Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 161, Down ~63lbs

Well at this point I am just ridiculously far behind on Sheep Guarding Llama.  I am heading into a really busy month and it is going to be really, really hard to keep up with everything that needs to be done.

This week I am working on homework as much as I can squeeze in because there is very little time in which for me to complete all of the stuff that needs my attention.  My team in school misunderstood some work that we were supposed to do and so we have to redo a bunch of it.  So I sat down and did one of our team projects over again on my own which was a lot of work but at least it will be done.

I did getting started on the homework today but did not complete it.  It is going to be a busy week.

Medifast Status: Day 160, Down ~63lbs

Today is my homework day.  I didn’t start off the day really thinking that I had that much to do.  Some, but not that much.  Plenty to do for next week but only a little that was due today and I already had a small start on it so I had assumed that it would not be all that bad.  I was wrong.

By mid-afternoon my partner on one of my project teams realized that we had a major paper that was due today by eleven this evening (central time) so we had to go from ground zero to completed paper in no time flat.  That made for a very crazy day.  We had been thinking that it was due next week, not this week, so we were planning on working on something else today and focusing on this for this coming week.

So my entire day revolved around homework.  Fortunately nearly all of my own personal homework was already done, more than fifty percent of it at least, so I was able to focus on that, pump it out and get to work on the big team project.  My partner was farther behind both in her personal homework also due today but also in other classes.  It turned out that she had no spare time and I was pretty much left doing the team project on my own.  In many ways, though, that was a blessing because without the need for coordination I was able to move much faster.

 

It was an exhausting day.  I managed to wrap up my homework and turn with eight minutes to spare.  The upside, and this is pretty major, is that by having this catch us like it did today we were able to do it in a panic and get it over and down with.  Now it will not be hanging over us for the next few weeks like we thought that it would.  It is a big relief to get it down and now we can move on to focusing on other projects that need our attention.

Medifast Status: Day 159, Down ~63lbs

It was a long week and I am pretty tired today so I decided to make today my day in which to relax.  This is a three day weekend for me, thankfully, which I am really looking forward to.  I need some time at home with Liesl and Luciana.  I have not gotten a lot of time with them this week.

We spent most of the day in the play room.  We watched quite a but of Star Trek: Voyager and a bit of our video tours of Europe as well.  I did a tiny bit of work today and had to be up early for a SAN migration but for the most part it was a day of being lazy.

Tomorrow will be a lot of homework.

Medifast Status: Day 158, Down ~63lbs

Dominica and I were up nice and early this morning.  Oreo was snuggled between our pillows.  He doesn’t do that often as it is not nearly as warm as actually snuggling with one of us but it sure is cute.  Oreo seems to be feeling a bit better overall, he is routinely wanting to play now if only for a few minutes.  He is sucking on his binkies again a little and the other day he actually jumped up with his front feet on my lap and barked at me to get me to play with him!  He has only done that maybe a dozen times ever!

Oreo is clearly getting much older, though.  He has no eyesight whatsoever and his hearing has deteriorated rapidly.  He is constantly getting lost in the house and we will find him in a corner behind a chair or behind the bar.  He can get stuck outside very easily.  We can’t call him anymore.  He hears us but has no idea from what direction our voices are coming and will often walk away rather than towards us.

I was in to the office a little after six thirty this morning.  Non-farm payroll is today so a busy morning for me.  The whole morning was pretty busy.  It finally slowed down a little around ten thirty so I walked to the corner for some coffee.  The walk takes probably forty minutes so it is some decent exercise.  It is overcast and coolish today so a pleasant day for a walk but with the inclines it still takes some effort.  There is a decent sized dip between the office and the cafe so it is uphill halfway in both directions.

I have been reading Paul Herrmann’s “The Age of Discovery” and am over halfway through it now.  I am learning a lot about the sixteenth century.  This is a part of history that I didn’t remember much of from school and, of course, they didn’t teach very much anyway.

I went home for lunch today and this evening was pretty busy.  I worked rather late and then went home and just hung out with the family.

Medifast Status: Day 157, Down ~63lbs

I got up early and went running this morning.  I’ve missed nearly a week so I am glad to be back into the routine.  My schedule makes it really hard for me to exercise consistently so I have to take it when I can get it.  I listened to some Prairie Home Companion on my run.  I am working on catching up on 2010 and still have all of 2011 to listen to yet.  I wonder how many people listen to PHC podcasts while exercising.  Probably not too many.

I went into Medifast this morning as I was feeling like today was a light day and I wanted to get weighed before I went to lunch.  I managed to get in at noon and my weigh in was pretty good, two and a half pounds lost in the last six days.  Not bad at all.  I wish that I could hold that as an average.  I would be in great shape if I was losing that all of the time.  They are happy with my progress.

From my Medifast meeting I ran back to the office where Dominica had been waiting for me for just a minute and I rode over to La Cima with her and we had lunch.  Today was our only chance to have lunch at La Cima this week.  Tilapia with an artichoke relish, roasted vegetables, picked veggies and mozzarella salad, etc.  It was pretty good.

After work I ran over to Fry’s to pick up a new UPS unit as the really good one that we have in the rack in the server room at home is having all kinds of issues and it is really impacting our ability to do anything in the house.  I found a decent APC 1000VA unit for just $90 with a $15 mail in rebate – so $75.  Not bad at all.  Hopefully this will fix some of our power issues.  At least fix them enough that we can have our ReadyNAS keep running and our VMWare vSphere server stay up.

I got home and Liesl was still fast asleep.  I talked to Dominica about some BlueRays of European travel that I had seen at Fry’s.  I should have called her from there to discuss buying them but it just didn’t occur to me.  We looked them up on Amazon and surprisingly on Amazon they were much more expensive on DVD than they were at Fry’s on BD.  So we decided that we needed them and since Liesl was still asleep and likely would be for a while yet I ran back out to Fry’s and picked up Visions of Europe.  It is a fifteen hour set of high definition tours of Europe all shot from helicopter.  It had some great reviews online.  A lot of people said that it was good even for use in classrooms to introduce kids to Europe.

The set that we got has two discs of Italy, one of France, one of Germany and one of Austria and a collection of great European cities.  We watched the first disc on Italy – the one showing northern and southern Italy.  It was pretty good.  We enjoyed it.  Very relaxing.  Maybe a bit too much.  The music is good and the imagery is great but it could be a whole lot more educational than it is.  As it is it is a little on the boring side while being very pretty.  We were disappointed that the disc on northern Italy spent nearly the entire thing in Tuscany and Umbria.  It basically skipped Lombardy and Piedmont, the areas that we wanted to see the most, showing nothing but two of the northern most lakes up on the Swiss border and nothing of the regions themselves.  There was some good footage at the beginning of Südtirol which we were happy to see.  But whole regions that we were really interested in were skipped like the Valle d’Aosta.

We watched some of the German video on Bavaria but stopped part way as we were all tired and needed to go to bed.  Tomorrow is the non-farm payroll announcement so I have to be up early and in to the office before seven.  Dominica has to run tomorrow so she has to be up a little earlier than I do to be able to get that in before I leave for work.

I got the new UPS hooked up tonight.  Hopefully it will work.  So far so good but the other one makes it for a day or two easily after first being plugged in before it starts to have problems so we will just have to wait and see.

This weekend is Columbus Day Weekend, so we have Monday off.  That is good, time to get some homework done.  My actual homework due this weekend is pretty light but I have a ton that is due next week.