Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 101, Down ~45lbs

Forty five pounds!  Today really feels like a milestone weight loss day.  Forty five pounds isn’t that big of a deal, I guess, but I am now officially (by my standard scale at home that I have been using since the very beginning) below the 250 lbs mark!  That’s the big break through.  We thought that I had done this while in New York but then had the ten pounds issue with the scales.  But now it is official and I didn’t just tip over it but went past it by a good bit and am on my way through the 240s now.  This feels really good.  Today is my very first day since the late 90s to be able to say that I weight in the “lower 200s.”  Now that is an encouragement to keep dieting.

In general I am continuing to like coming into the office nice and early.  It lets me get on top of the day and I tend not to fall behind because at no point am I dealing with a back log.  I am way more on top of SpiceWorks as well as a result since I am posting at the same time as the people in Europe rather than coming in and answering things that they’ve been discussing for many hours.  I feel that this has been, in general, a significant productivity boost.  And SGL is up to date too and Dominica feels that, except for Tuesday and Wednesday, I’m getting more family time too.  The only downside is needing to go to bed early but since I go to bed just about the same time as Liesl should and after Luciana has already fallen asleep it isn’t like I am giving up time with the girls because I’m turning in so early.

I went home late for lunch today, around one, and worked from home for the afternoon which was really nice.  I managed to catch up on a lot of things being home for a little bit.  It has been some time since I have been at home on a weekday at all so I’ve fallen way behind on a number of things.

Dominica and Madeline were painting the kitchen today.  They were painting it a bright green.  A green that Dominica picked out when she was pregnant.  It isn’t that bad but I have a feeling that this is a lot like her wine-coloured garage or Pepto-Bismal coloured bathroom like we had in Geneseo.  I let her pick out the paint colours but they can be pretty awful sometimes and, in the case of the bathroom, so bad that we had to immediately repaint to attempt to sell the house – it lasted no time at all.

They started doing the green paint with the intention of it covering the entire kitchen.  Once she saw bright green on the wall Dominica pulled back to just painting the one side of the kitchen and I have the feeling that she realizes that bright, crazy colours are probably not the way to go, especially in highly visible portions of the house.  So the plan now, from what I can tell, is to paint the rest of the kitchen in more of a cream colour.  At least the green has covered up the repair spots in the walls where we had white before from the electrical work that we had done.

As soon as my call was done this evening Emily and I ran to Willow Bend Mall to go to the Apple Store there so that they could look at my iPhone which has not been working for weeks.  What a horrible experience that was.  Apple really doesn’t grok customer service at all.

We got to the Apple Store and discovered that it is pure mayhem inside.  No signs, no instructions, no queues just a mess of disorganization – just like using a Mac, it would seem.  There was no one who clearly worked there in the store and people just milling about everywhere seemingly using the place as an Internet cafe.  There was no service desk, no customer service, no checkouts, nothing.  Just tables of computers with people looking at them.  People who seems to have just gotten lost and needed to sit down somewhere.

Emily and I were in the for a while and could not find anyone to help us or anyplace that we were supposed to go.  The only place that had anyone working at all was a thing called the “Genius Bar” which certainly did not strike me as the name of “warranty service and returns” but we tried going there anyway.  That was a waste of time, no matter how long we stood there, even right against the bar, could we get eye contact or acknowledgement of any sort.  We simply did not exist.

We walked around the store for a while longer, Tweeted about the lack of customer service and eventually I found a guy in a blue shirt carrying an iPod and I grabbed him and asked if he worked there and if he could help us because we had no idea what to do.  He said that we were supposed to check in at the door.  I asked “check in with who?”  He said that someone waits at the door to check you in.  I pointed out that there was no such person either when we arrived or currently and no signs or instructions to this effect so how were we to know this?  Even now I’m just taking someone’s word for this as he was carrying an iPod and seem to be wearing an old iPod case as a necklace.

He said that they were all booked up for the evening.  I said “maybe you weren’t all booked up when I arrived and no one would talk to me – I’ve been here for a while.”  So he said that he would try to squeeze us in, it was just a broken phone after all and should not take long.  I appreciate that they are busy there – but they are busy because way too much stuff is broken and none of Apple’s employees are working or working efficiently.  That’s not my problem.  And I’ve already put in hours of my time and tons of driving trying to deal with this because Apple doesn’t allow Verizon to service the phone when it breaks and makes me go find an Apple Store which is a rarity in and of itself.

So we ran over to Starbucks (just outside the door) to get coffee.  They actually came to get us to say that we could see the service desk before the coffee was even ready.  Okay, so that was fast.  We went in and sat at the Genius Bar.  And sat.  And sat.  Apparently they were not really ready.  There was no one available to talk to us for quite some time.

When someone was available to help us they turned away and starred at the back wall rather than helping us.  Seriously, I’m feeling completely hated here.  I’ve never had any store work so hard to avoid me before.  No one will make eye contact.  No one will acknowledge us.  Emily is really unimpressed and she is only ten!

The person who made our appointment came and told the available “genius” to help us.  But that didn’t motivate him.  While we were waiting a guy who had made an appointment online for eight asked if someone would help him.  They told him that he had missed his appointment and that it had been cancelled.  He explained that he had arrived an hour early, checked in and waiting in the store since seven and no one would see him.  So it is not just me being ignored.  Even with a previous reservation and a time slot, arriving early and waiting in the store you get nothing.

While we all waited for nothing to be done three scantily clad underage girls came in and techs lept to help them.  Being a half naked teenage girl apparently warrants service to be delivered in the middle of the store – no need for an appointment, a check-in or even to approach the “Genius Bar” for them.  Oh no, Apple employees make no qualms in letting everyone know what motivates them and it isn’t in impressing the people paying the bills – it is impressing the jail bait who just hitched a ride to the mall.  Not impressive.

Our coordinator came back ten minutes later and informed the same tech, again, to help us.  Not one other person was helped during this time.  Half the bar was empty.  The entire store could see us sitting there being ignored.  Not one employee moves to do anything.  This is ridiculous.

Once the tech starting helping us things went quickly and smoothly.  The took the phone, instantly determined that it was defective and the soldering internally had failed and we had a new, replacement phone in no time and were on our way.  That could have all been handled in five minutes but due to horrific customer service planning it took an hour and completely alienated a lot of people.  Apple spent a fortune to make a point to me that they loathe having me as a customer.  They did the same to Emily.  The same to the guy whose appointment they had cancelled – likely because some girl had come in that they wanted to service instead.  The same to that guy’s girlfriend who had sat there with him for an hour and a half waiting for them to honor the appointment.

Each individual person that I dealt with, once I convinced someone to take on the apparently abhorrent task of helping me, was friendly and helpful.  It was clear that it was Apple themselves making the store impossible to navigate, removing any semblance of instructions or process and refusing to have any means of acquiring customer service that is to blame.  Significant money and effort had to be expended to make this process work this poorly.  This was no accident.

What is amazing is that at any other store they would do something like this in the hopes that you would peruse other products that they had for sale and maybe buy something while you were there.  But this failed here too because there was at no time a point where I could meander about looking at products – I always had to be searching for an employee or sitting at the Genius Bar.  Never was I given a chance to look at products.  And also because there were no obvious products for sale.  Sure, there were Mac and iPod devices all over.  But no prices and nothing that suggested that you could buy them (at least not here.)  No configuration information and no sales people.  Plus no checkouts.  So if I did want to buy something there – or even find out what I could buy – I still, after being there over an hour, have no idea how I would do that.

Even if you go to the Apple Store and see something that you like it is faster (and way friendlier) to drive across town to Walmart or Target to buy it there.  And in all honesty, I am not certain if they do sell anything there.  I only guess that they do because the word “store” is in the name of the location.  But there is nothing inside of the Apple Store to suggest that they have anything for sale except that there is a small section of video games and weird accessories hanging on one wall that would have no purpose but to be sold.   I think.

All in all, I am just amazed how much Apple hates having me be their customer.

Medifast Status: Day 100, Down ~43.5lbs

I made sure that I was in the office nice and early this morning.  There is still just an unbelievable amount of cleanup to be doing from yesterday.  Today is going to be long and painful just like yesterday.  I just know it.

Francesca left this morning to go back down to Houston.  Madeline and Emily are staying with us for ten more days.  We are taking them back down to Houston with us when we go down there in nearly two weeks to celebrate Dominica’s birthday.

My entire morning was spent running between my own office and managers’ offices.  It was crazy.  Paperwork, technical work, follow ups, research, documentation all for the outage yesterday. It pretty much consumed my entire day.  This is exhausting.

I was going to go home for lunch and see the family but never got a chance.  I ended up working all through lunch.  Eventually, around two thirty, John, Dan and I went over to La Cima for a little while just to get some coffee and to escape from the office for a little bit before getting back into it again at release time.  It was nice to get a little relaxation time in.  We just sat in the dining room as there was no one else there and relaxed.  The lounge is closed off because the finishing touches are being completed on the new bar area.  The new carpets are in (there were none yesterday when the family was dining there) and the new bar is now on display and, in theory, will be usable by Friday’s happy hour.

While we were at the club we found out the news about the stock market collapse.  Today was the ninth largest New York Stock Exchange points drop in history.  That makes for the seventh, ninth and twelfth worst, by my calculations, all within seven days!  This isn’t good.  The word “depression” is starting to get used in the news.

I got back to the office and worked for a while.  Still a lot to be done cleaning up from yesterday.  I was going to go home, meet the family and return to go to La Cima for dinner with Brian Watson tonight but I had so much to do that we decided that Dominica and the girls would just need to pick me up in order to give me an extra hour or so to work.

We met Watson at the club and we had dinner.  The kids all had pasta as it is pasta night and we all had custom ordered Medifast approved dinners.  This is Watson’s first time having dinner out on his Medifast which he began, I believe, yesterday.

After dinner we just went home and I went pretty much straight to bed.

Medifast Status: Day 99, Down ~43.5lbs

The house made it down to seventy six degrees overnight.  That means that with both air conditioners running full tilt we are getting as little as eight degrees under the outside air temperature.  I’m guessing that most of this is ambient heat that they just cannot overcome – the carpets, the furniture and everything else in the house just holding on to the heat and keeping the place warm no matter what.  Normally the house is much cooler in the morning giving us a better jump on the day.  We have little opportunity to do that now and the house is just going to keep heating up.  I’m wondering if 10,000 BTUs was just way too small for that additional air conditioner.  It seems like another 50K wouldn’t be a bad thing.

I was in the office at six thirty as is becoming my usual.  We had a very busy day today.  Yesterday the market, as expected, crashed hard – the eleventh worst day by point value lost in Wall Street history.  Pretty bad.  Today, we had a rebound that almost completely covered the losses from yesterday.  Bizarre.  It is a highly volatile market and that makes for long, stressful days at work for me.

Today, however, turned out to be far and away worse than I would have guessed.  Generally volatile markets make for change freezes at work for stability purposes and that, in turn, lowers our workload since most of what we do is put on hold until things calm down.  This morning we ended up losing a server during busy trading hours.  That was awful.  It is always bad to lose a server but on a day like today is exceptionally bad.  So that ate up pretty much my entire morning.

Dominica, Francesca and the kids were planning to meet me for lunch at La Cima today.  The lunch menu sounded really good so we wanted to take advantage of it.  They were going to pick me up at the office.

By the time that they got to the office to get me another server had failed and my day was shot.  The whole day just went from bad to disaster.  I sent the family on to La Cima without me in the hopes that I would be able to join them later.  I was not.  They managed to get a small, private room for lunch which really worked out well with all of the kids.  They loved the food too, adults and kids alike.  It was a really good decision, it appears, to eat there today.

At two thirty Dominica dropped off food for me at the office.  I had to sprint to the car, grab it and sprint back.  I was on the phone for over six hours today!  It was awful.  It took me hours to eat that food – but boy was it delicious.

I worked in the office until around seven then went home.  What a long day.  Once home I had to work all evening too till nearly eleven when I went to bed.  I got see no one really today.  It was crappy.  And we are just picking up again tomorrow and we will continue on with this.  It is going to be a long week.

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.