Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 88, Down ~42lbs

I got up this morning and, of course, was on the phone.  Multiple phone calls, yet again.  This is really wearing me out.  Then in to the office on the late side as I had logged in from home and worked a while from there first.  I am on call this whole weekend so wanted to verify my remote access was working before being stuck physically in the office all weekend.

For lunch today Dominica and the girls picked me up and we went to La Cima.  We had seen the menu and knew that it looked like something that we wanted before I even headed in to work so I was dressed for the club and Dominica was almost starting to get the girls ready when I left.  We were just late enough for lunch that we were alone in the lounge which is perfect with the girls. They can make noise or walk around without bothering anyone.

Liesl gets so excited when we go to La Cima.  She watches out the window and can see William’s Tower a mile or so before we get there and points it out very excitedly and tells us over and over that we are almost there.  Then, as we round the corner onto Conner she says “We’re here! We’re here!”

On the way back to the office from La Cima we ran over to Medifast and I had my first appointment in a month. Dominica and the girls just waited in the car.  My weigh-in was not actually that bad and my trainer was very encouraged that I managed to average two pounds per week loss for the past month even while being pretty significantly off of my Medifast diet due to all of the travel and events.

It has been really tough for the past month trying to keep up with my diet.  All of the travel and events make it nearly impossible to stay on task and eat what I am supposed to eat.  My trainer was very impressed with how well I have done, all things considered, and said that most people don’t manage to do that at all.

This evening ended up being pretty quite because of the market freeze that has been put into effect due to the current failure for the US government to pass the debt ceiling bill that has been going back and forth.  Years from now, when you are probably reading this, the debt ceiling votes going on today and for the next few days will probably be completely forgotten about – a trivial point of financial minutia in the grand scheme of things.  But right now, this is an all encompassing political and economic disaster putting the country on the edge of collapse.  The US will, on Tuesday, August 2nd, run completely out of money and does not have the legal ability to borrow any more money which means that we cannot repay our debts (mostly to China and our own citizens) and will be forced to default.

Defaulting, for the world’s largest economy and one that has never defaulted or missed a payment in its entire history, would be catastrophic not just for the US but for the world too whose global economy has been fragile, to say the least, over the past few years.  If the US was to default not only would it significantly hurt the economies of our lending partners but would cripple the US’ own investors, such as bond holders, too.  And the value of US bonds would plummet.  The worst thing, though, is that rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor would be forced to downgrade the US from a AAA rating which would trigger forced sell-offs from many investment agencies that have requirements to only hold AAA bonds.  This is much bigger than it sounds and would cause dramatic losses for things like pension funds and anyone holding US bonds and would make it nearly impossible for the US to raise additional funds in the future as its biggest investors would be barred from investing in it.

So we wait with baited breath to see if the US government can stop its partisan bickering and get a resolution passed.  The whole world is watching us and our own government is acting like children.  I understand that any party that lets their guard down will get run rough-shod by the opposition but this is truly ridiculous.  The stakes are far higher than most people imagine that they are and this is not the time to be making political maneuvers.  The interests of the country are in second place to party politics.  The flaws of the US system are exposed for all to see right now and the actions taken over the next few days will have a ripple effect far into the future.  So my future reads will probably not even be aware of this near event – because there is almost no chance that some measure will not be passed at the eleventh hour – but the stability of the world economy is seriously threatened right now and catastrophe has its name on our dance card this evening.

I was able to get out of work on the early side, leaving at six thirty, and went home to spend the weekend with the girls.

I had to spend a bit of time on the phone tonight and Dominica put in quite a bit of time doing more painting.  Boy is a lot of painting getting done around here!  We watched Dirty Dancing tonight and then Mr. Baseball.

We stayed up really late tonight after the girls went to bed.  Lot’s of housework getting done.  I moved the soaker hose tonight too to attempt to water the failing pillars rather than the front yard.  We will see if this makes any difference.  We are hopeful but the chances of it working are very low.

I am working all weekend for the office.  It just worked out that I had traded weekend shifts with someone and it turned out that I picked up the “freeze” weekend when no changes would be going on.  That’s awesome.  My weekend will likely be really quiet.

Next week I am on an early shift starting at six thirty every day.

Medifast Status: Day 87, Down ~42lbs

I worked until around three in the morning before giving up last night.  Then I went to bed and was up just after eight this morning and the day started right away.  I ended up having one phone call after another all morning.

The heat streak continues.  Boy is it hot.  I am doing well, though.  I really cannot believe how well I have adjusted to Texan life and how so many Texans are complaining about the heat.  Texans who have air conditioning in their cars and whose homes have working air conditioning.  I have nothing in my car so drive in a car that is 110-120 degrees every day and the house can’t keep itself cool and so it in the low to mid eighties during the day and on into the evening.  And I feel fine, all of the time.  It really doesn’t bother me.  I’m wearing jeans and long sleeve shirts to work without a problem.

At lunch I had to come home and spend my lunch time, as you guessed, on the phone.  There was just enough time to talk on the phone for the entire time that I was home and then to run back to the office again.

After work I got home, you guessed right again, and got on to the phone.  I was on the phone until around ten or so this evening.  What a long day after yesterday being such a long day.  I’m tired.

After I was all done with my calls Dominica made dinner.  It was about ten thirty when we managed to eat.  She made a grilled shrimp on mushroom noodles dish that is in the Medifast menu guide.  This is our first time trying this recipe.  This  was my first meal in fifty-two hours!  I wasn’t really hungry either but dinner was nice.

At eleven Luciana fell asleep in my arms while I sat in the arm chair in the den.  Liesl was pretty tired at that point and Dominica took her to bed too.

I popped in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on the PS3.  I have not had a chance to even look at this game yet since I got it a few days ago and I’ve been wondering what it is like.  Dominica was interested to see it as well hoping that it would be a fun game to watch.

The game proved to be fun.  It is an action adventure game – not what I normally play but not completely outside of my realm of interest.  The graphics are good and the storyline is excellent.  The gameplay itself leaves a ton to be desired.  There is no decision making and the game is completely linear.  You are just advancing a movie with bits where you control the action and potentially die.  I don’t like it when you don’t get to influence anything.  The game is really about the cut scenes and everything that you do as a player is a bit tedious.  That makes it decently good for the people watching you play as there is a ton of story and it goes pretty deep but it can be pretty boring for the person playing as you are really just there to hit the buttons to keep the story moving along.

I played Uncharted for about an hour before calling it a night.  I say that I played for an hour but it was one in the morning when we turned in.  So maybe it was a bit more than an hour.  I’ve read online that people are often playing Uncharted in just six to ten hours so I might be pretty significantly through the game already.  The cut scenes are incredibly detailed so they must use a lot of storage on the disc so I would not be surprised that we are advancing pretty quickly.

I found out today that Nintendo is dropping the price on the 3DS, their brand new hand held game system, from $250 to $170 – a massive price drop and very surprising given that the system is only weeks old.  We had talked about getting one a week ago and decided against it.  Boy am I glad.  I am definitely going to get one now when the price drop comes into effect on August 12th.

Medifast Status: Day 86, Down ~40.5lbs

I had to be up this morning for a seven thirty phone call.  It was the start of an extremely busy day.

I got in to work and ended up completely working through lunch.  I actually decided that I needed to completely fast today anyway.  I have been cheating too much on my diet and with that food that I had last night I decided that I just needed to completely reset my system and get myself back on track.  So I skipped all traces of food today and cut my caffeine intake way down as well.  Amazingly I really didn’t get hungry today anyway.

I spoke to the foundation consultants today.  They looked at pictures of the pillars and said that they might be able to do something and also recommended some other options too.  So we are going to try some things on our own and look into getting prices from some foundation places for drilled piers.  Might be a pretty big project but it sounds like we won’t have to worry about topping another $2,000.  Still a lot of surprise money to be spending.

I worked until six and then came home and worked on SAN, Windows and Linux PBX issues all night.  And by all night I mean past two in the morning.  What a long day.  Exhausting.

I really didn’t get to see the girls at all today.  It really sucked.  Tomorrow is going to be tough too.  At least the weekend is coming up soon and we are not planning on going anywhere this weekend.

Medifast Status: Day 85, Down ~40.5lbs

Today is Genghis Khan day for the Millers.  It is also our very first time getting baby sitters for our children.  A red letter day if there ever was one.

I went to work this morning and worked through lunch knowing that I was going to have to leave work early this afternoon.  I also skipped nearly all of my Medifast meals knowing that I was going to be significantly cheating on my plan tonight as well.

Dominica took the girls at around three o’clock out to Mansfield so that they could spend the evening with their great aunt and cousins out there.  Dominica dropped them off and snuck out of the house in the hopes that Liesl might not even notice that she was missing.  She made it out of the house without an incident.  Fingers crossed!

Dominica was running late so we had to drive to the evening’s event separately.  The Irving Performing Arts Center is hosting the Genghis Khan exhibit on tour from the Mongolian government and I have been wanting to go to see it for a while.  We are really excited that we managed to get someone to watch the girls so that we could go.  Dominica arrived only a few minutes after me and was there in time for the tour.

We are getting a private tour of the exhibit organized by La Cima.  One of the benefits of being in the club.  It was a good size crowd for the type of event that it was.  We might have had fifty people in our tour group.  Pretty impressive.

The tour was nice.  It was around 103F outside but inside the exhibit it was just 55F.  Very chilly.  We got to see the new Mongolian dancers fresh in from Washington D.C. too.  They were very good.

The tour was about two hours.  From there we went on to La Cima for a Mongolian themed dinner.  The food was quite good and the salads were very interesting – especially the addictive cole slaw.  The meal itself was a stir fry and ours, being meatless, was good but nothing very exotic.  Dessert, however, was really excellent.  It was a rice pudding type thing but with the rice nearly whole so more like what I would call sticky rice with raisins.  Then there was Mongolian fudge on the side which is very sweet but has no chocolate.  Mixing the two together is divine.

We couldn’t stay out too late as we needed to go pick up the girls.  We figured that Liesl was probably rather upset all evening and Mansfield is pretty far away.

It was between eight thirty and nine when we got to Mansfield.  Liesl was watching television with her cousins and as happy as could be and Luciana had fallen asleep.  Unbelievable.  And, it turns out, Liesl ate her first fried shrimp tonight and loved them!  In fact, once she tried breaded shrimp she had refused to eat anything else.  We are very excited that she has a new food to eat.

The report was that both girls did very well tonight.  Liesl played and played and was clearly very exhausted when we went to take her home.  She really got no nap today so she is really pushing her limits tonight.

We had to go back to the office and pick up my car.  That wasn’t very far out of the way.  It was late when we got home and it was straight to bed for everyone.

Medifast Status: Day 84, Down ~40.5lbs

Boy is it hot today.  More than 102 and here I am without air conditioning in my car.  Surprisingly I’m still not really feeling the heat.  I mean, it is hot and all, but you don’t get that stifling wall of heat that I remember in my childhood.

I came home for lunch today and spent the entire time, without any breaks, working on a database modification issue.  It went okay, just used up any free time that I had in which to relax.  Not exactly how I like to spend my lunches.  Dominica made me an omelette (my Firefox dictionary does not have omelette in it, what is up with that?) that I ate while I worked.  That is my meal for the day.

After work I came home and was on the phone for a little bit before Dan stopped in to check out the collapsing pillars out front.  He didn’t stay for long but he didn’t think that the pillars looked very good.  He agrees that we need to get a foundation person out to look into this right away.

Dominica had been playing Dragon Age: Origins today.  We have those new expansion packs that we recently downloaded so she found them and started in on the first one for about an hour.

After Dan left we packed up and went out shopping at GameStop where we sold back two older games for the PS3 that I have never even played and we picked up a stack of games including New Super Mario Bros., Epic Mickey, Dora’s Birthday Adventure and Sesame Street Counting all for the Wii which we recently got back and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the PS3.  Pretty much everything was used so it wasn’t that expensive.

Then we ran over to Walmart.  We needed a few basic supplies like food for Oreo and we got Liesl a new lamp and  a small storage Ottoman for our den / play room so that we can fill it with video games and stuff that have been sitting around the room.  Anything that helps us to keep the place clean is a big deal.

We stopped off at Panda Express and picked up dinner for Dominica.  Then we came home.

Dominica started playing Epic Mickey but discovered that it was scaring Liesl even right at the beginning and Liesl was asking to try her new Dora game.  So after a few minutes of Epic Mickey we put in the Dora game and Liesl begin her very first foray into the world of the Nintendo Wii and console video gaming.

Liesl did surprisingly well for her first time having to use a controller.  It took a bit of work and much like with Angry Birds she often wants to do her own thing that is not what the game wants her to do so she gets frustrated after not too long.  But she is clearly old enough for this type of game and with some work will be able to play it on her own in no time.  We are very excited to have our first child playing video games with us now!