Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 29, Down 21.5lbs

Back to the office today.  It is Tuesday, so that means another four day week.  Two four day work weeks in a row.  Rockin’!

It is a hot one today.  Very, very hot.  After work I hit the Grapevine Municipal Golf Course for my golf lesson that I’ve been doing for several weeks.  Boy was it ever not.  The sweat was just pouring off of me the entire time making it very hard to play at all.  My instructor said that I was showing real improvement at least.  I am enjoying the lessons and can tell that I am swinging far better than I was before the lessons.  I hope to be able to do this again next year when I plan to take lessons with Dominica so that we can start playing golf as a family.  Dominica and I used to love playing golf together back in Ithaca before she hurt her back.

Medifast Status: Day 28, Down ~21lbs

Today is Memorial Day and we have no plans at all.  I am home from work and just have to watch the email today to see if anyone really needs me which is nice.  I have nothing scheduled so I spent most of the day actually relaxing, which I really needed.

We did some rearranging in the house today.  We took apart the couch (the “theatre seating”) and moved the mid-section of it into the play room and pushed the ends of the couch together.  Now there is a ton of space around the couch rather than either end of it being really close to the walls and, as soon as we can move the television into the other room, the mid-section will become seating for Dominica and I can use the other chair that is already in there.  That room is looking pretty busy now but the living room itself is looking far nicer.

I got to play quite a bit of Fable III today and I am making incredible progress.  It feels like I am flying through the game.  Much faster than Fable I or II felt.  It is hard to really know as you never know what lies ahead but I get the feeling that I am nearly halfway done with it already.  Of course, this weekend was a really good chance for me to plow into it right from the beginning, but still.

So far we really like Fable III.  Dominica is really enjoying watching it.  It plays out much like a movie, but like Fable II did.  There is no doubt that it is quite a different game than its predecessor.  The game play has changed quite a bit even if the look and feel have not.  This one is much less intense from a game play perspective but moreso from a drama and storytelling perspective.

Medifast Status: Day 27, Down ~21lbs

This morning we got up and headed on down to Mansfield to hang out with the family by the pool.  It was quite a hot day and most of us spent the day under the canopy while Liesl went to the pool and swam for a really long time.  She had a lot of fun.  Unfortunately I got paged out while we were at the party and we had to leave quite suddenly to drive back home so that I could support the office just to get home and find out that the systems that I had been paged out for were not mine, not our businesses and had already been taken care of 🙁  So I put in a few hours working anyway but we could have spent the afternoon with the family instead.

So we ended up having the afternoon at home quietly as a family.  Liesl slept a lot being exhausted from all of her time in the pool.  I put in some time on Fable: The Lost Chapters and wrapped up the last of The Lost Chapters which mostly take place after the ending of the original game and add a little more depth to the story line.  I am very thankful to have the game finally over and done with, nearly two years and six months to the day from when I started it when Liesl was just a few weeks older than Luciana is now.

There is something about having a new baby girl that makes me want to play Fable, I guess.  Maybe it is nostalgia since I played it so much in those first few weeks when Liesl was born.

It felt really good to finish Fable.  After two and a half years I have now completed a total of two video games on the XBOX 360.  A little silly, I suppose, for such a long period of time but I’m on a good trajectory now.

We immediately started in on Fable III.  I got the game for Christmas this past year (2010) and we had not had time to even start it yet – neither having the XBOX unpacked nor having finished the previous Fable game which I was determined to complete before moving on to the next one in the series.   We have been looking forward to Fable III for a really long time.  The upside to waiting a little while before starting it is that there is already some downloadable content for it that we can get and use right from the beginning.

We only played Fable III for a little while this evening but we seemed to really be progressing through it.  It is moving very quickly compared to either of the first two installments.

Medifast Status: Day 26, Down ~21lbs

I had a super early meeting this morning for several hours started at five o’clock.  A very long morning indeed.  I had several hours of work in before Dominica even woke up.

This evening we went to La Cima for dinner, my third meal there this week.  We ate in the lounge which works out great with Liesl and Luciana.  Watson joined us for dinner.  This is one of our last chances to hit the club before the menu changes to coincide with the new construction and the twenty-fiften anniversary events.  So, even though we are a bit tired of the old menu, we are taking advantage of some of our favourite dishes before they are no longer officially on the menu.

Items that we will miss most are the southwest salmon, the creme brulee, bbq shrimp and grits, salmon tartar, crab cakes, goat cheese salad, salmon in beet jus and the flat bread appetizer.  A lot of people are really going to miss the chocolate cake too, but I never get that so it is okay for me.  The key lime tart, my personal favourite dessert, will be continuing so that is all that I really need as I can get creme brulee pretty much anywhere.  Dominica is really going to miss the bread pudding, though.  It has been extra tough for me since it has been a month since I was last allowed to have most of the stuff that I like the most and it will continue to be a very long time until I can really enjoy the menu.  The new menu will be more summer-oriented with lighter fare as well which will be easier for me to leverage on my diet.

Medifast Status: Day 25, Down ~21lbs (one and one half stone)

Another quiet day.  I managed to go in to La Cima for lunch today which was my only notable event today.

After work we hung out and played some Fable: The Lost Chapters with the family before turning in for the night.  Dominica and I are looking forward to seeing the very end of the game.  Fable has been my main game on the XBOX for a very, very long time.  It’s been over a year.  In fact, it has been over two years.  Over two and a half years!  That’s just crazy.

No wonder I feel like that game had dragged on forever.  We started playing Fable II when we first got the XBOX 360, just weeks before Liesl was born.  Fable II was such a hit that we were done with it in no time.  It wasn’t a long game and in the weeks after Liesl was born we had a lot of time at home while she was so young so it got played a lot.  Back then I went straight from Fable II into Fable I but very quickly the free time dried up and I never managed to get close to finishing it even though it was decently short.