Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 98, Down ~43.5lbs

Got up at a few minutes after five and was in to the office by twenty after six.  The weather is very nice when driving in this early.  Before the sun comes up it feels great.  Today is supposed to be the cool day, just around 105.  Tomorrow we are supposed to hit 109 again!!  That is just crazy.  The Grices are not used to this at all and having a harder time than we are, I think, handling the heat.

This morning, first thing when Lowe’s opened, Dominica went shopping for a free-standing air conditioner to help take the edge off of the house.  The main house AC is just not keeping up at all.   So we are hoping that by adding 10,000 BTUs of cooling to it that maybe it will help.  I know that 10K is not a lot but it was the affordable unit and it is 10K of additional cooling, not our sole means of cooling the house.  The plan is to put it into the den where everyone is gathered all day to try to make that room more tolerable.  Once everyone is not in there all of the time we are going to try putting it in the server closet off of my office to turn the hottest piece of the house into the coolest – in theory. But before we can do that we need another outlet added to that room and a vent cut into the wall.

We had looked last night and our Lowe’s store is the only one in the Dallas area that has the air conditioning unit that we want (or any at all, for that matter.)  So Dominica was anxious to be there first thing.  They had none in stock so she bought the one returned unit that they had.  It turns out that the remote that is supposed to come with it is, of course, missing.  So we need to call the dealer about that.

I went home for lunch today but had a conference call so that took most of my lunch time.  Then it was back in to the office.  Not really so much worth the drive home.

To keep the house cool Dominica and Francesca put up sheets in front of the windows in the den.  This helps cut a lot of light as those walls are all windows and it also helps to cut cooling loss since the windows are so massively inefficient.  I really wish that we had had the resources to replace all of those windows this year before this heat wave hit.  What a difference that likely would have made.  We really got screwed by them not finishing the house work that we started in January because a lot of it revolved around making the house more efficient and, of course, those are the parts that never got done at all.

While I was home for lunch the new air conditioner was not set up yet because Lowe’s had laid it on its side and there was nothing on the box that said that it could not be on its side but once you opened it it said that if it had been laid on its side that it would have to sit upright for six hours before use.  So they are planning on turning it on around four this afternoon.

I went back in to the office for the afternoon.  It is nice being in the office when it is so hot.  Today is actually the “cool” day this week with it only supposed to reach 104.  Tomorrow is going to be exceptionally brutal with 109-110 predicted.  They are sending out warnings asking everyone to raise the thermostats, avoid cooking, run nothing unnecessary, close blinds, etc.

I got home and found everyone huddled in the den with the new air conditioning blasting.  The house, though, was still very warm.  I discovered that Dominica had not listened to me and ran the oven to cook food and did so at the very peak of the heat for the day.  So the house went up many degrees and never recovered.  The air conditioning was right at its limit as it was and that pushed it well over it.  So we spent the evening with the main part of the house hovering around eighty nine degrees and my office likely over one hundred.  We are now in very rough shape going in to the hottest day tomorrow as we have ambient heat left from today that we will not be able to dissipate before the real heat hits.

Francesca spent much of the day playing Dragon Age: Origins which she is really liking.  Dominica is enjoying getting to watch the game again, I think.  She has played through it twice and watched a lot of me playing it so this is like her fourth time through it.

Liesl made a lot more potty training progress today.  She is getting the hang of it and doing exceptionally well.  We are really encouraged that we are likely to be out of diapers, for Liesl at least, very soon.  Everyone comes in and cheers for her whenever she uses the potty successfully.  She likes to sit on the potty in the den in the middle of everyone which is pretty funny.

I had a call this evening lasting an hour or so.  And I did some work on Dominica’s computer to get it completely ready for her to use.  Not that the office is cool enough to use something in there, but in theory she could use it now.  She has MS Office all installed and ready to go and her Outlook and SharePoint are all set up.

I went to bed around eleven.  It was eighty four degrees when I went to bed.  But it did seem to be coming down a little.  Tomorrow is going to be really rough.

 

Medifast Status: Day 97, Down ~43.5lbs

I’ve been asked to go into work at six thirty again tomorrow morning.  So I am back to being awake very early in the morning.  Not that that is bad, I seem to get more and better family time by going to work really early.  It means that I am home earlier and more in line with when the children are awake.

The heat was unbearable today.  The house climbed to eighty eight degrees and it was all that the air conditioning could do to hold it at that level.  My office had to be very near one hundred degrees.  You start sweating the moment that you go in.

I did some work this morning for a little while.  Then at eleven I showered and at eleven thirty Madeline and I drove up to Vista Ridge to go see Harry Potter 7.2, the very last film in the series.  This is my first time seeing it and Madeline’s second.  She and I saw HP 7.1 together when it came out as well.

I have to say that without a doubt the final Harry Potter movie is far and away the very best in the series.  This is probably true about the books as well that they kept getting better and better as they went but the movies did a very good job in trying to keep up with the books more and more by the later ones and especially the seventh one.  The early movies really dropped the ball on character development by trying to focus on action and keeping everything moving but as the series went on their were able to make the movies a little longer and focused slightly more on the relationships and character development that needed to happen.  Splitting the seventh book into two movies each over two hours long really let them do more of what needed to be done compared to the other.  It really makes you wish that they had just made fourteen movies from the very beginning to allow for all of the action that they wanted to squeeze in while still getting the good, emotional parts across.

This final movie really makes you wish that the Harry Potter universe would continue.  I think that the movie does an even better job of this than did the books – which is unusual for me to say because I greatly prefer the books in general.  But this last installment goes so far towards keeping up with the books that it is able to surpass them from time to time.  The emotions of the ending are very strong and really make you wish that it would not end.  I have no idea where the stories would go from there but because the value of the characters is in their emotional ties and not their adventures you don’t even really care that the adventure is over – you want to know what happens to them, what they do with their lives, etc.  You just want to stay connected to them.

After the movie we went back to the house and I spent much of the day working.  The markets are highly volatile today.  Middle East markets saw Sunday drops of around 7% which is pretty crazy.  Asian markets tonight saw 2-3.5% drops.  Tomorrow morning on the open of the New York Stock Exchange it is going to be a madhouse.  Standard & Poor’s drop of the US from AAA to AA+ rating is a pretty unbelievable event and no one is really prepared for what it means.  The G7 were meeting today to come up with a plan to stabilize the world markets.

Francesca and Dominica spent much of the day playing Dragon Age: Origins.  Francesca is around twelve hours into the game already and really liking it.

The really, really big news of the day, however, is none of that.  The big news is that today Liesl officially started potty training!  Francesca is a whiz (no pun intended) at these things and Dominica has been hoping that she would help to train Liesl while she is visiting this week.

Liesl managed to use the potty successfully on her very first try!  Overall today she managed to use it four times and had no accidents!  She is batting 1,000 on her first day of potty training.  She is going to be comfortable going without diapers in no time.  This is very exciting.

I stayed up until after midnight.  That was probably not a good idea.  Now I am starting off another week with very little sleep.  I have to be up at five so four and a half hours of sleep is the maximum that I am going to be getting tonight.

Medifast Status: Day 96, Down ~43.5lbs

And the heat wave continues.  No end in sight.  I have checked the ten day forecast and one hundred and two degrees is the cooler day that we are expected to see for the next week and a half.  Week and a half!  And there are plenty of one hundred and seven and one hundred and eight days in there two.  I doubt that our air conditioning nor our foundation can take this.  It is really getting bad.

I managed to sleep in some this morning.  That was nice.  My first long night of sleep this week.  I needed to catch up a little.

I got up and worked for a while and then I got to work cleaning around the house.  Dominica’s Aunt Rose and cousin Katie are coming to visit around eleven so we wanted to get the house into order as much as possible.  It is actually looking pretty good after we did a panic clean up.

I had to work most of the time that they were here visiting.  Aunt Rose has completed her first phase of MediFast and is into the transition phase now.  I am not even halfway to that point yet.  I feel like I am going to be doing this forever.  I have fifty pounds left to go to my final goal.  That is a very, very long way to go considering that I have gone for more than three months and have only lost forty three pounds.  That is depressing.  I really miss food.

This afternoon we introduced Francesca to Dragon Age: Origins on the PS3.  We already got her hooked on the Fable series.  She had never played an RPG or even really an adventure game before trying the Fable games so this is an entirely new world of video games that she is now exploring. She is liking Dragon Age.  It tells such a good story that it is pretty hard not to get into it if you like your video games to act like literature.

This evening we went to family dinner at Rockfish in Irving.  That did not go well.  Dinner last night was nothing compared to the mess today.  The kids were not well behaved and people were clearly very unhappy with us at the restaurant.  There was so much noise coming from our table, it was really bad.  We all decided that we would not be going out to dinner with this many people again.  It just turns into a disaster and it makes going out very stressful rather than enjoyable or relaxing.

Medifast Status: Day 95, Down ~43lbs

I had to be up and in to the office early this morning as today is the non-farm payroll announcement from the federal government and I am the primary coverage for it.

Overall work was pretty slow today.  I moved my MediFast appointment up as early as I could get it and so left work at one and went to my meeting. It went quite well and they were very excited that I posted a five and a half pound loss over last week!  They said that I was their prodigy customer and that almost no one is able to lose at this rate this far into the program.  Normally progress has slowed to just two to three pounds per week.  So I am feeling good about my progress.  I can tell that my clothes are getting looser and looser every day.  I am really starting to see a difference when I look at myself in the mirror.

From the MediFast meeting I left and came home to work from there. On my way home, though, I swung into the Ingram Micro warehouse up on Frankford and picked up my brand new HP Compaq 24″ LCD monitor that I had waiting for me at will call.  I love that I am able to order stuff in the morning and pick it up on the way home.  That is the handiest thing ever.  I’m going to start buying everything this way.

I arrived before the Grices did and was able to help Dominica with a little more cleaning.  Most of the cleaning that needed to be done was the clean up from all of the painting that has been going on.  I got my new monitor hooked up as well.  It is awesome.  It is a bit larger than my old monitors which were still pretty large, and I made sure that this new one matched or exceeded the resolution of the older monitors so it is a step up in that regard too.  I have a bit more screen real estate now which makes it easier to work.  I got this one to replace the older Samsung 20.1″ LCD 1600×1200 that has been dying on me for about a year.  It has been taking longer and longer to turn on.  Originally it was just a minute or so but recently it has been taking one to two hours before it would turn on and even then only dimly.  To get to full brightness might take it four hours or more!  It was making it impossible to work.

Sooner or later I will replace this other Samsung with a new HP too so that I have two matching monitors.  That will be nice.  I just don’t want to spend the money right now since the other monitor works just fine.

The Grices arrived  mid afternoon.  Boy is it hot in this house and just getting warmer and warmer with so many people here.

Work wrapped up on the early side, for a Friday, and after work was done we ran out to go to La Cima with everyone for dinner.  That might not have been the best idea.  The plan was that this was Francesca’s first day on WonderSlim (basically a modified MediFast) so we thought that this would be an easy was to get a good, healthy meal to get her kick started.  Really it was more of a circus than anything.  The kids were all over the place and really loud.  Everyone was tired too which made it rough.  Having a party of nine is hard no matter what.  Just to talk to people across the table is nearly impossible.  It was a rough night.

We got home but I went to bed very early, around ten.  Everyone else was still awake when I turned in.  I just needed some sleep after such a long week.  I am scheduled to work some tomorrow too, about three hours in the middle of the day to support a server move when no one else is available.

Medifast Status: Day 94, Down ~42.5lbs

Technically it is not as hot today as it has been, but it is pretty hard to tell.  108 degrees again today.  I have a feeling that many a heat record is going to fall this year with this unabated heat wave bearing down on us.

Officially the need for me to be in the office super early today was lifted last night but until after I had gone home for the evening so I was not aware and came in early anyway.  Not a big deal since I’ve been getting up so early all week already and I still need to be in early tomorrow anyway.

I ran home at eleven to be at home when our painting contractor comes to give us an estimate on painting the house.  They were there early, though, and the estimate was over by the time that I had arrived.  $2,100 for the painting.  Ugh.  That’s a lot.  We were hoping that it wouldn’t be nearly so much.  There is a ton of house to be painted, I suppose.

So since I was already home and we didn’t have to wait on the painters we decided that we would go to La Cima for lunch today and that Dominica and the girls would just do some shopping after lunch and pick me up when they were done to take me home.  A good use of the commute.

Lunch was nice then the girls went to Kohl’s to get some new clothes.  Work was slow and Dan needed to run to Office Depot, which I did too, so we ran over there and knocked out some errands.  It was pretty much perfect timing getting back to the office before Dominica was ready to pick me up and take me home.

Having all of us out of the house during the hottest part of the day was good as well since instead of suffering through the house being so warm we were able to enjoy air conditioning elsewhere and the house’s air conditioning didn’t have to fight to keep us cool as well.  We are not happy about the house always being over eighty degree though.  That is really wearing on us.  It is going to be horrible after tomorrow when the Grice family arrives.  With all of those people in the house it is going to be much hotter than it is now.

After work I had a conference call this evening but it was exceptionally short for a change.  So often we run to hours and this time it was fifteen to twenty minutes at most.  Very surprising but good as there is much that I need to work on this evening anyway.

This evening we mostly spent cleaning since we have our visitors coming to see us starting tomorrow.