for supper.  We watched a little of the third season of How I Met Your Mother.  Liesl hung out with me while I was home.

The afternoon as well was super slow.

I got home and we watched television for a little while, more of How I Met Your Mother.  We love that show.  Liesl decided that she wanted to spend the evening alone in our bedroom using our television to watch Barney.  She had a very quiet night.  It is funny that the television that we almost never use that is in our bedroom is actually the good one and the cheap, old one that we got when we moved and didn’t have our good one is the one that we have in the playroom for every day viewing.  I think at some point we are going to need to replace that if only out of principle.

Luciana stayed up pretty late, until after nine.  That is quite late for her as she is often in bed by eight.  I tried putting her down several times but she was not having any of that.  Very unusual for her.

After Luciana went to bed Dominica went out and ran errands while I stayed in and worked on fixing some OpenVPN issues and doing some documentation projects.  I keep myself busy.

I hung out with Liesl for a while too. Liesl was very good.  She watched a couple short episodes of Barney and then was a perfect angel as I got her ready for bed.  We read her usual bedtime stories and she drifted off to sleep without a single complaint.  Some days she is such a struggle and other days she is so pleasant it you can’t stand it.  You just never know what you are going to get.  She did get a lot of sleep yesterday so maybe that is a big part of it.