Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.