Sheep Guarding Llama

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!

Medifast Status: Day 83, Down ~40.5lbs

Today is another day of cleaning and working around the house for us.  I got our stereo system out of the garage and got it set up (but not plugged in) in the den so that at least it is where it is finally going to go rather than sitting out in the garage in a box.  Now that we have our speakers from dad’s house and the stereo receiver from the garage we are able to see how they fit in that room.  And the verdict is that they don’t.  They don’t fit at all.  We have no idea how we are going to make these, or any other, speakers work in that room.

The first order of business is really to get the television mounted up on the wall.  Having the television on the TV stand on the floor is just not working.  That is a horrible arrangement.  It takes up a lot of floor space and it makes it hard to see.  So hopefully in the next two weeks we will be able to get that mounted.  Once that is mounted the plan is to have some shelves added beneath it to hold the receiver and video game gear in a nice, neat fashion.  Then that should clear up the floor giving us more floor space in which to spread out.  I think that Liesl will want to use that space to play a lot.  It will look much nicer.  But even once we do that we have no idea where to place the speakers.  We are stumped there.  There just isn’t a good space in that weird corner with the plants, the brick pillar and the buffet.

Dominica’s project for the day was to paint the wood paneling on the front of the bar.  The bar, where it is against the living room, that is the part at which one would sit to drink at the bar, has always been a very dark wood paneling which is very dated and very dark in a part of the house where we are always struggling to have enough light.  So Dominica painted it a bright white today and boy does it look a lot better.  She did the first coat around noon, the second at four and the last coat around eight tonight.  Already you can tell that the living room is much brighter and feels cleaner and more modern.

After this we are really looking forward to having the same dark wood paneling painted on the buffet and in the bar area itself.  We can tell that it will really make a difference once we get into those areas too.

Medifast Status: Day 82, Down ~40.5lbs

This morning I walked outside to do something and looked down and noticed that the sidewalk coming up to our front door had cracked.  I knew that this crack was not there before and I knew exactly what this meant.  This is the shift that I have known was coming since we first looked at the house but no one had believed me that it was going to be a problem.  I looked up and, to my horror, I was right.  Three of the four brick pillars supporting the roof over our walkway and begun to significantly sink into the yard and were leaning away from the house even more than previously and the mortar had given way, bricks were loose many feet above our heads and the roof had broken away and was buckling from the lack of support from the pillars.

So this is not going to be fun.  At all.

Today was our day to do work around the house.  It really needed it.  The house is a total mess, mostly caused by us getting in from New York and just dropping everything where we were and not getting a chance to do anything about it all week.  That and Liesl wanted her “tunnel” taken out so we have that set up in the living room again.  Boy that thing is huge.

We got a lot of the house cleaned up today and then worked on the garage too.  This morning we got the unfinished dresser out and set it up on the back patio so that Dominica could work on staining it.  It is incredibly hot outside which is good for the stain itself but it does not make it a fun job for Dominica.  She was melting out there.

It took several hours but the dresser appears to have turned out really nice.  It needs to sit outside in the heat tonight so that it will be ready to come inside tomorrow.  Liesl has never had any real furniture of her own other than her bed (which is going to become Luciana’s) so this will be nice for her.

I got the Nintendo Wii all hooked up today.  It is nice to have that back.  I popped in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and played that for about an hour tonight.  I have never actually played a Zelda game before for more than maybe fifteen minutes except for Ocarina on the Wii about a year and a half ago.  I know how unbelievable that sounds, but it is true.  It has just never been my thing and I never got into it even though we own what must be nearly the definitive collection of the games and that Ocarina of Time is one of Dominica’s all time favourite games.  So I decided that I needed to give this one a real try and see how it is.  I’ve seen it listed as having more than one hundred hours of gameplay in it.

We also played just a little bit of Super Mario Galaxy.  Funny enough, this is a game that we still had in shrink wrap when the Ralstons borrowed the Wii.  So even though we have owned it for probably two years we had never played it, ever.

This evening Dominica made some popcorn and we settled in to watch the latest Harry Potter movie on BluRay.  It was late when we started, after Liesl had gone to bed, so we were pretty tired.  We only made it halfway before we were too tired and headed off to bed ourselves.