Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 78, Down ~37.5lbs

We got up this morning early and unloaded our stuff from the U-Haul trailer and then loaded the trailer back up again.  It is crazy hot here so that was no fun.  Francesca pulled the truck and trailer around the back of the house in the alley and we moved everything through the garage from there.

Boy is our garage full of junk.  I can’t wait until we figure out how to deal with all of that stuff.  We need work done on the attic so that we can move most of this stuff up there.  A lot of it is just empty boxes, empty luggage, plastic bins, bins of wires or yarn and the like.  Nearly all stuff that would happily live up in the attic.  Some shelving on the far side of the garage and maybe a small shelf on the house side would take care of nearly everything else.  Much of the issue is just a horrible use of space and continuing sprawl caused by the lack of necessary space to move around in.  Like the fact that there is a large spool of insulation sitting in the middle of the floor – that could serve us far better in the attic than in the middle of the garage floor.

I got in to work and worked through lunch today.  The Grices left shortly after we had unloaded the trailer.

This evening I can home and Dominica and I discussed our La Cima membership.  For once she is less inclined to give it up than I am.  I am really disgusted by the changes that they have been making and don’t like where they are taking the club.  She decided that she should go in and get a look at it herself so we made reservations and went in for dinner.  We were the only people with reservations tonight and we pretty much had the club to ourselves.  Tuesday is the slowest night of the week.

We dined in the Lakeside room tonight.  We were the first to dinner and only after quite some time did one couple come and join us sitting at the farthest point of the room behind a support so we never even saw each other.  They left before we did too so we were alone for the end of our meal as well.

Our chef, Chris, knew that we were coming tonight and put together a dinner special just for us.  We had grilled red snapper on sauteed vegetables with a butter and oil sauce. It was excellent.  We got to see the construction work on the new bar that was just put together today.  It will be about two weeks before that is done but you can see what they are doing with it now.

Medifast Status: Day 77, Down ~37.5lbs

We had only just arrived in Texas around three this morning.  No one was looking forward to getting up today.  The Grices decided that they would stay in Carrollton with us all day today and return to Houston tomorrow so that they could relax for a bit.

I weighed in this morning and to my horror, but not totally a surprise, the scales here in Texas are ten pounds heavier than they were in New York.  I had guessed at this as I suddenly lost ten pounds upon arriving at dads.  So pretty much my diet has been stalled for weeks with me losing around around half a pound a week while thinking that I was doing my best ever.  So that is pretty depressing.  Now I really, really need to get back on the wagon and work hard to keep the weight loss going.  No more fooling around thinking that it is going well.  I have to be very strict again.

For lunch today Dan and I went to La Cima.  Now I get to see how the construction has been going since I have been in New York for nearly a month.  Surprisingly it did not seem like all that much work had been done since I initially left.  There are changes, definitely, but I was thinking that it would be nearly done.  Maybe it is and I just can’t tell being an IT guy and not a contractor.  The private room changes are done but the “touchdown rooms” are not started yet.  The dining room hasn’t been touched.

Where our big disappointment came in was in discovering that the lounge and casual dining space no longer had the one large television – which I hated on its own, why does an upscale private club need a big television – but now had five with four of them being on the one wall facing outward of the club.  Not cool.  It is very trashy and not at all what I want from my private club experience.  We love the lounge space and had made a big deal about how we didn’t want it to be a big television and video game space like the Tower Club had done.  We were promised that there would be no video games.  But guess what, not only is there a Wii like the Tower Club but a Playstation 3 as well.

This is really not the feel that we had been hoping for in our club.  ClubCorp is definitely moving in a different direction that we had hoped.  With the renovations we had been hopeful for a classier club, but this is definitely a move downmarket.  I’m certainly feeling less inclined to keep our membership at La Cima less than at any point since we joined there.  The club is catering to a different group of customers than us.  Admittedly, the biggest group of members are the lunch crowd – they work in the building and use the club for lunch.  But I can’t see how having the televisions will make them happy either.  Only a few spots in the club can see the televisions comfortably and those spots are slated to be set up to face away from the televisions making the televisions themselves nothing but really annoying reflections making the view from the lounge less than spectacular.

This evening I came home and after the younger kids fell asleep Dominica, Francesca and Madeline went out to one of those dinner and a movie theaters to watch the final of the Harry Potter series, the eighth movie.  I had wanted to go but we just could not figure out how Madeline and I could manage to go tonight and Dominica and Francesca go after us.  So I didn’t get to see it.  I’ll just be waiting for it to come out on BluRay now.  Probably won’t be long since they will be frantic to make as much as possible from the sale of the discs now that all of the other seven are out and a lot of people are likely waiting on the eight disc set before purchasing.

So Emily and I stayed at the house and watched the remake of The Parent Trap.  What a great movie that is.  So sad that the star than it made completely fell apart a few years later.  It really is one of the truly great Disney classics.  I first saw the remake of The Parent Trap with Nathan at the Silver Lake Drive In in the summer of 1998 back in Perry when I was still living out in that area.

Medifast Status: Day 76, Down ~38.5lbs

I woke up on my own pretty early this morning.  We are in Terre Haute, Indiana.  Nowhere near as far along the route as we had hoped that we would be by this morning.  I had originally been hoping that we would be in Missouri or, at least, central Illinois.

We were rushing to get up and moving today.  We are all dragging and no one wants to get back in to the vehicles but we want to get the drive over too.  With so many people to get loaded up it just takes forever to do anything.

Today’s drive was better than yesterday’s.  We moved somewhat faster, but not fast.  Everything was going okay until we hit St. Louis, Missouri.

My car got caught behind a large truck going into St. Louis across the Mississippi River and we were stuck taking an exit that took us through downtown rather than going straight on to I44 that would carry us across the state.  The other car made the turn and was ahead of us now.  Emily, Liesl and I had to meander through St. Louis for a while to work our way back to the highway so we were ten miles or more behind everyone else.  It was kind of nice getting to actually see St. Louis, though.  I’ve always wanted to see it so it was not a completely bad thing.

Getting back to the highway was not the problem.  The real issue came in that the other car got caught in traffic when an RV lost control and hit a bridge causing the highway to get shut down.  It was not shut down for them and they were able to sneak through the one open lane before the police completely closed the road.  We, on the other hand, got caught a few miles back in completely stopped traffic where we sat for two hours!

While we were waiting for the highway to open back up the other car drove on and went to do a bathroom and gas stop to kill some time – good thing that it was their car and not ours since it is theirs that needs to get fuel twice as often as we do.  Then, since they had so much time to kill, they went on to a caverns and did the tourist thing while waiting for us.  In reality they probably should have just gone on without us as we travel much faster than them on the road and take half as many stops.  We would not have caught up for a while but likely would have caught up somewhere near the Oklahoma border but have been, overall, an hour ahead or so.

Eventually they turned us around on the highway and we had to head back up the way that we came and get on to side roads to run alongside I44 – we were actually on historic Route 66 – and eventually we were back onto the highway.  We met up with everyone else at a McDonald’s farther down the highway.  We had ended up being fifteen minutes or so ahead of them by that point.

The rest of the drive was uneventful.  We were completely exhausted.  I did manage to listen to the rebroadcast of the Prairie Home Companion show that we had heard the end of last night.  I also got Emily to try listening to Wil Wheaton read Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” which she, being nine, has never read but neither have Dominica nor Francesca!  I can’t believe how both of them, being such ardent readers, never read such an American classic.  This is probably my third time reading it myself.  I can’t remember when I first read it but I was probably around Emily’s age.  I’m not sure where my original copy has gone – probably lost on a shelf at dad’s house somewhere.

We didn’t get to finish Tom Sawyer but we did make it about two hours through the book which is less than four hours long.  Good progress.

It was late, very late, when we finally got back to Carrollton.  Probably two or three in the morning and later yet by the time that we all finally managed to get to sleep.  Everyone except for Francesca and I got a lot of sleep on the drive.  Emily, I know, was asleep for easily more than half of the drive both days.  So she is very well rested.

I did manage to listen to the bulk of “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris” on the drive.  I’m not quite done yet but getting pretty close.   I have really been learning a lot from this book about American and French nineteenth century history.  I know how a far better understanding of the second French empire and how that came about, how it fell and the Franco-Prussian War as well as a much better appreciation for the art and literature of this period.

I am very glad to be home.  The house is still standing and most of the plants have loved having the house as warm as it has been.  It took me a while to get things like the Internet and phones turned back on since we had absolutely everything unnecessary shut down while we were gone.

Now for some sleep.  I will be in the office tomorrow and the Grices are planning to drive back down to Houston right away in the morning.

Medifast Status: Day 75, Down ~38.5lbs

We got up and showered this morning and were more or less ready when the Toccos arrived with the truck and trailer.  Dominica’s parents drove out with Francesca so that she would not have to be alone with all of the kids while driving.  It took about an hour and a half to load the trailer.  We got the necessarily items in and discovered, as we had pretty much expected, that there was a lot of spare space available so we scrambled to load up things from dad’s house that have been waiting for a truck to bring them down to Texas.

We got the largest item – the seven foot square bed that Art had made for Dominica and I for our house in Geneseo.  I really miss that house and that bed and the bedroom large enough to hold it.  That remains my favourite house after all of these years.  Sure, our current house is a full stand alone house and not attached but we had an end unit and felt mostly private and we had that huge basement and everything was new and clean.  The space was so well laid out for the way that we used it.  It was great.  Maybe I am just nostalgic because it was our first house.

It is hard not to be nostalgic, though, when you are loading up the stuff that you owned while living in that house.  I can’t believe that we sold that house so long ago and that we are still living without our stuff that got packed up when we moved out of there.  We’ve been living out of boxes for as long as I can remember, it seems.  We lived sans house for a while, then had the house in Peekskill and then lived in the apartment in Texas and now have had our own Texan house for eight months and still we don’t have the stuff that we packed up while moving out of our first house!

In many ways that house in Geneseo seems like it is from so long ago.  It seems like forever.  Dominica drove past it early this week to sneak a peak at it.  She was not going to tell me until I told her that I did the same thing last night on my way back down from Bushnell’s Basin.  The garage got repainted – apparently they didn’t like the Burgundy wine colour that Dominica had used out there.  The cheap, temporary screen door that we had put up between the garage and the house so that we could get a breeze when the garage door was open is still there, though, and still not painted.  The development was completed some time ago, but this was my very first time driving through it when all of the houses were built.  Our house was part of the first two buildings to go up in 2002-2003 and they only finished the project a year or two ago, I think.

We managed to get the bed, as I had said, which was the huge item that we’ve been struggling to figure out how to move all of these years.  We got the Christmas tree that Dominica has been pining for as well – now we will have it up for the first time since we lived in Geneseo, five years without a Christmas tree at home.  Both Dominica and my golf clubs were able to fit as were several plastic bins which mostly contained books, of course.  This time not really work material but novels, comic books, knitting books and the like.  The other big thing in the trailer for us, but not coming from dad’s house, is an antique dresser (well, an old one at least) that Dominica’s grandfather had been working on refinishing before he died.  It is already stripped and just needs to be stained.  Liesl needs a dresser so this is going to be hers.

So it was around nine thirty when our party set off for our long drive.  First off to Batavia and on to the New York Thruway from there.  We are talking the I70 route that ultimately takes us through Oklahoma.  Emily and Liesl are riding with me in the Acadia.  Everyone else is riding with Francesca in the Sequoia which is pulling the trailer.

It took hardly any time before we discovered just how quickly the Sequoia is going through fuel.  Francesca is having to stop every one hundred and eighty miles to fuel back up.  Between all of those people packed in there, the car top carrier and that large U-Haul trailer they are just burning fuel like there is no tomorrow.  We are barely going through a quarter of a tank before they have to fill up again.  Stopping twice as often for fuel is not going to speed up this trip nor is needing to drive about ten miles an hour slower than normal.

I had bought and downloaded “Anne of Green Gables” to my iPod in the hopes that Emily would enjoy listening to it in the car.  She isn’t into books but I was thinking that in the car when there was nothing better to do that she might find it enjoyable and Anne is such a good book I was hoping to get her hooked.  I should not have been surprised, though, that before our heroine even made her first appearance Emily had fallen asleep finding the book as boring as anything.

The one thing that I did manage to find, thanks to the wonders of XM Satellite radio, was Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion.  I turned on PHC right as they were kicking off the News from Lake Wobegon and she managed to listen to that – right at the end of the show.  It’s only fifteen minutes but at least it was something.

We did okay on today’s drive although the progress was painfully slow.  Ohio took forever to cross.  We were in Ohio around noon and it must have taken us nine hours or more to get across.  Crazy.  Every stop turns into a massive food, shopping, bathroom break that lasts easily forty five minutes.

We stopped on the west side of Indianapolis and it was late.  We were all tired so I called ahead to Terre Haute and made a reservation at the Econolodge at exit 7.  We figured that that would be only two hours or less away and that we had just enough energy to get there and collapse for the night.  Both Francesca and I are completely exhausted.  This slow driving and trying to stay together and frequent, long breaks is really taking a toll on the drivers.

We were at mile maker twenty on Indiana’s I70 westbound when we ran into stopped traffic.  And I mean stopped traffic.  We sat for an hour before looking up the news.  The Terre Haute news was reporting that the road had been closed due to a truck fire and that it was closed for the night.  The road is closed but no one is being diverted?  The accident was five hours before we arrived and they didn’t have a single cop or emergency vehicle, cone, sign or otherwise.  Indiana DOT just left the road wide open for everyone to just get stuck in the unannounced disaster.  The backup was already seventeen miles deep when we got there and much deeper, probably nineteen or twenty miles, by this time.

Finally I called the state police and they claimed that the road had been opened ahead of us but that there were so many people trying to get off of the shoulders and median that it was causing the traffic to move through very slowly.  That seems unlikely as there is no movement whatsoever.

We sat for many more hours before we were told by a trucker that they had heard that the police were not going to look to open the road until seven in the morning!  There are thousands of people stuck out on this road and the police are doing nothing.  The road is closed but no one is being told.  This is insane.

We finally figured out that all of the traffic that we were seeing in the eastbound lanes were actually people from our traffic jam driving through the median and heading back in the other direction.  All movement forward on our side was caused by the same thing.

We finally gave up and drove through the median ourselves for a while and headed back to exit 23, got fuel and drove to Terre Haute via the empty backroads.  Empty because the police weren’t warning anyone that the road was closed ahead.  All of these empty, deserted Indiana roads easily able to handle the overnight I70 traffic but being left empty for no apparent reason.

It was nearly four in the morning when we finally reached the Econolodge where we had reservations.  They said that we were lucky that even though we had given a credit card and got the usual threats about not being able to cancel that they were about to give away our rooms anyway – they were just giving us twenty more minutes before they left us with nowhere to stay even knowing that we just be out in that traffic jam.  At least they hadn’t done it but we were pretty furious that they were planning on it.  We needed those rooms pretty badly at this point.

The reservation person that took our room reservation (the same one who made such a point of telling me that I couldn’t cancel my room at this point and that I would be billed if I showed up or not) didn’t let the Econolodge desk know that we needed a pack and play for one of the rooms.  So, of course, they did not have one – anywhere.  It took nearly an hour before we had everything squared away and two rooms that we could get into with enough space for everyone to sleep.  They did eventually find a pack and play for Clara.

I walked Oreo and it was straight to bed for me.  I was totally exhausted.  Emily, Liesl, Oreo and I slept in one room and everyone else piled into the other.  We are going to be in rough shape for the second part of the drive tomorrow.

Medifast Status: Day 74, Down ~38.5lbs

Today is our last day in New York, probably for the rest of 2011.  Sounds weird when you say it like that.  Dad is planning on coming down to Texas again sometime soon and Dominica is contemplating another trip to New York without me – but she also wants to go to Walt Disney World this year so I don’t know how she plans to pull that all off in the same year.  That is a lot of travel and traveling to New York with two small children in tow is not going to be easy in any way, shape or form.

Today is pretty much just a work day for me.  Dominica did a bit of packing today as we have to leave early tomorrow morning.  Francesca and the kids are supposed to be meeting us at dad’s house around eight in the morning and from there we are heading straight on to Texas.  We are planning to stop at some point and sleep – not going to attempt to push straight on through on this trip since Francesca is pulling a trailer behind her.  We did straight through with the trailer two years ago when Francesca and I did it but we had both drivers in one vehicle making it relatively easy.  We have to drive separate vehicles this time so that would just be way too hard.

Later on in the afternoon the Richardson clan came over to visit and see the girls.  I got to see them very little because it is Friday and I had a lot of work to do.  So I was in the office nearly all day and just popped out from time to time to see everyone.