September 10, 2011: Emily’s Party

Medifast Status: Day 131, Down ~57lbs

We are down in Houston today.  We came down this weekend to celebrate Emily’s birthday.  The weather is turning hot again.  Hopefully this will not last for very long.  The next few days are supposed to be pretty rough but after that the rain should be coming.  What a relief that will be.  The drought has gone on for months now.  I have never lived in a place so parched.  I don’t think that many of the local Texans have ever seen it like this either.  Many new records set this year.

Pretty much from the time that we got up this morning we only had enough time for Dominica and Francesca to go out shopping and then it was time to get ready for the party at Joe and Britt’s house.

We went over to Joe and Britt’s around noon.  The party officially got rolling around two.  It wasn’t a huge party.  About six or seven girls came over to swim and then to spend the night at a slumber party.

I hung out for the afternoon and went swimming and hung out in the hot tub at night.  Most everyone stayed at Joe and Britt’s house today.  I took Liesl back over to the Grices’ and we took care of Oreo and slept there for the night.  Liesl would not have gotten any sleep had she been allowed to be where all of the older girls were and Oreo would not appreciate a night alone.

I read pretty much all of the book Discover Italy today.  At this point I have a pretty good grasp on the tourist information for Italy.  In some ways it seems like there must just be so much to know but, in reality, we are talking about a country about the size of New Mexico.  There can only be so much in a space so small.  I have a good idea of the regions, food, cities, things to see and more.  I am ready to be over there.

Disabling Quotas on a ReadyNAS Ultra NAS

If you have a ReadyNAS Ultra you may want to disable quotas in order to eliminate some issues.  I’ve experienced issues myself where CIFS copies would fail due to the filesystem being out of space even though quotas are set insanely high and the ReadyNAS interface is reporting plenty of space left on the device.  Often there are no needs for the quotas and the easiest thing is to simply remove them altogether.

Removing quotas in ReadyNAS (RAIDiator) is actually pretty easy but you have to know where to go and be confident that you are not going to break anything.  The filesystem data is kept in the /etc/fstab file.  The /c mount is the one about which we are concerned.  This is the mount that is used for our NAS shares.  In /etc/fstab it should look like this:

/dev/c/c  /c   ext4  defaults,acl,user_xattr,usrjquota=aquota.user,
grpjquota=aquota.group,jqfmt=vfsv1,noatime,nodiratime 0 2

All we need to do is to edit that line to remove the three arguments that refer to the quote.  For safety, make a copy of the original line before making any edits so that you can easily put it back exactly as it was.  The modified line will look like this:

/dev/c/c  /c   ext4  defaults,acl,user_xattr,noatime,nodiratime 0 2

Simply reboot and, if all is well, you will no longer have to put up with quotas and previously failing file copies will now work smoothly.

September 9, 2011: A New Record Week of Loss

Medifast Status: Day 130, Down ~57lbs

I slept in a little this morning.  Dominica got up and went running and Oreo decided to come over and be super snugly so I could not bring myself to get up on time.  When I weighed in this morning I was down another pound and a half.  I appear to be on a role.

Work was busy first thing this morning.  A busy day coming, I think.

I moved my Medifast appointment for the week up to 9:45 this morning.  I figured that it would be best to just get it underway.  The appointment went well.  I have a new trainer today.  I lost 6.5lbs this week.  That is probably my new record.  My trainer is concerned about me losing muscle mass so I am supposed to start doing yoga this week.  Other than that, though, I am doing great.  My blood pressure is 114/88 and my heart rate is 74.  And that with the stress and activity of the morning.  I’m sure it is somewhat better than that at other times too.

Work was pretty busy.  I got stuck working pretty late this evening.  I skipped lunch too, we were busy enough that I decided that working through lunch made the most sense to make sure that I was not stuck at work any later than necessary tonight.

It was nearly eight when we pulled out of Carrollton to drive down to Houston.  A very long night of driving.  We pulled in around one in the morning.

 

September 8, 2011: Off of the Plateau

Medifast Status: Day 129, Down ~55.5lbs

So our second summer in Texas turned out to be the hottest summer that Texas has ever seen and the second hottest summer ever seen in the US losing out to Oklahoma which was just barely hotter than us this summer.  July was the hottest single month in Texas history.  And I made it all summer without air conditioning in my car.

After several days of slow loss today I clocked in at 1.5lbs lost since yesterday!  That is awesome.  I am finally off of the weight loss plateau, I think.  I am starting to really lose again and can see progress day to day.  Breaking the fifty pound barrier was really tough but now sixty seems like no big deal. I only have twenty eight pounds to go until I reach my originally stated target weight.  Although I plan to continue past that a little bit once I get there.  I doubt that I will want to stop there.  But no matter what I am past the halfway point of my total weight loss.  At most I imagine that I might want to lose as much as forty three more pounds, but that is all.  That will put me at my high school weight senior year which is probably good enough.

I went home for lunch.  Dominica made her Buffalo Chicken (vegetarian chicken, of course) salad which is one of my favourite meals under Medifast and we watched an episode of Voyager before I ran back to the office.  It was a busy morning and a moderately busy afternoon.

After work I had to run over to La Cima.  Today was the first meeting of the Young Executives Board which most likely we will be naming “The 26” or something similar.  The Young Execs have been effectively disbanded for the past year so it is nice to get the ball rolling again.  We have a lot of fun when we are together but never seem to have any events.  So we are going to be working hard to change that.

It was a nice evening but Dominica was having a rough day with the girls so I needed to get home as early as I could to relive her of sole babysitter duty.

September 7, 2011: Reconnecting in Dallas

Medifast Status: Day 128, Down ~54lbs

Today was a major breakthrough day on my diet.  I broke another numeric barrier and I can see that my weight loss is starting to speed back up a little bit.  Losing two pounds per week is encouraging, for the most part.  Losing one pound per week is not nearly so much.  As of today I do believe that I am about the same weight that I was when I was twenty.  Now that is an accomplishment.

I am fighting my way back to my high school weight.  I put on a large chunk of my weight between the end of my senior year at York in 1994 and when I left GMI in Michigan in 1996.  So today is  a very exciting day for me.  I can really see the progress on the scales now.  This will really encourage me to fight on to lose the next bit of weight.  I have 43.5 pounds more to lose to be at my senior year graduation weight – which was the same as my sophomore year weight.  In between the two I had lost thirty pounds during the height of the competitive swim seasons.  So I will be only to my peak high school weight.  But that is good enough for me to call the exercise a “win”.

At lunch I went to La Cima and met Roni who graduated from York with me in 1994.  It is unbelievable that we have not seen each other in seventeen years.  That is basically half of our lifetimes.

It was very strange seeing Roni again, to be sure.  We had a really good time reminiscing at the club.  We sat in the lounge and spent nearly three hours talking about high school and where people are now and what we have been doing for the last half of our lives.  Roni went to SUNY Geneseo at the same time that Dominica did but neither of them is aware of having ever met the other.  Roni was a history student and Dominica was a biology student and they were two years apart so there was every possibility that they would never have crossed paths.  She then moved to Siena, Italy straight out of college and has been there ever since – just moving to Dallas last week!

We had a really good time.  She had lots of questions about the DFW.  I had lots of questions about Tuscany.  The timing could not be better for either of us.  It is great having her here.  I am pretty confident that we will be seeing a lot of her now that we are living so close to each other.  She pretty much knows no one here and we reasonably only know a handful of people outside of work.

Roni was really encouraging about our prospects for the citizenship jure sanguinis and had good advice for us.  She is full of good Tuscany advice in general too.

I am back at RIT for the fall semester as of yesterday as well.  I am taking International Project Management this semester as part of my MSc of IT degree.  I am excited to be back.  I am really looking for both to this class in particular and to regaining forward momentum on my Master’s degree.  I generally enjoy my classes and I am looking forward to the next stage of my academic career after my MSc which, most likely, will be an MBA.

Dominica and I put in a bit of time, especially Dominica, working on the paperwork for the Italian consulate tonight.  We have the initial round of paperwork sent off and we have tons and tons of research under our belts already.