Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 136, Down ~57lbs

Finally it is getting to be actually cool here in Texas.  This is when Texas gets nice.  Outside of the brutal summer months the weather is amazing here.

Not much to tell about today.  Today was one of my killer – all day on the phone, days.  Two hour phone meeting over lunch and the regular two hour phone call after work.  Not fun.  An exhausting day, really.  Rather stressful.

Did a bit of bill paying today.  Spent the evening with the family.

Keeping this short and sweet.

Medifast Status: Day 135, Down ~57lbs

Dominica is still getting up every other morning and going out running.  I never expected that she would be doing it for this long.  She is doing really well with it and is hoping to be running a 5K race down in Galveston at the end of next month.  She and Francesca are signing up for the run.

The weather was awesome here in Dallas this morning.  We got some rain during the night.  Nothing much, but enough that the ground was damp and that is desperately what we need.  The plants are all dying – there is just nothing that we can do for them.  The temperature was down this morning too.  Going outside was wonderful.  Of course, by this afternoon, it was super hot again.  But today is the last day.

Medifast Status: Day 134, Down ~57lbs

The Weather Channel did their countdown of the five cities (in the US, I presume) that got the very worst weather this summer.  I was pretty impressed with Binghamton coming in at number two and Witchita Falls (DFW) coming it at number one.  Flooding and drought, hard to beat those.

Today was no slouch on the weather front here in Dallas either.  We hit 107 today and when I went outside at lunch time boy did I feel it.  After a week or two in the low hundreds hitting 107 out of no where has an impact.  But nothing that we can’t handle.  We just had to turn our second air conditioning unit back on again for the day.  Tomorrow is supposed to be similar.

I was pretty tired this morning and slept in a little.  Not a lot, but I didn’t get up until after six.  Then it was in to the office.

I called Medifast this morning to confirm that we had a dinner meeting at La Cima tonight.  I have been trying to get them to confirm that they are going to show up for the dinner meeting tonight.  I asked two weeks ago and got the brush off.  I asked a week ago and got the brush off.  I asked this morning so that Dominica and I could verify our meals for the day and was told “I’m sure that everything is fine, if you don’t hear from us then everything is good for tonight.”  Right, like I’m going to believe that.  I know what being ignored sounds like.

I went home for lunch but we didn’t eat since Medifast told us that they were meeting us for dinner.  We had wanted to go to the club for lunch today because it looked good but had to save our meal to eat with them since we are having a dinner meeting.  I trust that our diet trainers understand the importance of being able to schedule meals for people on Medifast – especially when there are four people who are dependent on that schedule not to mention the people at La Cima that they were going to meet.

I had to work from home this afternoon because Oreo had a doctor’s appointment.  So I had come home quite late, a quarter till two, and watched the girls while Dominica took him in.  He had a long session today and got acupuncture which is seems to really enjoy.

I called Medifast since I heard nothing today.  I know better than to trust that when people just give you the “yeah, yeah, we’ll be there” that no one is actually planning on being there.  So at three this afternoon I finally reached the manager who admitted that they were not going to be going to the meeting that I had set up on their behalf.  They weren’t going to tell me this, of course,  they had been planning on just not showing up.  Even though I checked and double checked and triple checked they had no intention of going to the meeting.  Even though I had done all of the legwork on their behalf.  Even though I followed up.  Even though I had them set the schedule.  Even though I am one of their clients.  Even though I have brought them other clients.

Seriously?

Is it the end of the world?  Hardly.  But annoying and unprofessional?  Heck yeah.  Who does this?  I was polite enough to immediately contact the person that they were standing up and let them know that they had been planning to stand them up.  I’m pretty pissed that I am stuck dealing with these Medifast people for the next year.  I wish that I was out of my contract.  They definitely do not respect me and I really don’t want to spend time there.  I’m certainly not recommending them to anyone else.

After work I had a call about a newsletter today and after that Dominica, the girls and I went to La Cima for dinner anyway since we needed to be able to eat even if our meeting was canceled.  We went to dinner around seven thirty, came home and went straight off to bed.  We were all pretty tired today.

Medifast Status: Day 133, Down ~57lbs

I decided that I needed to work from home today.  My boss is back from his vacation and this is his first day in the office and so that means that I am needed less in the office today than I have been for the past few weeks so it is the perfect day for me to spend some time at home.

The weather is heating up more today.  Tomorrow is supposed to be exceptionally brutal at 105 again.  I can’t wait for autumn to come and save us.

Work wasn’t too busy today which was nice.  Liesl was very happy that I was home and got to spend time with her.  She is very happy to be home too.  She loves her cousins but she also very much enjoys having her quiet time to herself.  She is very much into just playing her imaginary games with her animals or playing house and she does not really need other people around to do that.  She really acts a lot like an only child in that respect.  Her private time is important to her.

For lunch today we all went to La Cima as the lunch menu looked pretty good.  Dominica was in the mood to go out for lunch today.  So I took along my laptop and just set up at the club and worked from there for a while.  On the way home we swung in to Fry’s and I picked up a solid state drive and Dominica picked up some headphones.

Liesl came home and took her nap.  Dominica and Luciana went out and did some quick shopping while I worked from home.  Dominica picked up a new pair of jeans for me.  This pair is four inches less than my last jeans (around the waste, that is) which, in turn, were four inches less than the jeans that I had before that.  So from my largest pair of jeans (which were never actually tight in any way) I am now down eight inches with the new jeans being completely comfortable.  I am now wearing 38/30s from Levi and could, in theory, fit into a 36/30 in a pinch – but pinch it probably would.  In another two or three months I might be ready for 36s, though.

This evening’s project was to rebuild my desktop.  I am using the same desktop that I bought while we were living in Peekskill or possibly while we were still living in New Jersey.  It is certainly several years old and I am pretty sure that I have never rebuilt it.  It has been running terribly slow and is full of old software that I have not used in a very, very long time.  Well overdue for a complete rebuild.  I am replacing the original hard drive with the new, high performance solid state drive that I bought today.  In theory that should really speed up my desktop considerably.  It will also cut power consumption and heat generation although my computer uses several hard drives so it will only help a little.  In my little, unvented office space every little bit makes a big difference.  I can’t wait until solid state drives are three or four times the capacity that they are today.  My new drive is only 60GB.

The rebuild went all evening.  I got Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 installed and all of the updates downloaded and applied but that was about it.  It takes forever to do a fresh build.  Tomorrow I will be working on getting all of my software downloaded again and installed.  I use a ton of software.  This is no small task.

We watched some Star Trek: Voyager together as a family.  Once in a while Liesl really gets into it.  We watched one episode tonight that had some children in it and Liesl was riveted.  She sat on my lap for a while and snuggled and just watched the show.

Liesl actually put herself to bed tonight around eleven.  She came to me and told me that she wanted to go to bed.  A good sign of maturity.  If only I could do that now.

Medifast Status: Day 132, Down ~57lbs

It is hard to believe that today is ten years since the attacks on the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington.  In some ways it does feel like a lifetime ago but in others the events are things that have been spoken of and shoved in our faces every moment of the past decade so it often feels much more recent than it was.  Life in American, as it is in Afghanistan, is a daily reminder of that day.  A decade later we have no more answers and no idea what really happened.  What we know is that a much larger percentage of the world lives in constant fear that we did ten years ago.  Sadly, as Americans, we don’t live in fear of terrorists but of ourselves.

Liesl got me up early this morning and we came out to find that Bennie had come home to escape the mayhem early on.  So we sat in the living room and watched a cable 9/11 memorial film that went on for an hour or two.  It had a ton of HD footage of that morning that I had never seen before.  Today it is hard to remember just how rare HD was back then.  I was an early adopter of high definition and, at the time, I know that it was my old 32″ Sony Trinitron CRT that we had watched the attack on back when Andy, Nate, Bob and I lived on Sanctuary Drive in Ithaca.  That so many people were running around Manhattan with HD camcorders that day seems pretty unbelievable.

It was strange seeing so much of the footage today.  Having really not seen it in a decade it really brings it all back.

A little later on we went back over to Joe and Britt’s and hung out for a few hours until all of the kids had returned home.  Then we went back, packed, ate lunch and were on the road back to Dallas around three in the afternoon.

The drive went fine.  The girls were pretty worn out from the weekend and were able to sleep for much of the drive.  Dominica and I have been listening to “At Home”, Bill Bryson’s history of private life which has been really entertaining.  We listened to some on the drive south and some more today on the drive back north.

It was decently late when we arrived back in Carrollton and we were all pretty tired.