Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 154, Down ~60.5lbs

The family is home and I am back in the office today.  I went into the office early but had to come back home just after ten so that Dominica could leave to go to a doctor’s appointment.  I took care of the girls for a few hours while she was out.  We had been hoping to go to La Cima for lunch today as only today and Thursday have lunch menus that appeal to us but we couldn’t make it today.

I went back to the office after a while.  This is my first chance to really get to see my girls after they were gone all weekend.

We did little this evening.  Mostly just watched Star Trek: Voyager.  We are really enjoying that series.  We needed some calm family time tonight.

Medifast Status: Day 153, Down ~60.5lbs

Day two dedicated to doing homework.  I’m getting really tired of these projects.  Today went well, though, and I was able to wrap up my homework by late afternoon – a bit before Dominica and the girls managed to return from Houston.  I really have nothing to tell about today.  The weather was nice and I have the windows open.  The house is looking great with all of the cleaning that I have been doing.

I am relieved to have this week’s homework all done and submitted.  Tons more to do over the coming weeks, though.  So this is hardly the end.  I can’t wait to be done with school.  I’m hoping that I can accelerate the process a little this year and wrap it all up in 2012 but that seems like it is likely more ambitious that I can really do.  I really hope to not have to take any classes while we are in Europe but that might prove to be impossible.

The girls got home around seven and we spent the evening hanging out together and just relaxing.  It is good to have them home.  I don’t handle four days away from my children very well.

Medifast Status: Day 152, Down ~60.5lbs

After getting in so late last night I decided to sleep in considerably today.  It was late morning when I finally got up.  Oreo appreciated the extra snuggle time.

Today begins my focus on doing homework all weekend.  There is a ton to do this weekend.  I have this whole weekend set aside for nothing else.

In addition to my homework I was able to get just tons and tons of housekeeping taken care of today.  There have been some spots on the floor that really needed to be worked on but I really cannot work on them when everyone is home because once they get wet they attract dirt like crazy until they are cleaned and with all of the traffic from the girls there is just no way to keep them clean so they just get dirty again and the effort is wasted.  I put in many hours cleaning the floors.

I got the whole house cleaned up quite significantly.  I started on Thursday evening and did some yesterday too, but today is my day completely at home and I was able to focus just on this and what a difference it makes – especially since I already got the big objects out of the way.  I got the entrance table completely cleaned, the bar against the living room and the wet bar too.  It has been months since these were clear.  The playroom was cleaned up and a lot of the kitchen.  I got Liesl’s room all picked up and did work in Luciana’s room.  We now have a lot more space in Luciana’s room between taking the desk out of there last week and me getting the file drawers out today.

The homework was a ton of effort but I made quite good progress today.  I’m not liking this class as much as it seems that we put in tons of time doing busy work and very little learning or doing anything useful like having in-depth class discussions.  We are not producing professionally written papers that I would be proud to share with anyone.  Mostly we produce silly stuff like bizarre high-school-like PowerPoint presentations.  I have no idea what the value of this is supposed to be.  I’m spending all of my time learning how to format presentations rather than learning the topic.  In the real world neither is the formatting of a PowerPoint so critical (academia is so lost on the minutia of formatting that it misses the whole reason of education) nor is it even relevant as typically your company would have a standard already set up for you.  In business the goal is to save time, in academia it is to waste time.

I worked all day.  I was very productive.  It was exhausting though.  Having work like this hanging over my head just makes me want to work on other things.  I struggle to stay focused when there is a bunch of work and a tight deadline looming.

Medifast Status: Day 151, Down ~60.5lbs

Oreo slept the entire night right by my side with his head on the corner of my pillow.

I got up this morning and got the trash all taken out and without Dominica home to remind me.  She would be very proud of me.  I had to hop on and do a tiny bit of work online before leaving the house too.  Oreo was still fast asleep when I left.  One handy thing of him getting older is that he sleeps from around ten in the evening until one in the afternoon – no need to take him out at all in between those times.  So I can get up, get ready for work, go into the office and come home at lunch and he is still sleeping away.  I can even clean for a while before getting him up and he is surprised to find me there.

I had my Medifast meeting today.  I lost hardly anything this week but I had them do my body mass test while I was there.  A few weeks ago there was a concern that I was consuming muscle mass instead of just fast to lose weight.  It was only two pounds over a period of many months so hardly cause for serious concern but we needed to keep an eye on it.  So today we did the test again after I have been exercising more and we were very happy to discover that I have put on twelve pounds of muscle in the past three weeks!  That is ten pounds positive muscle increase since I first started on Medifast.  That means that effectively I have lost ten more pounds than my scales show since I converted ten pounds of fat into muscle.  A major win.

After work I came home.  It was a late evening.  Tonight is Jenn’s birthday party so I was going to come up, change and then head out after just a little bit to meet up with everyone out in Addison.  It was pretty late because there was so much work to do and then when I got home I showered and changed and was just heading back out of the door when the phone rang and they needed me to get back to work for the office.

So I was stuck on the phone for over an hour.  It was a pointless call too with no one on the call willing or able to even explain why I was needed or what was going on.  How annoying.  It is not like I try to go out very often.  Eventually I was able to get someone who was actually working at the time to take over for me and I ran out the door to meet up with everyone.  I was about an hour late by the time that it was all said and done.

I met up with everyone.  They had gone out for fondue prior to going to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar.  Jenn, Chris, Mike and Tamara were there when I arrived.  We had a really good time.  Pete’s is a lot of fun and it was a very nice change of pace.

After Pete’s Jenn, Chris and I went to IHOP for a late dinner, or more likely an early breakfast.  It was after five in the morning when I finally got home!  It is a good thing that I had gone and taken care of Oreo before I went out for the evening.

Medifast Status: Day 150, Down ~60.5lbs

I got up early this morning and got into the office at a good time so that I could get caught up and be productive.  Dominica was up feeding Luciana when I left.  Luciana was awake enough to see me as I was getting ready to leave and wanted me to come see her.  At least I got to see her for a minute before going four days without seeing my family.

At ten this morning Dominica and the girls met up with her cousin Nicole at the Fort Worth Zoo.  What a hot day to see the zoo.  Originally it was supposed to be 95 today, then they raised that to 97 and now it is projected that it will be 99 degrees!  I’m glad that I am not going to the zoo today.

After the zoo, Dominica is heading down to Houston for a long, four day weekend with the Grices.  It really is the best possible weekend for her to do that since I just have tons and tons of homework that absolutely demands my attention this weekend and I will be able to get a start on it tonight and do little else all weekend.

I also have a birthday party to attend tomorrow night at Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar in Addison. Jen from the Young Executives Board is celebrating her birthday there tomorrow and a bunch of us from the club are going together.  So that worked out really well from a timing perspective.  Normally I would not be able to go.

For lunch today I just went home so that I could pick up our latest Diet Direct shipment that was supposed to arrive today and to take care of Oreo who is home alone all day.  Fortunately Dominica didn’t leave until mid-morning and I was home by one and then it is only a few hours until I get home after work.  So Oreo won’t be alone very much.  Since he spends his days sleeping on our bed now he probably doesn’t notice when we are or are not home anyway.  He doesn’t get out of bed on his own until afternoon these days.

I got home and Oreo just kept on sleeping.  I took some time and started with the cleaning.  There is a lot to be done.  I only really get a chance to clean when everyone is away.  I took care of house plants, vacuumed, picked up toys, cleanup up Liesl’s room, did some work in Luciana’s room, cleaned in the kitchen, watered the lawn, took Oreo out, did a few ticket-like tasks, did a little reading, ate a quick lunch and got the front entrance cleaned up.  Not bad for a lunch hour.

I plan on having this house in great shape by the time that Dominica gets back.

Work was slow this afternoon.  Dominica called me around four to let me know that she was at Buckee’s, about an hour north of Houston.  So they will all be at Francesca’s house pretty soon.  Tomorrow Dominica is planning on heading into the city to go to the Italian consulate.  Fortunately we know someone now who deals with the consulate from time to time and knows the people there and was able to tell us that we would get far better results by actually stopping in and dealing with them in person.  So fingers crossed.

I went home and spent the evening with Oreo.  He is really enjoying having the house be quiet and empty all day and having his daddy to himself in the evening.  He was so happy tonight that he jumped on me and got me to play “tug” with him for a while which he has not done in a year or more.  He played longer than I remember him playing too and then, when we were done, he took his gingerbread man binky and sucked on it like he did long ago.  It has been a very long time since I last saw this side of Oreo.  It makes me happy to see him feeling so well.  I’m sure that he is very happy that I have been cleaning and that the obstacles that normally are all over the house just waiting to trip him up are not there so he can move around the house far more safely now too.

I had a short call, maybe an hour, when I first got home and then had the evening to myself.  I felt the need to unwind so I quickly ran out to Chili’s and grabbed dinner and hit Target to pick up Keurig coffee cups and bones for Oreo as he is out and he will be very sad if he has to eat his dinner without getting “dessert.”

I got home with my take out and I finished watching From Russia with Love which is temporarily available on Netflix and that I had started watching the other day.  I haven’t seen most of the old James Bond movies since I was a kid and dad and I used to watch them together.  So I know the movies but they exist mostly as vague memories and I don’t know the plots very well.  In fact, I often have a hard time knowing which movie is which anyway.

Oreo laid down at my feet and was very contented so I was loathe to get up and do anything else so I decided that I would start Goldfinger and go to bed early and be as productive as possible tomorrow.  Oreo thought that that was a great idea.  I love these old movies, they really take me back.  What is amazing to me is that while this movie seemed old as a child, it was probably only twenty years old.  But it has been way more than twenty years since I last watched it.  It was, more or less, newish when I first saw it!  And this is one of the oldest Bond films.   Goldfinger is shot mostly in Switzerland too which is nice to see shot in 1964.  Very interesting.

Out of nowhere this evening, even though we were forecast to have clear skies, there was a violent thunderstorm that lasted a few hours.  Even while it was going on The Weather Channel, Accuweather and MSN were all continuing to report that the skies were clear and that there was no rain.  I seem to be finding this over and over again living here in North Texas – even once it is obvious that there is rain the weather services keep sticking to their horrible predictions.  And you can tell just by stepping outside eight hours earlier that rain is coming – it isn’t much of a surprise.  So how they are so bad at it I just can’t figure out.  But thank goodness for rain.  We just can’t get enough of it here.  It is going to take a lot of storms before our aquifers begin to fill up again.  I am really glad that I watered the lawn a little bit earlier today – this will help the ground soak this up a little bit.