Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 81, Down ~40.5lbs

It is apparently a La Cima themed week for us.  Dominica saw today’s menu and decided that she was coming down with the girls to join me for lunch again.  They have just had a really good menu this week and we’ve been completely unable to resist using the club again.

This afternoon we got a panicked communique from our renters back in Peekskill, New York.  Apparently there are several issues going on at the house including a broken door, wasps, a water stain, a running toilet and some exterior painting issues.  These things just never end, it would seem.

So we spent a bit of the day just attempting to coordinate work up in Peekskill.  That was stressful and not fun at all.

I worked late this evening and then went home for a short night with the family.  We are going to be home all weekend just dealing with stuff around the house.  And around the other house, apparently, too.

Medifast Status: Day 80, Down ~37.5lbs

Eighty days on Medifast.  It really does not seem like it has been all that long.  But looking back, it sure has.  I can barely remember what food is like anymore.  It’s not that I am hungry very often but boy do I crave normal food.  I really miss being able to eat.

I skipped lunch today and just stayed at work all day.  I’m still struggling to get caught up from having been out of town.  I’m pretty exhausted and looking forward to the weekend coming up at home.

We stayed in again tonight.  Just stayed home and relaxed.  I brought home dinner from Rockfish so that we could just eat and take it easy.

Medifast Status: Day 79, Down ~37.5lbs

I sent the menu over to Dominica this morning from La Cima and she decided that she wanted to bring the girls down and go eat there again.  They are on a roll this week.

This evening we just stayed in and spent a quiet evening at home.  We’ve been watching 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter – the television show that John Ritter did and passed away while filming the second season.  Neither of us have ever seen it and we have both wanted to and the first two seasons are available on Hulu Plus in HD so we have been watching it there.

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.