Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 36, Down ~25lbs

Slight progress on my diet today.  Just a tiny bit but as long as it is visible it keeps me going.

Worked at the office today and came home to spend time with the girls at lunch.  Boy am I glad that I am able to do that.  I get a lot of quality time with the girls because I am home when they are very much awake and Liesl, at least, tends to nap while I am in the office in the afternoon so we continue to get maximum time together.  I feel bad that I was home full time when Liesl was born and am not able to be with Luciana.  So I am working as hard as I can to get quality time with her through improved coordination.

This evening we decided to do La Cima for dinner.  It turns out that this is our last chance to eat from the old menu that we have gotten so used to over the past year.  Time now to say goodbye to our culinarily familiar friends and look forward to soon to be new items on the new menu that arrives shortly.

Medifast Status: Day 35, Down ~24.5lbs

Another day of dieting without visible results.  I know that most people don’t see diet results day to day but it sure is nice to get up in the morning and realize that you are lighter than the day before.  Really makes you think hard about going off of your diet at all when you know that it is working every day.

Normal day at the office.  Came home for lunch and spent some time with the girls.

This evening Dominica decided that she really wanted to go out to eat at BJ’s Brewhouse so we drove up there.  We both got the southwest salads which were really good.  I’m probably not supposed to be eating avocado but it is just so tasty.  The booths at BJs are huge which makes it really easy to go out with the girls.  Liesl even insisted on sitting between Dominica and Luciana all on one side of the table and they fit just fine.  It was a nice evening out and both girls were very well behaved making it quite easy to eat out – even at a crowded restaurant.  It was a nice change of pace.  Since I’ve been on Medifast we have been struggling to find variety in what we are eating.

Medifast Status: Day 34, Down ~24.5lbs

Finally today I have another weight drop on MediFast.  These days with the big drops (two and a half pounds, today) are really encouraging.  Going for days without seeing anything at all is really frustrating.  I am past the days of the big, sudden drops in weight and am now dealing with the long, slow journey through tiny weekly drops in weight that will stretch on for months and months.

Today is Sunday an we managed to have a day that was pretty relaxing as a family.  I am plowing right through Fable III now.  Dominica is really enjoying watching that.  We’ve waited so long to be able to play it that we are just shooting right through as fast as we can.

I’ve seen a lot of people posting about this problem but it is very hard to find a good resolution.  Here is what the error will typically look like:

filer1:~# drbdadm secondary r0
/dev/drbd0: State change failed: (-12) Device is held open by someone
Command 'drbdsetup 1 secondary' terminated with exit code 11

You will typically run into this scenario when attempting to force a DRBD primary node into a secondary status for testing or manual failover purposes.  This is a common task.  This error could, in some cases, be triggered by a process that is attempting to use the device in question.  But I find this to be rather unlikely.

With DRBD, most people are running Linux’ LVM volume manager on top of DRBD.  LVM, if still active, will keep DRBD from moving into a secondary mode.  If we know this then the problem is easy to solve.  The vgchange command will allow us to deactivate the volume group in question so that DRBD can successfully change the state of the system.  The “-an” option is used for this.

vgchange -an /dev/drbd0

Most likely this will resolve your error. Obviously use your own volume group name.

Medifast Status: Day 33, Down ~22lbs

Today is my dad’s sixty-fifth birthday.

The big move was moving the television from the fireplace into the girls’ playroom (aka “the den”, aka “the dining room.”)  Having the television in the living room has been driving me crazy.  It makes the house look awful and it causes that large, main section of the house to become Liesl’s playroom which is a bit of a disaster.  Her toys end up sprawling all over the house and it is all that anyone ever sees when they look at our home.

Getting the television and a bit of the furniture moved into the playroom (which we did the other day) really makes the living room feel open and clean (or cleaner, anyway.)  There is lots of room to move around now and the house feels much more open and bigger.  It also causes us to really use a room that we have never spent time in before now.  It’s kind of like getting a free room.

We really have shifted our usage patterns in our house pretty significantly from when we first moved in.  It used to be that I worked from the back bedroom as my makeshift office and we would watch Netflix from our bedroom – all in the “private” wing of the house.  Then we moved to the living room (middle of the house) for entertainment.  Then my office was completed and I started working out of the new office at the far extreme point of the house from the “old” office.  Now we have shifted our entertainment area from the middle of the house to being right next to the new office.  So we have shifted completely from using the south side of the house to the north.

We did a bit of redding up as well as Liesl’s sprawling disaster needed to be handled.  What a mess the living room turns into practically overnight.  It is amazing.  She loves to just take every container of toys that she owns and empty it all over the living room and the play room – not to mention her bedroom and ours as well and sometimes our bathroom.