Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.