Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 93, Down ~42.5lbs

Up at five again and in to the office by six thirty.  Of course I got to the office and went through my emails and found that last night our need for early morning coverage was lifted so that I didn’t really need to be here so early this morning.  It is good, though, as there is always just so much to be done and getting in so early allows me to be on top of things all day long rather than always playing catchup.  You can see from SGL alone that I am now getting the posts out first thing in the morning and am completely up to date.  So it is working well.

I posted a new article over at SMB IT Journal yesterday: “Do You Really Need Redundancy: The Real Cost of Downtime.”

We are supposed to hit 109F here in Dallas today.  The all time Dallas record is only 111F.  It actually doesn’t feel bad outside.  I believe that today is the hottest day that we have spent since moving to Dallas.  According to the forecast that I have seen we are in very good shape to break the all time “number of days consecutively over 100 degrees” record famously set in 1980 and we are very, very close to breaking the all time “number of days consecutively over 105 degrees” record.

Our air conditioning is really struggling.  We are keeping the house at 86F now and the air conditioning barely gets a chance to take a break.  It is getting pretty rough.  My office at home is in the mid-90s every day and it is very hard to be productive sitting in there.  Very hard indeed.  And we have had to shut down the ReadyNAS as we do not have enough cooling to keep it at a good operating temperature nor is our UPS able to handle the constant dips in power that we are getting now either.

The rolling blackouts did not hit today either but we have heard that we have come very close.

Today is predicted to be the peak of our heat.  John at the office saw his cars exterior thermometer display 123F on his drive home at six in the evening!

Medifast Status: Day 92, Down ~42.5lbs  (Three stones!)

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Boy was I tired when the alarm went off at five this morning.  It took me a minute to figure out what was going on.  But I got up and got right in to the shower.  I was out the door and in to the office just a few minutes after six.  Half an hour earlier than I was scheduled to be at work.  Makes it even easier to get caught up, though.  There is always so much to be done, SGL not withstanding.

It was an incredibly slow morning at the office.  Very quiet.  And it passed like molasses.

I decided today that my York94 website that I made in 2007 as a way for my classmates to reconnect online is no longer needed and as my registration for the domain runs out later this week I am simply going to allow it to expire.  I’ve been running that site for four years now.  So anyone attempting to use email there will get nothing.  But I’m pretty sure that no one has used those email addresses in years.

It is so hot today that they have announced rolling blackouts through Texas during the heat of the afternoons today through Thursday.  Yesterday it was so hot that it was 103F at nine at night!  Now that is hot.  It is 104 as I write this and we are expected to hit 108 later today and 109 tomorrow.  What is amazing is that I was just sitting outside reading a few minutes ago and was thinking how nice it was and that it must be a lot cooler today.  Apparently not.  The level to which I have adjusted to Texas is truly unbelievable.

I went home at lunch today, hung out with the family but did not eat as Dominica wanted to eat our meal at dinner instead, and then returned to the office for a few hours.

The final vote for the raising of the American debt ceiling was passed by the Senate this afternoon and signed by the president shortly thereafter.  So we are out of the woods, for the moment.  This current crisis has been averted and history will very likely completely forget how close we came to disaster today.

On my way home from work I stopped off at MediFast to pick up food supplies.  Now that Dominica is on MediFast too we are going through the food much faster and she eats completely different food that I do.  I mostly just have the shakes and sometimes the bars.  Dominica focuses on the oatmeal and puffs.  So we needed more.

I was pretty tired all day and this evening I was struggling just to stay awake while hanging out with the girls.  The house is hot, we are keeping it at 84F in the evenings now – that allows the air conditioning unit to turn off from time to time.  We cool it down when we go to bed.  Today is the first day that it was so warm that I had to switch to wearing shorts in the house.

Dominica has nearly all of the cabinet and trim painting that she wanted to do completed.  We are looking into hiring painters to do the bulk of the house.  This was more than a week long project just to do what we did and we pretty much want the entire house to be painted.  Having professionals do it will take no time at all and will likely look far better than if we tried to do it ourselves.  And as there is just so much it would cause us to be painting continuously for months.

We did very little this evening.  I did a tiny amount of work.  We watched very little television – maybe two episodes of 8 Simple Rules and mostly just were puttering around the house.

Luciana got her first big cut tonight – she got clipped on her right thumb by the finger nail clippers.  It was pretty bad.  She cried and cried and we couldn’t stop the bleeding for probably fifteen minutes.

I went to bed at ten.  I was just so tired.  I have to be up at five in the morning so while that sounds early, it really is not considering that I will only get seven hours of potential sleep time after having only gotten three last night.

The Grices are coming up sometime this week.  Maybe on Friday but Dominica is pushing to have them come up earlier.  We don’t know yet when they will be driving up to visit.  We are getting Madeline and Emily for almost two weeks too.

Medifast Status: Day 91, Down ~42.5lbs

Today begins my week of early shifts.  I got up at five this morning and was out the door, with everyone else still asleep, before six.  I swung into RaceTrac near the office and got my 52oz. refill of diet Mt. Dew to get me through the morning.  Then I noticed that the donut place next door was open and empty so I went in and got a dozen donuts for the team.  I can’t eat any but no one has brought donuts into the office in a while so I figured that it would be nice since many of us are working extra early this week.

The morning was very quiet, as expected.  There is a proposed bipartisan debt bill going to vote today and it is expected to pass but the vote has not happened yet so we are mostly just waiting to hear about that and see what happens.  The US defaults tomorrow if this is not approved so this particular bill is very possibly the last one that there is time to put through the system before it is too late.

For lunch today I was supposed to be meeting one of my MediFast trainers at La Cima.  So I went over to La Cima, not hearing any differently, at noon and waited there until about a quarter until one but he never showed up.  So I ate lunch alone and then went to the Verizon store to see if they could do anything about my iPhone that is no longer working.  The earpiece on my iPhone no longer makes any sound at all but if I put the phone on speakphone it works fine. So it is just the earpiece having an issue.  The Verizon store looked at it but said that I would have to take it to the Apple Store to have warranty service performed on it.

I worked until around four and then went home.  It was nice to get home early.  Liesl was still napping and would be for quite a while yet.  Luciana was awake and ended up hanging out with me for about an hour.

I spent the evening on the phone.  Another one of those evenings.  Six hours on the phone, in fact.  What a long evening.

I also put in several hours working on key deployments (that is, the deployment of keys) for the office.  It needed to be done tonight after hours and it took many hours to complete.  Sensitive stuff that required my direct attention.  A pain but it is done, at least.

So it was after ten when I was finally able to go spend time with Liesl and Luciana.  Way too late.  Dominica managed to do a bit more painting today and has been putting hardware onto the cabinets and getting them put back together.  I did some painting too on the fireplace trim and that, if all goes well, is now done.  Hopefully tomorrow Dominica can take the tape off from around the fireplace and mantle and we will have that part of the room done except for the whole room paint job that is coming up soon.

We called Emily and wished her a happy birthday.  At first Liesl was screaming “stop singing, stop singing!” when we sang the Happy Birthday Song but once we explained that it was Emily’s birthday Liesl got all excited and took the phone and talked to Emily for a while and was excited about the “Big Cousins Party” that she would be having soon.  What a funny kid.

Just this past fortnight Liesl has become really into talking on the real phone for the first time.  She has talked on a play phone for forever and has long understood what a phone was but just recently she has gotten over her shyness of the real phone and now loves to get on to it and talk to her family.  She started with my dad over a week ago and probably spent more than half an hour with him as her captive audience telling him about this and that.  It was so cute.  She took off with the phone and wandered all over the house.

Then several days ago she talked her Dominica’s mom on the phone for a while.  And today she spoke with Emily for a little bit.

Tonight we watched Mary Poppins together as a family.  At first Liesl did not like it but once the singing and music started she really got into it and sang along.  It was adorable.

Liesl started playing a new game tonight.  She told me to sing her the “exercise song” – which of course was just something that she wanted me to make up.  She does that from time to time, often asking me to sing the “chocolate milk” song.  This is what I get for constantly making up songs about things around the house since she was born.  I just always sing about things.  Probably has something to do with my Aspey.

So I started singing the “exercise song” which included “jump up, jump down, run around in circles” and she started doing whatever I said.  So it turned into a kind of “Simon Says” game with singing.  She made me sing over and over again.  This probably went on for twenty minutes and she thought that it was great fun.

It was nearly two in the morning when I finally managed to get off to bed.  I have to be up at five tomorrow.  It is going to be a rough morning.

Medifast Status: Day 90, Down ~42.5lbs

I slept in a little this morning.  Very little sleep last night and we were up very late.  Today we are just staying home – there is just a ton of house work that we want to get done and very little time in which to do it.

The first order of business this morning was heading out to the patio to enjoy our new furniture before it got too hot to be outside.  It has been so hot that since we returned from New York the air conditioning has been unable to keep the house cool.  We have the daytime temperature set to eighty one degrees now and the AC runs nearly continuously.  I am really hoping that we manage to get a lot of projects done around the house that include insulation items so that this will not be the case next year.  Our old windows and doors leak so horribly that there is just no way to keep anything cool.

It was nice getting to sit outside.  I made us coffee and we relaxed for a while.  It was still hot, even early on in the morning.  Probably in the mid-nineties.  It is amazing to us that walking into our eighty degree house feels very cool and pleasant.  Who would have guessed.  And I don’t wear shorts around the house or anything.  I’m in jeans or jogging pants at nearly all times and perfectly comfortable.

Liesl woke up while we were outside and came out to join us.  She sat with me on the love seat.  She likes being able to go outside and hang out.  I think that Oreo is going to like this too once he gets used to the furniture being there.  Even with the house as warm as it is he still enjoys laying in the sunlight in the warmest rooms and sometimes like to linger outside.  I think that if he knows that he has a comfy loveseat on which to sleep in complete peace – since the girls are inside the house away from him – that he might decide that that is his new favourite place to hide and sleep.  I just have to convince him to attempt hoping up on to the furniture outside.  That might be hard to do.

Oreo has been doing pretty poorly as of late. He has mange that we seem to have halted its spread but it is not going away.  He is incredibly itchy and has lost a lot of fur.  I brushed him tonight and a spot on his back actually started bleeding.  His left eye has horrible glaucoma now too and is very much bulging.  We have been giving him his eye drops two and three times a day now and he is going to see his vet on Wednesday afternoon but that eye is completely destroyed.  We just hope that we can keep him from losing it altogether – although I wonder how much more than is for us than for him, there is nothing left of that eye for him anymore.

I worked a bit today for the office.  I also helped out Dominica a bit more with painting and other house projects.  We did some cleaning and a ton of painting.  I did some painting last night too.  The mantle and trim around the fireplace are nearly done.  We are painting them white instead of them being the dark ’70s stained wood.  It is making the living room look both more modern and brighter.  But the real brightness came from painting the wood paneling in front of the bar.  What a difference that has made.

Coming up quite soon is the painting of the entire living room itself.  It is a very large space that is currently done in a rather dark and drab paint.  It is not bad, but it is not as bright and lively as we would like.  Plus we have a lot of patch places where work was done on the wall behind and the wall had to be fixed so it really looks awful right now with the way that it is.  Once we get it painted the house will be brighter and those patches will go away.  We can’t wait for that.  It will be awesome.

While the girls were napping this afternoon I stayed home and cleaned while Dominica ran to Walmart to do some grocery shopping and to Lowes to get cabinet hardware as we are replacing the old brass-looking hardware on the buffet into modern brushed nickle hardware.

This evening I got the chance to play a couple of hours of Twilight Princess.  I am now a good deal past where Dominica has played.  Maybe as much as two hours past her.  Overall I am not enjoying the game very much.  I can only describe it as being exceedingly amateur.  I’m used to polished games like Oblivion or Dragon Age.  Twilight Princess feels like it was made by interns – everything is done very poorly and they didn’t even hire professional translators to bring the dialogue over, it’s like it was written by children who didn’t understand English very well.  It’s hard to believe that Nintendo with all of its resources puts so little effort into one of its largest franchises.  But, I suppose, it has great sales numbers regardless of the quality so why bother?

I’m giving Twilight Princess the ol’ college try as I’ve never completed a Zelda title before and I really want to understand what all of the fuss is about.  I own nearly all of the Zelda games every made (Oracles being possibly the only one that I have never owned) across all platforms.  I have multiple copies of some games like Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask – both of which I have the early-release collector’s gold cartridges from the N64 as well as Wii Virtual Console emulated versions, but neither of which have I ever managed to play for any length of time.  All Zelda games seem, to me, to share these same elements: bad graphics, horrible controls, poor translations of weak dialogue and shallow, trivial stories.  The exception to this is A Link to the Past on the SNES which had good graphics.  But I’m determined to play through at least Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time to the end and see if I feel that way the whole way through.  Dominica says that she really liked Ocarina of Time and Minish Cap.

I went to bed early tonight.  I start my 6:30 shifts tomorrow morning and I need some sleep.  I worked for the office until around ten thirty and then wrapped up for the evening.  I went in to the play room to tell Dominica that I was going to bed and instantly Liesl started picking up her toys and I said to her “no sweetie, you don’t have to go to bed, daddy is going to bed” and Liesl said “Liesl going to bed too.  Snuggle with daddy.”  This is easily one to two hours before her normal bedtime.  Who could resist that?  So Dominica got Liesl ready for bed and Liesl slept in our room tonight.  Dominica stayed up for an hour or two doing more painting.  She is on a mission to get the cabinets all painted very soon.

 

Medifast Status: Day 89, Down ~42.5lbs

I tried to sleep in this morning but Luciana wanted to get up and Dominica was up so late painting last night so I took Luciana and got up and hung out in the play room for several hours on our own.  She was perfectly happy with me holding her so we just sat in the arm chair and attempted to play some video games.

For the first time I tried out New Super Mario Bros. Wii on the Wii.  This is the spiritual successor to the old Super Mario Bros. games of the ’80s and ’90s.  NSMBWii feels just like you are playing a traditional Mario game like Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World (Super Mario Bros. 4) and in many ways, I think, should be considered Super Mario Bros. 5.  It is like you stepped back to 1991 and Nintendo just brought out a sequel to Super Mario World.  Technically there was a sequel in 1995 on the SNES called Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island but everyone called it Yoshi’s Island and as it was really a Yoshi game and not a Mario game it is often not considered to be a traditional member of the series.

No matter what, playing NSMBWii was fun and I enjoyed going back in time a bit.  The graphics are great and the gameplay is solid.  Finally something really impressive on the Wii – not that anything in the game wasn’t possible on the SNES or N64, let alone the GameCube, but still.  I have not yet gotten to play NSMBWii with multiple players but that could be really cool.  I’m looking forward to seeing how well that works.

I played through the first world in NSMBWii and decided that that was enough for one sitting.  It is cute and all but I can’t play it for very long.  Just like the old Super Mario games, it gets old pretty quickly.  There is effectively no storyline in these games (they would actually be improved by having none at all – what they have is so awful that it detracts from the game) and all you do is jump so it wears thin pretty quickly.

I started playing a little more of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.  I did not get to play very much before Dominica got up.  I got maybe another two hours in.  Dominica slept in very, very late.  It was a quarter after eleven when I sent Liesl to wake her up.

Dominica decided to start on MediFast today.  She is not going to use a trainer, like I do, that is just too expensive – especially when I already see a trainer every week and we have a really good grasp as to what she should be doing.  We have five of us now in the DFW area doing MediFast so we have like our own support group.  No need for her to be seeing an additional trainer to get feedback.

We worked around the house for a while and I worked for the office a bit, but not too much.  Then, around two thirty, Dominica decided that we needed some new furniture so we ran to Walmart and bought a deck set of two chairs, a love seat and a coffee table to put on our back patio.  We really made out.  We went because we thought that the $300 set that Dominica wanted was on sale for $180.  It turned out that when we paid it was reduced even further to just $149!  Talk about getting a deal.

We got home and barely had time to shower, change, check in with the office and get out the door for our dinner reservations at La Cima.  I had totally forgotten about them today.  Today is the last chance for us to use our Plus meal that we have left for July so we had to make reservations several days ago and it completely slipped my mind.  The reservation was at six but we were thinking six thirty.  So we were decently late for dinner.

It was a busy night as expected.  We sat in the back corner of the dining room.  Liesl was really good tonight considering how tired she was.  She was falling asleep while we were out shopping.  She had asked to bring her pacifier along with her while shopping because she was so tired even before we left.  She really needed a nap then.  After shopping, while we were showering, she napped for maybe an hour but was really upset when I woke her up to get dressed for the club.

Liesl took her Care Bear and her blanket up to the club with her and spent much of the evening slumped in her chair semi-napping.  She never actually fell asleep but was very subdued.  She did, however, perk up and eat her dinner – peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as well as a bit of sun-dried tomato bread.  Luciana was pretty quiet tonight too.

The girls were so good that a couple of different tables even remarked to us as we left as to what wonderfully behaved children we have.  A miracle, to be sure.

After we got home I worked for a while and then joined Dominica in working around the house.  We were up quite late again.  Dominica managed to get the two chairs and the loveseat assembled by the time that we went to bed.  The two chairs were moved out on to the patio.  The loveseat is still in the living room.

It was around one in the morning when I finally got to get back to my Twilight Princess game that had been on pause all day long.  I played for maybe thirty more minutes attempting to get to a point where I could save my game and shut down the Wii for the night.  I am now, at around four and a half hours of actually game play time, nearly as far in this game as Dominica has made it when she was playing it several years ago.