Sheep Guarding Llama

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!

Medifast Status: Day 92, Down ~42.5lbs  (Three stones!)

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Boy was I tired when the alarm went off at five this morning.  It took me a minute to figure out what was going on.  But I got up and got right in to the shower.  I was out the door and in to the office just a few minutes after six.  Half an hour earlier than I was scheduled to be at work.  Makes it even easier to get caught up, though.  There is always so much to be done, SGL not withstanding.

It was an incredibly slow morning at the office.  Very quiet.  And it passed like molasses.

I decided today that my York94 website that I made in 2007 as a way for my classmates to reconnect online is no longer needed and as my registration for the domain runs out later this week I am simply going to allow it to expire.  I’ve been running that site for four years now.  So anyone attempting to use email there will get nothing.  But I’m pretty sure that no one has used those email addresses in years.

It is so hot today that they have announced rolling blackouts through Texas during the heat of the afternoons today through Thursday.  Yesterday it was so hot that it was 103F at nine at night!  Now that is hot.  It is 104 as I write this and we are expected to hit 108 later today and 109 tomorrow.  What is amazing is that I was just sitting outside reading a few minutes ago and was thinking how nice it was and that it must be a lot cooler today.  Apparently not.  The level to which I have adjusted to Texas is truly unbelievable.

I went home at lunch today, hung out with the family but did not eat as Dominica wanted to eat our meal at dinner instead, and then returned to the office for a few hours.

The final vote for the raising of the American debt ceiling was passed by the Senate this afternoon and signed by the president shortly thereafter.  So we are out of the woods, for the moment.  This current crisis has been averted and history will very likely completely forget how close we came to disaster today.

On my way home from work I stopped off at MediFast to pick up food supplies.  Now that Dominica is on MediFast too we are going through the food much faster and she eats completely different food that I do.  I mostly just have the shakes and sometimes the bars.  Dominica focuses on the oatmeal and puffs.  So we needed more.

I was pretty tired all day and this evening I was struggling just to stay awake while hanging out with the girls.  The house is hot, we are keeping it at 84F in the evenings now – that allows the air conditioning unit to turn off from time to time.  We cool it down when we go to bed.  Today is the first day that it was so warm that I had to switch to wearing shorts in the house.

Dominica has nearly all of the cabinet and trim painting that she wanted to do completed.  We are looking into hiring painters to do the bulk of the house.  This was more than a week long project just to do what we did and we pretty much want the entire house to be painted.  Having professionals do it will take no time at all and will likely look far better than if we tried to do it ourselves.  And as there is just so much it would cause us to be painting continuously for months.

We did very little this evening.  I did a tiny amount of work.  We watched very little television – maybe two episodes of 8 Simple Rules and mostly just were puttering around the house.

Luciana got her first big cut tonight – she got clipped on her right thumb by the finger nail clippers.  It was pretty bad.  She cried and cried and we couldn’t stop the bleeding for probably fifteen minutes.

I went to bed at ten.  I was just so tired.  I have to be up at five in the morning so while that sounds early, it really is not considering that I will only get seven hours of potential sleep time after having only gotten three last night.

The Grices are coming up sometime this week.  Maybe on Friday but Dominica is pushing to have them come up earlier.  We don’t know yet when they will be driving up to visit.  We are getting Madeline and Emily for almost two weeks too.