Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 220, Down ~71lbs

My alarm didn’t go off this morning so I was on the late side getting up.  It was still seven thirty but I try to be up around six, at the latest.

It is warmer today and sunny again like yesterday.  We had a full week of grey days and now it is colder but bright.  Today is not so cold though and no real fear of there being ice anywhere.

I had the sniffles, a bit of a sinus infection, and was so busy trying to help Dominica around the house that once I came home for lunch I decided to just stay home for the evening.  There was no time to get everything done otherwise.  I had a lot of deployments to do for the office because of the upcoming financial freeze for a month and Dominica needed me to be home early to babysit the girls for the evening while she goes out to see “The Littlest Wiseman” production in Fort Worth.

The afternoon was pretty busy.  Everyone is trying to get their deployments in prior to the weekend.  Monday will be great, but today and especially tomorrow will be rough.

Dominica had to leave the house at twenty after five to make it over to Fort Worth for the show.  That left Liesl and Luciana with me for about four hours.  Luciana was really tired and went to bed around six thirty.

Liesl stayed up with me hanging out.  She hung out in my office for a while whilst I worked.  Then I moved out into the play room to work from Dominica’s workstation.  After a while, once Liesl was getting into her drowsy evening mood, I turned on Dragon Age II and played a little bit in the background while still doing work.

I got to play very, very little of Dragon Age II.  I did just enough to get it to initiate the final sequence of the game and did some of the necessary grinding to head into that portion.  At most it was probably thirty to forty-five minutes of game play, tops.  I wanted to save the very end of the game for Dominica to watch as well.  I should be able to complete it tomorrow night at this point.

Liesl sat on my lap and watched me play even though I was working far more than I was playing.  After a bit I turned it off and Liesl said “Daddy, what happened to your game?”

Liesl and I read quite a bit tonight too.  She kept bringing me books that I had not seen before and making me read them over and over again.  Books like “Jazzy in the Jungle” and “Go, Dog, Go”.

Dominica got home around nine thirty.  Liesl went to bed shortly thereafter.  Then Dominica worked for a while and we watched a little How I Met Your Mother second season.  We were both worn out so Dominica had a whiskey and I had a martini and we called it a night.

Medifast Status: Day 219, Down ~71lbs

I totally forgot to write yesterday about our first fire in the fireplace of the “new” home.  New being a funny term for a house that we have already lived in as long as we lived in the Peekskill house.  We have been in the Carrollton house two months longer than when we found out that we were moving out of Peekskill.  Our renters in Peekskill have lived in the house for several months longer than we ever did and will be there nearly twice as long as we were by the time that we next renew their lease there.  It is really weird to think of them living there more than us.  But that house really does seem like a blip along my life’s timeline.  An important one, but a distant one that I barely remember.  It was so quickly that we moved in and moved out of that house.  We still feel like we just moved into Carrollton and it has been a whole year already!

So Dominica really wanted a fire in the fireplace.  But we have no wood for it.  I said, “Well, we have that deck in the atrium that Art ripped out.”  So we set about finding pieces of the deck that would fit into the fireplace and I spent at least an hour feeding cardboard into the fireplace in an attempt to dry out and cook the soaking wet deck wood enough to get it to burn.

The wood did eventually light and smolder for a while.  It was not much of a fire but it has been raining for three days so this wood, which has been completely exposed in the atrium, was about as wet as possible.  We have a small amount of wood in the house drying out now.  Maybe next time it will work better.  We seem to have a limitless supply of cardboard to use as kindling so that makes things easy.  We are constantly struggling with the amount of cardboard of which we need to dispose so this actually works out rather well.  We have a huge stack of boxes in the garage that we can bring in and feed up the chimney.

This was Luciana’s first fire in the fireplace ever and the first one that Liesl can remember, I am sure.  We have not had a fireplace since Peekskill and she was barely a year old when we moved out of there.  Liesl thought that it was pretty cool but since it was unable to sustain itself it lacked a bit of something.  We really need fireplace implements and a lot of replare done on the fireplace itself.  It is in rough shape.  Silly things like the doors don’t quite fit right.

Today is even colder here in the DFW than yesterday.  Today it is 26F degrees!  We only dropped to 30F yesterday.  When I got out to the car at seven thirty this morning it was coated in frost and I had to run the car for a while to get it warm enough for me to be able to see out of the windshield.

Today was a bit busier than the last few days.  We are getting really close to the December freeze so things are picking up as people do last minute prep and deployments.  It wasn’t crazy today, just busier.

John and I managed to run to Panera for coffee.  They were out of coffee so gave him a bagel to eat while we waited.  That was really sad.  I’m the one who paid for coffee but on Medifast I cannot eat bread products.  So he got to eat a delicious cinnamon crunch bagel with cream cheese which I have been craving for so long while I just sat there and watched knowing that a free bagel awaited me as well should I cave to the pressure.

I came home during lunch but we didn’t eat.  I spent the time working on the server that needs to ship out and playing with the girls.

I didn’t get to leave work until a little on the late side.  Not too bad but closer to six.  Liesl had been having a great morning but had gotten too tired for some reason and was a bear this afternoon.  Dominica had had all that she could take and really needed me to come home.

I was home for about an hour before Dominica couldn’t take the kids anymore and had me watch them so that she could escape to a shower.  I got Luciana to bed around seven thirty, a little early for her.  Liesl calmed down and hung out with me for a little bit and then voluntarily decided that she would go to bed herself at eight.  She went and told Dominica that she needed pajamas and told me to read her a bedtime story and put her to bed.

Recently we have been reading “Tickle Monster” and “Can’t You Sleep, Dotty?”  She has me read each, in that order, each night as she goes to bed.  We are starting to get into this story reading routine.  The advent calendar helps with that because mommy reads that story in the play room, then Liesl puts it on the tree, then daddy takes her to bed and reads her books and tucks her in.  It is really helping her to move from daytime play to nighttime sleep.

We were really impressed that Liesl was in bed so early and we were thankful too as we were both really exhausted and had a lot of work to do.

I spent the evening primarily working on the Juniper firewalls and some on the server.  It was a long night.  I worked until half past twelve.  Then Dominica and I watched one twenty-two minute episode of How I Met Your Mother.  We watched the first two seasons years ago and love the show but for some reason never continued with it.  Dominica can’t remember the second season so we are rewatching it now.  We are watching it because Netflix just got it so we finally have access to it now.

It was about one when we finally got off to bed.

Medifast Status: Day 218, Down ~71lbs

I got up at six this morning and did about an hour of work from the house before heading into the office.  When I got outside to my car I discovered that there was actually snow and ice on it!  Not very much, but some.  I had not been aware that snow was in the potential forecast for today.  It was quite cold when I stepped outside so I was not totally surprised but early December is pretty early to be seeing snow in Texas.  Back home in New York it was expected to hit sixty yesterday and today it was raining.  Not very often that we have snow in Texas and it is a nice, autumn day back in New York.

I got in to the office nice and early and the morning was pretty slow.  Not very much going on at all.  At a quarter till eleven I went out to the cafe down the street for some coffee by the fireplace.  My iPhone is acting up today and neither IM nor email are working properly.  Everyone else seems to be having issues as well.  Not fun.  Now I am disconnected unintentionally.

I got back from the cafe just in time to be hit with a huge outage that took up my entire lunch period and into the afternoon.  I was barely off of that call when another one, supporting Europe, kicked in.  So my day was quite busy and spent almost entirely on the phone.  Exhausting.

This did make it easy for me to leave the office early today, though, which is nice on a Tuesday because that is kids’ night at Brookhaven and we like to get over there nice and early for dinner.  It is slower earlier on and perfect for the kids so that they are not so tired when we go.  Liesl really loves her Brookhaven buffet.  She finds it quite exciting to get to pick her food and eat pizza broccoli all night.

I got home at a quarter till five.  The kids were mostly ready.  Luciana was demanding that I hold her for a while so I held her while Dominica got Liesl ready.

We got to dinner nice and early, a quarter after five.  Liesl ate very well.  Pizza and broccoli and some of a cupcake.  Dominica and I both decided to just do the buffet tonight.  Seared mahi mahi with a chili lime sauce, grilled asparagus, salad bar, cheese board, etc.  It was pretty good.  The food is tamer on kids’ night since it is more families and the older kids tend to eat off of the chef’s table too.

Liesl is doing really well now with her potty training.  Last week when we came to Brookhaven Dominica had gotten Liesl dressed and totally forgot to put a diaper on her.  Liesl told Dominica that she wanted to use the potty partway through dinner and Dominica rushed her down to the restrooms fully expecting to take off a diaper.  Thankfully she did not tell her to just go in the diaper since it is important that she learn to go use the restroom when we are out someplace.  Dominica was very surprised to find Liesl in panties, not a diaper!

So this week, after Liesl did so well last week without any prep at all, Liesl is going out diaperless – except now Dominica is packing spare clothes and stuff just in case.  Last week had something gone wrong there would be nothing that we would be able to do.  Liesl used the restroom twice this week without incident!  She is growing up so fast.

After dinner we came home and I watched the girls for a while while Dominica went out and did some shopping.  We were pretty low on some household essentials so it needed to be done.  We had forgotten a few things when I ran out yesterday.

Once Dominica was home we spent the bulk of the evening working.  I put in a lot of time working on some Juniper routers and then spent a bit of time working on the DL385 G7 which is shipping to Toronto this week.  I can’t wait to get that bad boy racked and spun up.  That is some sweet kit.

Around midnight I managed to log into Dragon Age II and knocked out a couple of smaller side quests.  Nothing too major but I wanted to get some things done so that the story kept progressing.  I played for maybe forty-five minutes.  Towards the end Dominica came in and sat on the couch with me and watched me play for a little bit before we finally went to bed around two in the morning.

I’m going to be pretty tired tomorrow since I am getting up at six in the morning these days.

Medifast Status: Day 217, Down ~71lbs

I should have known that if I took the time to have a nice weekend that I would pay the price today, and I did.  What a day it turned out to be.

I weighed in this morning and thankfully was down a full pound.  It has been three weeks since I was last visibly losing weight so I am pretty pleased to see progress finally this morning.  Not very much progress, but something.  We have been suffering from giving in to snacking and holiday foods.  There is just so much food around the house.  And then we discovered Panda Express which is not the worst thing ever for the diet but we were going there way, way too often.  An occasional treat at best.

There was a threat of light snow this morning, but I did not see any.  It was a chilly day, nonetheless.  Snow was certainly an option.  The house was very cold and we have discovered that living in a house in Texas on a slab means that no matter what you do the floor is always very cold and you need to have something thick on your feet at all times.  My feet are aching today from how cold they are continuously.  The carpet helps a little.  Not much.

I worked from home for a little while this morning then ran in to the office a little after ten thirty.  It was a busy morning.

I came home for lunch and had hoped to get to play Dragon Age over lunch and wrap it up.  I had stayed up until one this morning thinking that I might be able to beat it last night but that didn’t happen.  The side quests kept tripping me up.  So I finally gave up on it thinking that I could come back to it today.  I fired it up, played for less than ten minutes while starting to eat lunch, but then I had to go do a call.  I knocked out one really small quest and that was it.

My lunch ended up being eaten over the course of three calls.  No breaks for me.  This was an exhausting lunch hour.

Back at the office it was relatively slow.

Dad sent me this link of the World’s Fifteen Best Cities In Which to Live.  So far I have only been to two of them: Toronto (15) and Ottawa (14).  Both of which I know very well, however.  I am surprised that neither Montreal or Halifax made the list, both of which I would likely choose over Ottawa and definitely over Toronto.  Not that Toronto isn’t awesome, I just prefer the other three.  Of the remaining thirteen cities on the list Dominica and I expect to be visiting Amsterdam (12), Bern (9), Geneva (8), Dusseldorf (5), Munich (4), Zurich (2) and Vienna (1) while we are over in Europe in a few months and we might stop by Frankfort (also tied for 5) while we are there too, but that one is less likely.  So at the end of our trip we might see eight more of the top fifteen for a total of ten.  I will have been to some pretty impressive places.  Considering that part of the goal of the trip is to determine areas in which we would like to live it appears that we are making some pretty good choices as starting points.

After work I stopped by Walmart and did some grocery shopping.  Just some quick stuff as we were out of some essential ingredients to being able to eat other food that we had in the house.  And Liesl was nearly out of her “purple chocolate milk” – Walmart brand Pediasure.

I got home, had a snack, played with Luciana for a little bit and settled in to work for the entire evening.  I worked until just after midnight.

Dominica had a really long day too and effectively worked all day.  We were both really exhausted when we knocked off around midnight.

Liesl is loving doing her advent calendar every night.  Every night she and Dominica open the calendar, read the night’s story then Liesl goes and hangs the little booklet for the day on to the Christmas tree.  She loves the Christmas tree and the ornaments.  She will sit in the living room, far away from us in the play room, and talk to the ornaments, organized them into like groups and just have the best time.  She organizes the ornaments into “families.”  It is really funny.

Luciana is getting up on her hands and knees now and is skooching backwards pretty well.  She is nearly ready to crawl and might be doing so any day.  She is so active and happy.  She is the happiest baby ever.  Just happy all the time.  She gets so excited when I get home that she just shakes.  It is adorable.  She is sitting up pretty well now and is finally tough enough to be able to handle playing with Liesl from time to time without us being terrified that Liesl is going to break her in some way – likely her arm as Liesl loves to grab Luciana’s hand and yank her around by it.

Hopefully tomorrow will be more relaxed.   I have my alarm set to get me up early so that I can actually make it in to the office at a reasonable time.

Medifast Status: Day 216, Down ~70lbs

I managed to sleep in a little today as well.  This weekend has been really nice.  No page outs from work, no big project needing my attention.  At least nothing that can’t wait for tomorrow.

The weather has been just amazing the last few days.  Texas rarely gets the cold, dreary weather that I love so much but since Friday we have been completely overcast, chill and non-stop drizzle with short interruptions of real rain.  It is wonderful.  We have to wear fleeces and wrap up in blankets – especially in the play room which is uninsulated and has half of its walls exposed to the outside and is all windows.  Being a slab floor also means that our feet are tremendously cold at all times.

The whole family spent the day in the play room.  We just stayed in and did nothing.  It was glorious.  I got a ton of time with my girls and we played Dragon Age II all day.  By the end of the day I was forty-one hours in to the game and nearly done with it.  I tried to stay up late to complete it but that ended up not being reasonable and I had to go to bed.  I hope to be able to finish it tomorrow.