Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 237, Down ~72lbs

Today is Monday and because of when the holiday fell I get today off of work so I am able to stick around in Houston for a while before going back up to Dallas.  Really I could stay down all week but there is stuff to be done at home and Oreo really needs his quiet time.  He thrives when he is able to be alone and sleep all day without anyone interrupting him. His one eye is really looking bad and he needs to make a trip to the vet as soon as we can get him in.

This evening we all went out to dinner at Saltgrass for Dominica’s mom’s birthday which is actually tomorrow but not everyone could make it tomorrow.  Dinner was quite good.  I got coconut shrimp which was quite tasty.  This was Dominica and my first time going to a Saltgrass.  The food was good, nothing amazing but not bad, but I must say that the customer service was excellent.  Good enough that even though I am writing this blog post weeks later it stands out in my mind how impressed that I was with their customer service while we were there.  I would go back there just because of that.

Tomorrow I will be working from Joe and Britt’s house with Oreo during the day and will be driving back to Dallas in the evening.

Tonight I finished reading “The Great Age of Discovery” which I have been reading for some time.  This is book number two that I have completed during the holidays.  I learned a lot of South American and Central American recent history from this book.  Not areas that I know very well.

Medifast Status: Day 236, Down ~72lbs

We were up decently early this morning, like around eight, and headed over to the Grices’ with the girls.  Oreo stayed behind in his kennel at Joe and Britt’s house so that he could sleep.   The mayhem of opening presents would be way too much for him and there is no reason for him to be there then.

We ate the coffee cake that John and Michelle sent to us this morning which has become a bit of a Christmas tradition for us.  They had sent it to me while I was still up in Dallas and I delivered it down so that we could eat it here.  It was awesome.  Everyone really liked it.

We got started on the late side for the opening of presents.  This year is really crazy as there are so many kids.  Liesl was only somewhat involved in the present opening process last year and Clara was not involved at all.  But this year we have five kids opening presents with only Luciana being too young to take part.

Liesl, of course, made out like a bandit and has all kinds of cool, new stuff.  She had a great time and is very excited about her new toys, art stuff, school stuff, clothes, etc.

The big gift for Dominica and I is money for a Rug Doctor.  We will be buying that next week.  This year was the first year that we had figured out what we wanted to Christmas way ahead of time and have known what we wanted for about eleven months.  Normally we wait until the last second and then struggle to come up with the right thing to ask for.  This year we were prepared but spent the entire year looking forward to it.  It may seem like a mundane present but when you put as much work into cleaning carpets as we do it becomes one of the most exciting things that you can imagine.  We are really looking forward to deep cleaning our carpets on a regular basis.  They really need it.

Liesl’s big gift was Kinect for the XBOX 360.  Garrett got one as well.  We are hoping that because the Kinect works by watching the kids and does not require any remote that it will work better for them being so young than does the Wii.  Liesl has a really hard time taking the abstract concept of the Wiimote and figuring out how to translate her hand motions into video game interactions.  That every controller today is different makes this much harder.  She is good with touch screens and has some concept of keyboards and a mouse.  But Wiis and XBOXs, for example, have extremely different controllers that look much alike and the Kinect is completely different yet.  So there will be some learning curve, but we are hopeful.

The Kinect came with three games and Liesl got a Sesame Street game for Christmas too.  Dominica also got a Kinect game for Christmas based on a game show that she really enjoys but whose name escapes me at the time that I am writing this.

One of the coolest things that I’ve gotten for Christmas in a long time are whiskey stones.  These are square chunks of soap stone that you put into the freezer and then use instead of ice in a whiskey (or any drink.)  They keep the drink cold but do not water down the drink so they are way better than normal ice.  I have wanted whiskey stones for years and now I have some.

This evening I put in some time working on Francesca’s second computer – the one that recently got a really bad virus infection.  It has not been working for a while and they were unable to find any installation media for it (it was purchased used) so we decided to install Ubuntu Linux for her to see if that would work out.  I got it installed pretty quickly and she tried it out and was really happy with it. It has everything that she needs, looks way better than Vista, which is what was on there before, and should not have any need for anti-virus software making it was less cumbersome for her.

Madeline and Emily’s big presents were Apple iPod Touchs which are pretty awesome presents.  They are basically full-blown handheld computers with Internet access.  So now they have new ways to have handheld video games, music, movies, television shows, books, chat, email, etc.  I spent much of the evening getting the iPods set up and working.  It is amazing how much work it takes to get those ready for use.

Medifast Status: Day 235, Down ~72lbs

Christmas is one of those rare holidays where everything at the office completely stops and I really do not need to worry about checking in at all.  I can just disconnect and disappear.  Ah, I love it.

Mostly today was a very relaxing day.  Just hanging out with the family.  Lots of food.

We went to mass this evening at the church near to Joe and Britt’s house.  This is our first time going to this particular church.  We got there early but it was already standing room only.

After church we did dinner at the Tocco’s and then Dominica went back over to the Grices’ with her parents to help with the setup for Christmas morning.  I stayed with Oreo who is very nervous and anxious with so many people and dogs around and so much space that he does not know his way around.  He has been having a really hard time being down in Houston so I am trying my best to keep him calm and relaxed.

Dominica was gone for several hours.  Oreo and I went to bed very early and put in some time listening to books on Audible.  Audible has become a Christmas tradition for me.  We are always out of town for the holidays and both traveling as well as being out of town make me want to use Audible to listen to books.  I have been doing this for several years now and I am beginning to associate the holidays with book reading.

It was probably one in the morning when Dominica got back to Joe and Britt’s house.  I’m not sure exactly when it was as Oreo and I were already fast asleep.

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.