Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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.

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.

Medifast Status: Day 127, Down ~53lbs

I was pretty tired this morning when I got up at five after having gone to bed at one.  I talked to Andy for an hour longer on the phone last night than I got to sleep!  Oops.

I got into the office at a good time, though, even being so tired.  As I walked into the office I ran into my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss who had just arrived from London so we walked into the office together.  Always a bit of a surprise at six thirty in the morning.

For lunch today I had a meeting with my regional manager from my consulting pass-through organization so we went to La Cima to have our meeting there which worked out well.  It was good timing, since today I am officially on furlough, to have a lunch provided for me.

I did not get to leave work early today like I had hoped.  That is the danger of coming in really early.  Sometimes you get stuck working late too and then your day is really long.  So today I put in nearly twelve hours without even, really, a lunch break since I technically had to work through lunch.

I got home and got about an hour with the girls before it became a working evening.  Had two phone calls that lasted about three hours or so in total.  Luciana was in bed before the end of the first one and Liesl was in bed by the end of the second.  Dominica was heading to bed by the time that I was off of the phone.  Mostly I was doing Asterisk troubleshooting tonight.  Always exciting.

I was off to bed at a very decent hour.  Probably around ten thirty.  I need to catch up on some lost sleep from last night.

Tomorrow I am having lunch with Roni from high school.  We haven’t seen each other in seventeen years!  Now that is hard to believe.  Boy that makes one feel old, doesn’t it?

Medifast Status: Day 126, Down ~53lbs

The temperatures have really broken now.  Dominica got up early this morning and went out for her run.  She is really dedicated to her C25K program.  I’m impressed.

I slept in a bit with a very snuggly Boston Terrier and then, when I got up, I headed outside with the girls to relax in the fresh air.  It was actually quite a bit colder than I had anticipated and I actually had to come back inside to get a fleece jacket to wear in order to keep warm.  A fleece and warm coffee out on the patio.  You would not have thought it possible just two days ago.

I continued to read Lonely Planet’s immense tome on Italy as long as the battery on my Kindle lasted today.  Dominica finished reading her book on traveling in Europe with kids, read some of Lonely Planet’s guide to Switzerland and bought a Kindle book on Florence and Tuscany from Rick Steves.  Our Kindles are going to be absolutely loaded with European travel information by the time that we get there in May.  We are going to have every inch of our trip memorized at the rate that we are going.  That or we might not have any idea where we are going at all.

After my Kindle died I read a little bit more in one of our paper-copy European guide books and then we watched Under the Tuscan Sun via Amazon’s VOD service as it was the best Italian film that we could find.  Netflix does not appear to have films like Roman Holiday or the classic La Dolce Vita.  So we had to improvise.  Overall we weren’t too impressed and when towards the end of the film the combination of Amazon’s service and PlayOn stopped working we just gave up and decided it was not worth the effort to complete the film.

I’m feeling very worn out today.  The excitement of last night and this morning is a little bit overwhelming and we are now stuck waiting to get the paperwork for the consulate filled out and to get into contact with them, hopefully tomorrow.  Until then we want to start considering the possibilities but doing so could do nothing more than get our hopes up.  We are stuck in that horrible state of not knowing and not being able to make plans.  My regular readers will appreciate how stressed that can make me.  I’m good with change but I like to be able to plan, too.

Going through six months or a year of tracking down all of the necessary paperwork for Dominica and the girls will be fine as long as the consulate has told us that we are expected to be successful at the end of the process.  Putting in the work is fine.  Putting in the effort not knowing if it will turn out or not is very stressful.

Dominica is busy working on tracking down language learning resources.  We are going to attempt to learn at least one foreign language before we go to Europe.  Originally the plan was that I was going to focus on German and Dominica was likely going to focus on French.  Given the current situation we are seriously considering changing those plans and learning Italian.

We watched a little more of Star Trek: Voyager tonight and then went to watch House Hunters International (watching shows on Italy, of course) when Andy called me back after I had been trying to reach him yesterday.  He and I ended up talking for about five hours from eight in the evening until one in the morning.