Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

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!