Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 118, Down ~51.5lbs

Another one pound down today!  It would appear that my weight loss has kicked back in again.  Yay!  I’m remaining pretty close to having lost half a pound per day for four months.  That’s pretty awesome.

Today is another quiet day at home.  Nothing planned and little to do.  Did a little more cleaning today and some work in the office.  I have been working my way through some C# and MVC3 tutorials, slowly, as I get time.  I had set it up and started on one yesterday.  I’ve always been working on testing PBX in a Flash builds this weekend which I have not used in many, many generations of the product.

I stayed home with Liesl for a while today while Dominica and Luciana went out to do some quick grocery shopping.  We were running low on supplies.

Dominica did some work on my Database Administrator class from University of Illinois.  She has been putting that off for months.  I am hoping that she can wrap it up quickly.  My classes at RIT start this week.  We are attempting to figure out if there is any way for me to get student loans to help with the cost but so far things do not look very promising.

I was logged in to the office most of the day checking in regularly to see what was going on with the storm up in New York.  The New York area got hit with the storm this morning and there is heavy rain and high winds.  We are looking like we will weather it not so badly but there is going to be a lot of flooding one way or another.  It is turning out to not be nearly as bad as everyone had feared.  We have heard nothing about our own house in Peekskill yet. I suppose that no news is good news, for the most part.  Or it means that there is no power and the house was swept away in the storm.

We started watching Star Trek: Voyager today.  This is one of the “new” Star Trek series.  “New” meaning that it is newer than when I have watched Star Trek.  Through my childhood I watched Star Trek in reruns and the Star Trek cartoon in reruns and watched, new, all of TNG.  But TNG went off of the air – its final season being my senior year of high school.  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had started a year earlier and I had seen the first season but it was not very good at all compared to TNG and so I lost interest.  It was fine to watch when nothing else was on.  But it was hardly an event to get to watch an episode.

Once I went to college I did not have access to television for quite some time.  I remember when Voyager was announced and everyone thought that it would be a big deal.  But somehow I missed seeing it, at all, until today.  Sixteen years later and I now have an entire Star Trek series that I have never seen in any way whatsoever.  I have no idea of the plot, the characters or the setting.  So it is pretty exciting to get to watch it now.

Voyager retains much of the look of TNG while carrying that generic 1990s sci-fi show look that you also see in Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1 and others during the trendy sci-fi era that was occurring them.  I missed all of these shows when they were new.  I missed practically all television after 1994.  It is really amazing how little I have seen television from that era.  Most everything that I know from then I have seen more recently because I saw it on DVD or even more recently on Netflix and Hulu.

Medifast Status: Day 117, Down ~50.5lbs

It was a very big relief when I weighed in this morning and discovered that I had passed the fifty pound mark on my Medifast diet!  Fifty pounds!  That sure sounds good to say.  I still have a very long way to go.  But this is a very big milestone.  This will re-energize me, I’m sure.

We did a bit of cleaning today and the house is looking pretty decent.  It was really nice to have a basically empty weekend in which to stay home and just deal with normal things.   I need some downtime and some time just hanging out with my girls.

I was logged in to work all day.  We are watching to see what is going to happen because New York might really get slammed by the hurricane.  We might have a lot of work to do over the weekend depending on how the storm goes.

The heat is just continuing and continuing.  It is about 104 today and we are projected for 107 for the next two days!  There is some hope of some rain in about  a week which will make a huge difference.  We can’t wait for there to be rain again.

Overall today was decently relaxing.  Dominica hung out in the office with me some today and did more research into our trip to Europe.  We are thrashing on our planning, I think.  Just going from one idea to another.

The current plan now is completely different than anything that we had talked about previously.  We are now looking at skipping Ireland entirely and flying directly from New York (or possibly New Jersey) to Warsaw, Poland and skipping our time spent far out west because that makes the whole trip that much harder trying to add in Ireland.  That would be like going to both NYC and LA in the same trip trying to hit Belfast and Warsaw.  So cutting off Belfast makes everything so much easier.

Once we decided to do that we were very relived as the trip is now far, far simpler.  This will save tons of money and time.  It will be far less stressful.  NYC to Warsaw is eight hours on a plane.  Our original plan was NYC to Ireland, Ireland to Krakow and Krakow to Warsaw for a total of twelve to sixteen hours not including layovers.

We are now planning to eliminate Croatia and most of Italy.  Instead, since we have the girls who are not going to be happy traveling all over the place, we are going to attempt to focus on Austria, Switzerland and the Alsace-Lorraine and minimize how much traveling we have to do.  The upside is it saves tons of times, effort and travel costs.  The downside is that we see far less of Europe and the places where we primarily spend our time are the most expensive ones.  So hundreds of dollars a night for a hotel instead of forty.  That is going to be rough.  We are attempting to find apartments in Austria and Switzerland that we can rent to lower the cost.  We might spend a night in Budapest to make that one night cheaper too.

I got a lot of time with my daughters today.  They are growing up so fast.  Liesl is doing great on her potty training.   That is going to save a lot of money in diapers.  And it means that she will be ready for the trip to Europe too!

We managed to relax this evening.  We watched some of Star Trek: The Next Generation which Dominica and I had started watching back in Geneseo and never got around to continuing with.  We are still partway through season two.

It is funny watching the old TNG episodes.  In my memory they were so incredibly modern and the acting and people still feel that way.  But when you actually watch it, especially as it was filmed on tape rather than film, much of it actually feels like watching the original Battlestar Galactica.  The models, the landscapes, the film quality – it really reminds you of how close in time those two shows actually were to each other.  To me, being a child at the time, the distance between them was significant.  One was from my early, murky memories and the other was a show that I looked forward to as I already knew the original Star Trek well and looked forward to a new series.  But now, looking back, TNG was much longer ago than I feel that it must have been and definitely looks like a product of its time period.  It is very enjoyable to watch still, though.

Medifast Status: Day 116, Down ~49.5lbs

Finally down another pound.  Little victories.

A few days ago while standing in the kitchen Dominica and I heard something very loud that sounded like it was in the kitchen with us but we were unable to identify what had caused the noise.  I felt that the sound was the tiled floor breaking but I was unable to find a break in the floor.  Well today I found it.  Several of our tiles in front of the fridge have cracked.  Same thing that we found in our bathroom.  The house is just shifting so much that the tiles cannot take it.  This drought is destroying the house.  We just don’t know what to do at this point.  At some point we want to replace much of the tile in the house with hardwood which will look better and hold up to the shifting better.  We also want to extend the “kitchen” flooring to go behind the bar as well since having carpeting in the working bar area is just silly.  Why anyone would have decided to put carpet there eludes me.  It is a working kitchen space, not a living area.  So we hope to rectify that.

Work was pretty busy today because we are preparing for the pending hurricane, Irene, which is expected to blast through the northeast this weekend.  Right now Peekskill lies directly in the projected path of the storm which is not good since we have so many concerns around the state of our house up there.  So this could be potentially pretty bad.

I had my Medifast appointment after work today.  Just one pound lost this week.  Not very encouraging but at least there is still forward momentum, slow as it is.  Every pound counts.  And with me being so close we are pretty much assured that I will lose the last one half pound and pass the fifty pounds lost mark this week.  That will be really nice to be able to say.

Likely this weekend will be busy with work as we attempt to prepare and support the northeast with the hurricane hitting.

Medifast Status: Day 115, Down ~48.5lbs

Somehow I lost a day this week.  Today is Thursday.  I thought for sure that today was Wednesday.  I have absolutely no idea where the week has gone.

I seem to have stalled on my diet.  I’m trying hard to stick with it but I just do not appear to be having any progress.  I’ve been hovering at the same weight for more than a week.  Tomorrow will be my appointment with my trainer and if I am not careful I will have lost nothing or maybe even gained!  That isn’t good.  I’m not sure what could be wrong.  I am tracking it very carefully.

I came home for lunch again.  Dominica made salads.  We are splitting up our meals today.  Half at lunch, half at dinner.

Tonight Dominica decided that maybe she wants to do something dramatically different while in Europe and actually go to see the Dalmatian coast in Croatia.  It is supposed to be just fantastic and we will be there during the off season when it is cheap.  So, if we go that route, we will get to see some amazing artifacts of the Roman Empire and a bunch of the Adriatic which would be really nice.

From Croatia we are thinking that we would take the ferry across the Adriatic to southern Italy and get to see Naples, Rome, Livorno, the Mediterranean Coast and up to Genoa.  From there we would go on to Switzerland and be back on to our original plan.  There is a lot to think about.  This is going to be one major trip.

I got home and had my two hour call that I have every Thursday.  It doesn’t seem to long anymore.  I guess that I am used to it now.  I had two more calls after that one.  Then finally I had some time to spend with the girls.

I got to bed at a decent hour.  Only one day to go then the weekend.  Should be a relaxing weekend this time.  We have nothing in particular planned.

Medifast Status: Day 114, Down ~48.5lbs

Eight Scenes That Prove That Hollywood Doesn’t Get Technology (or… Eight Scenes That Prove That Screenwriters Don’t Have the Education of a Second Grader.)

Not a lot to report for today.  I got into work early.  The heat wave is continuing.  We had a heat index advisory today warning us to beware of the extreme heat.  Andy got the same thing in Austin.  We were both wondering why we get it now when it is 104 with a heat index of 106 when we did not get it when we were 111 with a heat index of 112?  Makes no sense to me.  We also go issued the “turn off your appliances and air conditioning in the middle of the afternoon” alerts as Texas doesn’t have enough power to deal with the cooling needs in this extreme heat.

I went home for lunch but we didn’t eat, we just watched some travel shows.  Mostly Rick Steve’s Europe.  We continue to be overwhelmed with what all we could attempt to do while across the pond in the spring.  We really just have too many options from which to pick that it is making it impossible to choose.  We really want to do everything but balancing cost, time, travel, kids and everything else is tough.

We have ruled out going to the Baltics or the Scandinavian countries.  They are just too far away from the other places that we will be.  We have effectively rules out The Netherlands for mostly the same reasons and because I have been there although I really want Dominica to get to see it as I think that she might really like it.

We are now leaning towards Dominica and the girls coming to Poland with me so that they can get to see both Krakow and Warsaw.  Krakow fits into the itinerary now because flying there and then taking a train to Warsaw costs the same as flying to Warsaw directly and Krakow is the cooler city to see.

We are definitely planning on spending some time in Vienna (Wien) and from there likely going to see Budapest and Bratislava too as they are just too close and easy to pass up while we are already so far out to the east.  It is not likely that we will be that far east again for a very long time so it will be nice to hit some of the highlights of eastern Europe too.  Technically Warsaw would be the farthest eastern point of our entire trip.  It sits in longitudinal line with western Greece but, obviously, far, far to the north.

We are thinking that we are going to give up the bulk of our time in Ireland in exchange for spending time in Northern Italy – primarily on the western coast.  We want to get to see the Mediterranean and that will be our only real chance.  Likely we would not venture south of Livorno but Rome is not out of the question.  It would be neat to see Rome, to be sure.

Most of our time will certainly be spent in Switzerland.  That is the one really solid bit of our planning.  From Switzerland we have an incredible ability to see southern bits of Germany, eastern bits of France and potentially the Milan and Lake Como areas of Italy.  It is all so close.

After I got home I spent the evening working on some Linux security issues.  That probably ate three hours.  And I had one hour long call.  I spent some time with the girls and watched a little bit of Rick Steve’s Europe but very little.

For dinner tonight, Dominica made a vegetarian Buffalo style chicken over salad thing that was very good.  We are adding that to our Medifast food rotation.