Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 224, Down ~71lbs

Ah, the freeze has started.  This is the best time of the year.  The financial industry’s present to its employees – nearly a month of hardly any work to do.

It is dark and dreary today.  But warm.  It doesn’t seem like it should be raining but I keep seeing things wet everywhere so I am guessing that there are bursts of rain when I am not looking.

I had my first Medifast appointment today in nearly three weeks.  I’ve been so busy that I just was unable to get in there.  That an my new trainer there kept insisting on trying to schedule me on days that were unlikely to work so once we started missing appointments we just kept missing them.  I don’t know why she felt it so necessary to get me off of the proven time period that has been working for most of a year.

I’m not down any weight by my weigh in was positive with my water and muscle weight up while my fat weight is down.  That means that at least I am continuing to tone up even if I am not slimming down.  I was able to buy more Medifast food today which was quite the relief as we have been without the food that we really like for quite some time now and that has been making the diet nearly impossible to stick to.

I came home at lunch today and hung out with the family for a while after my Medifast appointment.  Dominica and I were very happy to have our food again.  Even Liesl has been craving a Medifast Smores bar.

One of the best things about the freeze is that I pretty much never get caught late in the office.  I’m not out particularly early, but I am able to get out at a nice time rather than dealing with lingering and late coming requests well into the evening.  So I am able to reliably get home and put in some time with the family.

Unfortunately I had a lot of work to do this evening once I got home so we did not have much free time to do anything.  Both Dominica and I spent most of the evening working and got very little time to do anything together.

My paycheck finally arrived today.  It has been a month since I have seen one and the checks that I have seen have been small because of the furlough that has been draining us since September.  We’ve now made it through the furlough and through the “missed paycheck” after the furlough and should be getting full checks again on a regular basis.  So tomorrow I get to start paying the bills again.  Pheww.

Medifast Status: Day 223, Down ~71lbs

It was not all that relaxing of a Sunday.  I had to work all day for the office and in my spare time I was cleaning up tickets, building a server and more.  We did manage to watch some more of How I Met Your Mother but not very much.

It was a nice day but not as relaxing as one would hope.  But today is the final day of the “working year” in finance and the freeze begins this afternoon.  So tomorrow is when the real relaxation kicks in.  Today is still a busy day.

I got a lot of work done today, but I can’t wait until tomorrow.  I am so looking forward to the freeze.

Medifast Status: Day 222, Down ~71lbs

Today was a mixture of work and watching How I Met Your Mother.  I am on call for the office this weekend and while there was not a ton of work there was a certain, steady amount.

There was some scheduled work for me to do today as well.  It was supposed to be handled by someone else but they didn’t manage to do it so I had to step in.  So instead of starting late, like around noon, and working into the evening like we are supposed to do on weekend I actually ended up needing to start at ten in the morning so it was actually a pretty long day for me.

We broke down and decided to get Panda Express for dinner this afternoon.  We have been crazing it.  So we gave in and I ran out and picked up our steamed vegetables, honey walnut shrimp and golden treasure shrimp.

Not much news for today.  It wasn’t a quiet day but very little happened of note.

Medifast Status: Day 221, Down ~71lbs

Today is one of my busiest days of the year.  I have been bracing for this all week.

I got up, showered and worked from home for about an hour before going in to the office at nine.  It wasn’t too bad this morning but that did not last for long. Work picked up as the day progressed.

John and I did manage to get away for lunch.  We drove out to Brookhaven for the lunch chef’s table.  It is Friday and they were doing a whole seafood lunch thing.  There was the salad station, some chipotle shrimp with noodles, tuna salad, crab cakes, fried mac and cheese, seafood chowder and a few other shrimp-themed entries.  It was quite delicious and I am very glad that I decided to come out to Brookhaven today.  And boy is it cheap.  Even for my guests it costs no more than going to Rockfish or someplace like that for lunch and they are quite reasonable as well.

After lunch the afternoon just took off into a frenzy of deployment preparations and then the deployments themselves.  What an exhausting day.  I got back from lunch at about two and worked until nearly nine in the office.  I have to work all weekend as well as technically the freeze does not kick in until Sunday afternoon and this just happens to be my weekend in the support rotation.  Lucky me.

I dragged myself home and helped Dominica to take care of the girls.  She was at her wits’ end from the girls driving her crazy all day without any break.  So I got home and helped to take care of them.

We are out of Medifast food, more or less.  We’ve been scraping the bottom of our food stores for the last week.  We are desperate for a restock of Medifast food.  We’ve been on an austerity budget and trying to buy as little food as possible which, at the moment, includes eating all of the Medifast meals that we don’t really like and, in many cases, skipping them altogether and just eating whatever is in the pantry.  At least we are doing a good job at cleaning out the cupboards but not having good Medifast food is making it increasingly difficult to stay on diet in any way as we are not getting the formulated protein that we need.

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.