СВЕТИ ГЕОРГИMedifast Status: Day 276, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

I was dragging when I pulled myself out of bed at six this morning.  I showered and got into the office for Non-Farm Payroll.  Really good numbers this morning.  Very good and far better than expected.  It would appear, at least according to unemployment, that the US economy is really making a recovery.  One good month only does so much but this was one amazing month.

Medifast Status: Day 275, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

We stayed up late and I am paying the price for it today.  I am very tired and dragging heavily.  Dominica is really tired too.  It is going to be a long day.

The weather is a little cooler today but still pretty nice.  I cannot believe that we survived January without any snow at all and only about two days of frost.  Now it is February and we have been having spring weather for a week already.  We have had the windows open and no need for jackets at all.  This is wonderful.  It is odd, though, having no winter at all.  The last two years we have been in Texas but we saw snow and got that “winter feeling” which helps us to mentally reset and remember when it is.

But with zero snow and no freezing temperatures it is pretty hard as a New Yorker to wrap my brain around the fact that it is warming up already.  It just feels wrong.  There is little chance now that we will see any snow this year.  We are past the worst month and it is already so warm that it would be surprising if it went anywhere near snow temperatures after this.

Work was super slow today.  It was great.  I was in the office all day.  Went home for lunch and hung out with Liesl.  Luciana slept through me being home.  Dominica made cauliflower soup which is one of my favourite foods these days.  I love it.  Tastes so rich yet is incredibly light and healthy.

I was able to leave work right at five this evening.  In reality I could have skipped all afternoon and probably no one would have noticed.  It was really that dead.  Very strange.

On my way home this evening I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s American classic “On the Road: The Original Scroll.”  It was a lot longer than it should have been and I must say that, overall, it is one of the worst books that I have ever read.  It is written as if by a third grader who had spent some time serving in the merchant marines.  Funny enough, Kerouac had served in the merchant marines.

The book is not really a story but simply a highly descriptive, but mostly unintelligible, journal about Kerouac and his friend Neal and how they drove across the country several times in the late 1940s.  There is no plot and not a single character that would not have been improved by having been run over by a bus.  Kerouac bounces between being homeless, living in a tent or just being another random loser living in his mother’s basement.  His story generates only the slightest interest because it takes place in the 1940s, an era that I know little about and reading a journal from that period helps to put the world into a little better perspective.  But the journal of an interesting person would probably have been a lot better.

How “On the Road” became a classic I will never know.  Why anyone published it, again, I have no idea.  The book is considered the foundation of the beat movement and later the hippy movement.  But as the book is nothing but a journal about losers Kerouac and Neal Cassady and doesn’t portray them as anything but the most unflattering light and makes everything about them as poignantly pathetic as bad prose can do it is confusing how this tome could have influenced anything.  Not only does the book point out what losers these two were and the circle of friends that they had but it is also written so poorly that the writing style alone points to Kerouac as being completely unprepared even for a high school English course.  Apparently his typing skills were not too bad, however.

What makes Kerouac so sad is that he actually tried to work and even went to college hoping to be a writer.  And this is considered his best work.  There could be no greater insult to a person.

In reading a book like this about figures who were such great influences of counterculture it is amazing to learn that they were really nothing but a few homeless guys with a notepad.  There was no great purpose.  There was no plan.  There was no success.  Kerouac really was just a guy who lived with his mother who sometimes let him ride along on people’s road trips.  If he were alive today he would play World of Warcraft and never see daylight and whine to his mom that they were out of Doritos.  Neal Cassady was a small time criminal and parking lot attendant who couldn’t keep a job.  Both died, as they lived, penniless and pointless.

While I was reading about the book after having finished it, I was saddened to learn that a movie is currently being made about it.  Can any work be less deserving of being retold?  So many great works of literature to bring to the masses and this is what we come up with?

I started reading “Hot Six”, the sixth installment of the Stephanie Plum adventure books.  I need something light and well written in the wake of Kerouac’s madness.  Something coherent would be nice.  I think that Truman Capote described Kerouac best in his seminal quote on Jack: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

I did quite a bit of work this evening while we watched Tron: Legacy, the 2010 sequel to the original movie.  The movie was not very engaging and we barely paid attention to it.  It wasn’t bad, just didn’t grab us.  Dominica has never seen the original so that made it even harder for her.  I saw the original when it was new in 1982 and once again probably in the 1990s.  It has been a long time and it was hard to put that plot into perspective with this one.  I think that I have figured out how they two go together but I am still unclear.  It didn’t make much sense.

Off to bed a little early tonight.  I need to catch up for tomorrow.  Tomorrow morning is Non-Farm Payroll so I have to be in the office nice and early.

Medifast Status: Day 274, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

I am feeling much better today and went in to work this morning.  I held back and worked from home for about an hour to give myself time to feel sick before making a final determination but by nine thirty I could tell that I felt fine and was in the office by around ten.  I often don’t feel sick when I first get up so giving it an extra hour often gives me a chance to figure out if I am going to be sick or not.

I came home at lunch, a little late knowing that I was going to be at home a little late, and did one phone call after another for a couple of hours.  It was a crazy mid-day for me.

At two Dominica had an appointment at the salon so I was home watching the girls for what we thought would only be twenty or thirty minutes but turned into over an hour putting me into a bit of a rush to get back to the office when she returned.

The office was dead this afternoon and Dan and I decided to make a run to Centennial on the Northwest Highway to stock up on bar supplies.  I have a pretty complete set of the more traditional base items for a bar but need the schnapps and liqueurs often used for flavouring.  Without them so many of the drinks that people expect a bar to be able to make just cannot be done.  It is rather amazing how many drinks this includes.  You need far, far more different types and specialty drinks to make so many everyday cocktails.  I never realized.  At least all of the stuff that I need now is the really cheap stuff.

I went back to work but everything was dead so I went home at a good time.  I swung into Brookhaven on my way home and grabbed dinner to take home.  That was quick and easy.  It is too bad that we cannot eat potatoes because today’s chef’s table was the baked potato bar that looked awesome.

We watched a couple episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise this evening.  Now that we are into the normal  episodes it is a little bit better than it seemed to be in the pilot but only a little.  Overall the show is weak compared to its predecessors and is not grabbing us much at all.  Dominica is really not into it.  I am only moderately interested.  It just lacks something that TNG and Voyager had.

Medifast Status: Day 273, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

I stayed at home today after going home sick from work yesterday halfway through the day.  I did feel somewhat better today but not well enough to go in to the office and sit there being sick all day.  There was no reason to do that.  Yesterday afternoon was the only time that I felt really, completely awful.  Today it is more of a slight sinus infection with eye irritation.  I am sure that I will be all cleared up by tomorrow.

The weather has been just crazy awesome this week.  We opened the windows yesterday and are even leaving them open at night.  It is February and we are getting fresh air in the house.  Amazing.

FireFox 10 came out today.  I already have it installed.  So far… I can’t tell a difference.

I put in some time paying the bills today.  We are starting to get caught up after the furlough of the fall.  It is painful but we are getting back on our feet.

This afternoon Oreo had a vet appointment.  His vet is happy with his progress and he is going on to a very different medicine regimen now.

Dominica did not feel like going anywhere today but I wanted to get dinner from Brookhaven so I drove down there and got the buffet (chef’s table) for Dominica and I and the usual kids’ selection for Liesl.  Liesl always gets cheese pizza, broccoli and a cupcake.  For us tonight it was creole style fried fish and fried green tomatoes and giant salads with blackened shrimp.  In reality we should have foregone the fish and tomatoes and just gotten even larger salads which were healthier and absolute delicious.

Tonight we began watching Star Trek: Enterprise.  We only watched the first episode which, as expected, was a double header.  We ate dinner while we watched.  It wasn’t bad, the premise is that this series takes place one generation prior to the original series which is kind of interesting to see the take on “how it all began.”  The first episode failed to really grab us, though.  It doesn’t have the same feel that made TNG and Voyager so good.  We will give it a chance but it isn’t looking to be so much a classic as a “for fans only” kind of series.  This is our last series of Star Trek.  After we work through these ninety six episodes we will have seen every episode of every Star Trek series.  Each series, at least at one point, watched completely in order from beginning to end.

We are kind of hard core like that.

Medifast Status: Day 272, Down ~74.5lbs (26lbs to go)

Finally down another pound and just in time to go to my Medifast appointment this morning.  I was supposed to have an appointment there on Friday but I could not make it as I was home sick that day so I had it today instead.  I hit a new low weight on my weigh in this morning at home and matched it when I got in to Medifast around lunch time.

I was in the office this morning and was sneezing quite a bit.  Before I left to go to Medifast Dan said that I sounded sick and that I should be staying at home.  Once I went home for lunch I was feeling worse and worse and decided that I needed to stay home once I got there.  Dominica took one look at me and said, “You look awful!”  I could barely keep my eyes open due to the heavy sinus irritation going on.

So I worked from home all afternoon which was nice as I got more time with the girls although it would have been much better had I not felt so awful.

We finished Star Trek: Voyager today.  We both felt that the double-length final episode was rather anti-climactic and not a good ending for an otherwise awesome series.  I’m not sure if Dominica feels that Voyager kept up with The Next Generation but I would certainly rank it as being competitive with that series and, in some ways, it was superior to it.  Without a doubt, Voyager was the spiritual successor to TNG in a way that Deep Space Nine completely failed to be even though DS9 was of a closer era and shared more staff and crew.  TNG and Voyager really feel like they “go together” whereas many of the other series including the original each seem to stand mostly on their own and are disconnected from these two that seem to almost act like one, long series that simply switched from following one ship to anther halfway through its run.  To TNG fans I highly recommend taking the time to watch Voyager.  It is available on Netflix so few people have any excuse for missing it now.

Medifast Status: Day 271, Down ~73.5lbs (27lbs to go)

Today was a mix of trying to get caught up on my backlog of work and getting in family time.  I used Dominica’s workstation much of the day so that I could stay out in the living room with the girls rather than hide in my office.

Since we finished watching all that there was of How I Met Your Mother yesterday, today we moved to watching Star Trek: Voyager as we are on the final season and very near the end of the show.  Only a few episodes left to go and that entire show will be over and done with.  We got up to the final episode today and just have the very last one to watch and that will conclude the entire fourth series of Star Trek.  After this only Star Trek: Enterprise remains for us to watch and we will have seen every episode of Star Trek ever.

I mixed some drinks today.  One of my first real tests of my bar tending skills.  A friend of ours who used to work in IT but now makes signage and other swag stuff (I have no idea what that stuff is called, I just call it all swag – printing on things for marketing) came over and is helping us figure out what to do about getting some lighting, shelves and a sign for the bar.  It is going to be really cool when we are all done.  We need to buy bar stools soon too.  Right now everyone just has to stand at the bar which can be awkward.  Once we have stools it will be a halfway decent place to work from a laptop too.

Medifast Status: Day 270, Down ~73.5lbs (27lbs to go)

Dominica had wanted me to go out and to do some shopping for bar supplies last night but it was late and I did not feel like going out so we postponed it.  We weren’t going to be using anything last night so it didn’t really matter.

This morning I got up and went out first thing in the morning and drove up to Centennial up on Parker and Josie which is brand new.  I’ve never driven that far up Josie before to the region of Carrollton known as Hebron.  It is like wilderness up there.  Nothing but fields.  Very strange.

The new Centennial that just opened there is awesome.  Hardly anyone using it as it is so remote so parking and everything is really easy.  I spent quite a bit of time shopping and ended up with rather an impressive lineup for our bar including nearly everything that we could possibly need for mixing drinks.  It was rather a sizable haul that I brought in this morning.  We have gone from being severely understocked to incredibly well stocked in one fell swoop.

I am really happy that we found such a nice liquor and wine store so close to the house.  We thought that we had to drive a really long way to find one which is what we have been doing previously.  This is very close and very convenient – no tollways, no traffic and no crowds.  Not to mention it is in the country rather than in a rough part of town.

I came home and was home for a few hours.  Today is our relaxing day.  Dominica is still recovering from her bought with strep throat but is feeling mostly better today.  She should be right as rain by tomorrow.

Dominica sent me out to do some additional shopping at Target in the early afternoon.  We needed some food items and bar supplies like a jigger, strainer and hand juicer.  While I was out I ran over to Tom Thumb to grab some produce and swung by Centennial again to fill in the gaps on what we had already bought.  I had missed a few things once we had done an inventory.  We are well stocked now with items like Cointreu, Triple Sec, vodka, gin, vermouth, cognac, Canadian whiskey, scotch, Irish whiskey, rye, bourbon, tequila, sloe gin, rum, flavored rums, spiced rum, liqueurs, etc.  Enough to make most anything.  It is truly amazing how much you have to have in order to be able to mix drinks for people.  Just a set of basics is an onerous amount of alcohol.

Add to that the mixers that you need on hand.  We have Sierra Mist, ginger ale, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Coke, tonic water, seltzer, club soda and cranberry juice.  Plus then there is grenadine, lime syrup, limes, lemons, oranges, bitters – the list goes on and on.

This afternoon I spent almost entirely with Liesl and Luciana.  We hung out and played, read and snuggled.  It was a great day and the weather was amazing too.  Dominica and I finished watching the sixth season of How I Met Your Mother and, as of this evening, we are now completely caught up on that.  Nothing more for us to watch on Netflix until the seventh season comes out which will likely be a while since it is airing currently.  They have already been picked up for an eighth season so there is a lot more to watch in the future.

Medifast Status: Day 269, Down ~73.5lbs (27lbs to go)

I am at home today as I have strep throat and don’t want to be spreading it around the office.  I am contagious at least until tonight and possibly until Saturday.  So best to be safe and just stay home.

It was quite a busy day at the office so I got very little time to spend with the girls during the day.  Still, being home all day means that I do get a bit of time with them even if I am in my office for nearly the whole day.

Today has little news.  We are all sick so we are taking it easy.  I didn’t have to work all that late this evening either which was brilliant since I was already home and able to just go hang out with my girls.

I felt pretty good all day.  The strep really never wore me down and I could barely tell that I had it at all.  Dominica felt pretty awful all day, though.

We watched more of How I Met Your Mother tonight and are nearly done with the sixth and final season available on Netflix.  We are nearly caught – years after we first started watching the show.

We’ve been talking about getting our bar set up in the house and to that end I got a couple of books on bartending for the Kindle tonight.  Dominica wanted me to go out shopping for supplies but the liquor stores close pretty early and I didn’t want to go out shopping while the girls were still awake.  That is a waste of family time.

Medifast Status: Day 268, Down ~73.5lbs (27lbs to go)

I got up and went into the office this morning, a normal day.  By mid-morning Dominica said that she was feeling worse than she had yesterday so she was going to make an appointment at CareNow and I would stay at home and watch the kids while she was there.  So at around noon I went home and let the office know that I would be at home until we found out if Dominica had strep or not, but we were pretty confident that she did.

Dominica’s throat culture came back immediately as positive for strep.  So she was out for a while making runs to the pharmacy and getting supplies.  I will be staying home this afternoon as I am very likely contagious, even though I feel fine, and will make a trip to the doctor’s myself later on once work settles down to see if I am sick too.

So I had a nice afternoon at home with the girls.  Work was pretty busy, though, so I never really got a chance to relax much.  I had to work pretty late, in fact.

At six I ran down to Brookhaven and picked up dinner.  Dominica didn’t feel like going out, for obvious reasons, and did not feel like cooking.  A perfect day to get takeout.

We ate dinner and watched How I Met Your Mother on Netflix.  I got a bit of time with Liesl and Luciana today since I was home nearly all day, even though work was busy.

At eight I went in to CareNow and got checked out.  I felt fine but we wanted to be proactive.  I got the throat culture and, lo and behold, I have strep.  The doctor was pretty amazed that I knew to come in with strep and even told him that it was going to be strep when I had no symptoms and felt completely fine.

So I am on antibiotics now as well.  I stopped by at CVS on the way home and picked up my meds and some meds that Dominica had waiting for her.  I got home around ten or so and we called it an early night.

Medifast Status: Day 267, Down ~73.5lbs (27lbs to go)

I felt good this morning.  I woke up a bit late but with having gone to bed early that was over eight hours of sleep which I never get.  Awesome.

I got ready for work but got a call from Dominica’s cousin just before heading out the door.  We talked for about an hour.  I might get involved, again, in online training for IT certifications.  We are trying to come up with a plan for me to write about computer based training.  This could be a really cool opportunity.  I have always enjoyed doing computer based training, ever since I got unlimited access to it while working with CTG at IBM in Endicott back in 2000 but I have not had very much opportunity to do it myself in a very long time.  It would be nice to do some again and get some certification efforts underway once much.

The rain was really coming down today and there was significant flooding all over the DFW.  They are saying that this rain might actually replenish our water table after the drought that we had this summer.  It is nice to see water around town again although it makes the drive a little harrowing since every so often you come upon a large amount of standing water without much warning.

I went home at lunch and spent some time with the family.  We though about eating lunch then but at the last minute decided against it.

For dinner tonight Dominica decided that she wanted something different so I picked up Rockfish on the way home.  They have the best cedar plank salmon around.  I love getting it there.  So we ate dinner and watch How I Met Your Mother.  We are making huge progress on that show and are on track to be caught up with the current season very soon.

Dominica started to feel a bit under the weather this evening.  She has a soar throat and a stuff neck and is feeling a little run down.  We know that a friend of mine has strep throat, she just found out yesterday, so there is a risk that that is going around.  We’ll see tomorrow as it was pretty late this evening when she started to not feel so hot.

Medifast Status: Day 266, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

More rain today.  A lot more rain.  It was actually clear this morning but the rain snuck up on us.

I went into work today.  It was a quiet morning.  For lunch I met a friend at Sfuzzi which is right around the corner from the office which makes it a decently convenient place for lunch.  I got the regular salad and “Mama’s Eggplant.”  That turned out to possibly be the best eggplant Parmesan dish that I have ever had.  It was simply amazing.  I’m sure that I should not have eaten it, it was way too good.  But boy am I glad that I did.

Lunch was good, we had a good time.  While we were eating lunch the rain returned and it went from sunny to pouring rain while we were eating.

Work was normal today.  After work I went back to Sfuzzi and got take out for Dominica as well as she decided that she wanted the same food as me as it sounded so good.  It ended up taking like forty minutes for me to get the food.  While I was waiting they were doing a photoshoot of some of their drinks and when they were done I got one for free.  So that was pretty nice.

It was around six thirty when I got home.  Dominica ate dinner while we watched How I Met Your Mother.  Liesl is so funny.  She is only three but says, “But I don’t want to watch How I Met Your Mother.”  But, in reality, she enjoys playing at my feet or sitting beside me while we watch it.

It was a quiet evening.  I played catch with Liesl quite a bit.  I barely got to see Luciana as she was on her way to bed when I got home.  Dominica kept her up just a little bit so that I could hang out with her before she went down to sleep since I had barely seen her today as I was not home at lunch.

I went to bed early tonight.  Oreo and I turned in at eleven.  Dominica stayed up for a while as she was not tired.

Medifast Status: Day 265, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

Back to work. I took the day to work from home because I was paged out so late last night and got so little sleep.

I found another book that I was the lead writer on.  At least this time it was really accredited to me.  I wish that someone would tell me about these things, though, so that I would not have to do a search on them to find out when my writing is being used someplace interesting.  You can check it out online, The Guide to Managing IT Staff from Internet.com.

It was nice being home today.  I got a lot of time with the girls.

The rain started last night.  This is the rain.  I’ve heard a rumor that it is going to be raining all week, in fact, going as late as Friday.  It has been hypothesized that this rain storm may be so big that it might actually replenish the DFW regional water table that has been so heavily depleted following the drought that lasted us all summer.

It rained all day today with it getting pretty heavy at times.  It was a nice day to stay home.

Liesl’s new thing is playing with a large balloon in the living room.  She has gotten good at both playing catch with it and playing “keep the balloon in the air” which she just loves.  I can’t believe how good she is at that.

We have been watching a lot of How I Met Your Mother and we are rapidly catching up with the current state of the show. We are into the fifth season now.  I believe that the sixth season is the current one.

We stayed in all day today.

Medifast Status: Day 264, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

Today was a generally quiet day.  Not a lot on the schedule.  We just hung out at the house this morning.  It was really a down day for us.

We ran some errands this afternoon, nothing exciting.  Not even exciting food today.  Just a quiet day at home.

I was on call this weekend and had to work a bit of the day.  Nothing too strenuous but a few hours here and there.

I ended up getting paged out tonight again.  No fun.  I was up working really late, until around four in the morning.  I was already in bed and had fallen asleep when the page came in.  So I am going to work from home tomorrow and probably sleep in a bit.

Medifast Status: Day 263, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

The weekend is here.  We all slept in a bit this morning, but not too much.  We are long past the age of really sleeping in.  Now sleeping in means sleeping until Liesl demands that we get up.  Liesl is the morning child.  She gets up like clockwork and when she is awake she is awake.  And that is that.

Liesl’s new thing is to get herself up and come into our bedroom and stand at the side of the bed pestering us until we get up and take care of her morning routine which includes turning on Dinosaur Train and getting her a drink of Walmart’s own version of chocolate pediasure which she likes to refer to as “purple chocolate milk.”

Early in the afternoon we packed up the girls and drove on out to Arlington to go to Ashley’s diaper drop.  Ashley has just moved back home to Texas from Virginia and the baby is due in the next month.  We were there for about two and a half hours.  We ate dinner there at the party and cheated a little on the diet.  Liesl loved some turtle cake balls and ate an astounding amount of them.

Liesl had a lot of fun playing with the kids.  She loves going out and meeting new people.  Luciana had a lot of fun too and was awake the entire time.  She spent the party getting passed around from person to person.  She, like her older sister, is a social butterfly and just loves getting to be with new people.  As long as there are people with her, she is happy.

Once we were home both girls went down for their naps.  They were both really tired.  Pool Liesl was so tired that she passed out in the car on the way home, was carried in and put into our bed because her bed was stripped as it was being washed and so slept the afternoon away while still wearing her coat.  I ended up, late in the evening, carrying her into her own bed and she slept the entire night long with her coat still on!   Luciana, likewise, pretty much fell asleep in the late afternoon and was gone for the entire evening.  They really got worn out at the diaper drop.  Playing with the other kids, skipping the normal naps and seeing so many new people really wears them out.

It was a quiet evening with the girls in bed all night.  We didn’t really watch much of anything tonight.  We did some cleaning and some work on our computers.  Had some coffee. Overall it was an early night.  The kids aren’t the only ones that are tired.

Medifast Status: Day 262, Down ~73lbs (27lbs to go)

The weather has been absolutely amazing in Texas the last two days.  It was seventy degrees yesterday and today is set to be even warmer yet.  Amazing.

I took the Mazda into the shop this morning to have the taillight that is out fixed and to have the new Texas plates swapped on.  Finally I can feel safe driving it again.  John drove with me as he had to get his car inspected too while we were out.

I went to Medifast today and had a better weigh in than I had been expecting, only half a pound up from last week.  But I knew that today was going to be a bad weigh in, sometimes that just happens.  I’m feeling good about coming in low next week.

My Medifast appointment ended up taking so long that I skipped lunch and just had Medifast meals and went back to the office.  That way I can eat dinner with Dominica tonight, save a few dollars and most likely have a far leaner meal than I would have had otherwise.  Probably for the best.  I really need to get solidly back on to the diet plan.  I do not have that much farther to go, I need to push through and get to the end.  I am 73% of the way to my goal weight.  I can do it.  That will not take that much longer.  I just need to stay focused.

This evening was a light deployment load at the office.  Not bad at all.  I managed to wrap up an article that I was working on today too and submitted it for publication.  Hopefully it gets accepted.  I’ve been very lax in my writing over the last few months and I really need to get that back on track.  My latest article was nearly three thousand words.

I managed to leave work at a quarter after five which is completely amazing for a Friday night.  We stayed in tonight, had a nice, healthy dinner and watched a bit of How I Met Your Mother.

It was a quiet night.  Dominica wanted to stay in, I felt like hanging out with some friends.  After the girls were asleep she talked online, posted, watched some television.  I went out and got a drink… but didn’t drink.  Trying to stay away from alcohol per my diet, although that is hard.  I end up taking in way too much caffeine because I substitute caffeine products like coffee, energy drinks and sometimes tea or soda.  I’m sure that the alcohol would be far better for me.

We are working hard to get our diets back on track, though, so trying to curb that as much as possible.

Medifast Status: Day 261, Down ~73lbs

Finally, I am caught back up on SGL!

We all saw it coming for years and knew that they were working on the filing recently but officially today Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy protection.  I find it unlikely that Kodak will ever rise again.  They have been on a downward spiral for so long that bankruptcy protection is not going to help them.  They have had a decade to reorganize and find a way to make money.  Now they are just buying time.  The end is near.

It is odd having grown up in Rochester, New York and being a child of Eastman Kodak.  Kodak was a massive part of my childhood.  Kodak defined the Rochester skyline that we could see from my childhood home.  My father worked there from the time that he left college until he retired.  I did my first competition photography with the Kodak Camera Club in the summer of 1986.  I took many photography classes there in the nineties.  I did my second engineering job at a company that partially made products for Kodak.  I did my first IT “job” at Kodak, a short week or two week intern thing when I was thirteen.  I considered going to work for Kodak Canada in the mid-nineties.

Rochester is not the same town that it once was and never will be again.  Kodak was a product of another era and that era is very much over.  Already people have little memory as to what Kodak even was and no one understands just how powerful film manufacturing was during that era.  Kodak changed the world, but the world moved on without it.

I was in the office today after being home again yesterday.  This morning Dominica made a run to CostCo to go shopping.  She got a ton of stuff.  Loads of coffee, some new clothes, lots of food.  She found some amazingly tempting maple glazed pecans.  Those are just evil.  And she found some cool Korean seaweed snacks.

I went home for lunch.  We ate salads and watched two episodes of How I Met Your Mother.  Liesl was being weird and wanted to take a bath so I drew that for her.  Then back to the office.

I ended up working until nearly six and then went home and hung out with the girls.  We had a nice evening.  Liesl loves making me play “ring around the rosey” over and over and also likes to play “stop / go”.  Luciana stood up on her own for the first time tonight.  I was sitting in my arm chair in the play room and she crawled over to me and just lifted herself up.  After doing it that first time she did it several more times on the ottoman in the play room much to Dominica’s chagrin who now as an extremely dangerous near-toddler to deal with around the house.

We watched How I Met Your Mother this evening and we finished the fourth season and have now watched an episode or two of the fifth season.  We really love that show.

Medifast Status: Day 260, Down ~73lbs

Dominica and I were both exceptionally tired today.  We got very little sleep and Liesl got us up this morning so there was no sleeping in to make up for it.  Well, maybe about half an hour of sleeping in but that is not very much.

Since I had worked for several hours last night I just worked from home today.  Going in to the office would have been onerous given how tired I was and I needed to be on conference calls early this morning so there was no time to shower and commute in.

I managed to do a lot of critical work on SharePoint today and am very happy with my progress.  I am really liking SharePoint 2010 Enterprise so far.  There are a ton of really cool features in there and I am just getting started too.

We did very little today.  We were just too tired.  I played with the girls a lot.  Liesl has been doing puzzles more and more and today she managed to do her Wizard of Oz puzzle that we have done a few times since Christmas almost entirely by herself.  I help her get started and I did one piece for her and I helped her put large sections of the puzzle together but as far as actually finding where each piece went… she did that all on her own.  I am very impressed.

We watched a bit of How I Met Your Mother tonight, but we went to bed at a pretty reasonable time.  We need some sleep.

Medifast Status: Day 259, Down ~73lbs

I woke up this morning at ten till six all of my own accord.  I find it hard to believe that my body thought that I had gotten enough sleep but I wasn’t really very tired.  Maybe having the windows open made me sleep a lot better.  I snuggled with Oreo for a little while and then just got up and showered and got ready for work.

When I got out of the shower I noticed that Liesl had moved into our bed and was snuggling between Dominica and Oreo.  I don’t believe that she was there before so she must have woken up and had a nightmare or something and come in there.  They were all fast asleep so I never found out why she was there.

I did a little work from home this morning, mostly doing some SharePoint work that I needed to do from there.  That was maybe forty-five minutes at most.  I made some coffee, wrapped up my work and headed in to the office at eight thirty.

On the way in to work today I finished reading “That’s Not In My American History Book” and got back to working my way painfully through “On the Road.”  As I listen to it I found “On the Road” improving, but not very much.

It is colder again today after a very warm weekend.  It was so warm that we comfortably slept with the windows open last night. Today we are looking at the possibility of frost again.  Quite the jump in temperature.

I came home for lunch as usual and spent some time with the girls.  I pretty much come home every day now.  It is extremely rare that I eat at work or go out on my own.  Maybe once every other week at most.  I am more likely to work through lunch than to voluntarily do anything other than going home to see Liesl and Luciana.

I got home at a good time this evening and we did some house keeping.  The place is really looking great and we seem to be doing really well at keeping up with it these days.

We just hung out at home tonight.  Thankfully nothing big planned.  We ended up staying up pretty late hanging out, we probably should have gone to bed long before we actually did.  I got paged out several times tonight starting around eleven o’clock and going until about two thirty in the morning.  We are going to be tired tomorrow but at least they cannot expect me to be in the office.

Medifast Status: Day 258, Down ~73lbs

I finally got a really good night of sleep last night.  I slept in until nine this morning and it felt great.  I think that having the bed in a different place in the room made me sleep better.

The Grices left about an hour after I got up.  School starts again tomorrow so they need to get back.  We will be heading down to Houston to see them again in three or four weeks depending on when we manage to schedule Madeline’s birthday party.  That is the next major upcoming family event.

Today’s big project in the house is more painting of our bedroom.  Dominica decided that the accent wall in our bedroom needed another, third, coat of Indiana Clay paint so she applied about half of that and I finished up the second half.  Now that we can see the wall in daylight after it has mostly dried I think that the colour is really excellent.  Francesca described it as orange with a hint of peach.  It is a great colour.

Dominica set up the paint for Crab Bisque and she edged the south wall of our bedroom, the one with the window.  Then I followed behind and did the roller portion to finish off the first coat of that wall.  I didn’t realize just how much lighter the Crab Bisque was going to be than the existing, awful sickly colour that is there now.  I thought that it was going to be slightly darker, which I suppose the Indiana Clay is, but it is significantly lighter so rather than darkening our room we are actually brightening it up.

After that wall Dominica edged and I rolled the north wall as well.  Now we are getting a good feel for how the room is going to look and it is pretty good.  Much cleaner and more modern than the old paint.  The old paint felt like it was ancient; it was really bad.

We are saving the east wall with the television mounted to it.  That one is going to be a huge pain because of the television, television stand and dresser all blocking it.  All of the other walls were easy to reach.

Now that we see the colours on the walls we are thinking that we want to not paint the “sink area” between our bedroom and bathroom the same colour but will instead paint that something dark like chocolate brown to set it off from the rest of the room.  That area is in desperate need of a new look.  It is dated and awful.  We really hope to completely replace that in the next two years with new walls and layout but that will be expensive so that has a while before it can be realized even though we really want to have that all new while we are actually living in the house.

I cannot believe how much of the house is now freshly painted.  Nearly the whole house is “new” now.  The kitchen, bar, my office, the playroom, the hallway, most of our bedroom and one wall of Liesl’s room have all been painted this year, most of them this month.  And don’t forget that the playroom cabinets, fireplace mantel and trim and the wainscoting under the bar are all newly changed from dark veneer to bright white paint too.  Our bedroom will be all painted soon and one of Luciana’s walls this week too.  The living room is up next and is the single largest and most ominous painting project.  That one is going to be awful and I suspect that we will be tackling that all of next weekend.  Once the living room is painted the house is going to look completely different.  The house looks tons better now than when we bought it.

Dominica read an entire book in the “Hunger Games” series today that Francesca lent to her.  She read the second book in the series from cover to cover.

Liesl and I did a puzzle together today.  She has done about four puzzles in the last two weeks, we do one every few days, but today it was really apparently that the idea of how to do puzzles – I’m talking about real jigsaw puzzles here – is beginning to take hold and she is actually able to do them.  She still needs a lot of help and doesn’t know where to start or how to organize herself to make the puzzle efficient, but she does an excellent job of matching up pieces and figuring out where things go.  I am quite impressed.  She has always loved puzzles on the iPad so I am guessing that that has built a lot of the thinking skills used here.

I got a ton of important work today including wrapping up some really critical Xen to vSphere migrations including migrating a Vyatta router and firewall appliance.  That has been hanging over my head for some time and I am quite glad to have it done and see that it went so well.

At five I drove down to Las Colinas to go to Sfuzzi for Tamara’s birthday party.  I was there until eight thirty and then came home. I had a light dinner there, just some portabella mushrooms and a Caesar salad.  I planned on picking up dinner for Dominica and I on the drive home but she had already eaten so I decided to just figure that I had eaten enough and call it a day.

Luciana was already in bed when I got home and Liesl was heading towards bed time.  She sat in my lap and watched Dinosaur Train for a little while then I put her to bed.  She is continuing to love our reading books at night routine.  We do about four books, of her choosing, as I put her to bed.  For the first time in as long as I can remember she chose not to wrap up with “Tickle Monster” and “Can’t You Sleep, Dotty” but went for some new books instead.

Medifast Status: Day 257, Down ~73lbs

We had talked about maybe doing brunch this morning at Brookhaven but everyone decided against it.  So we just stayed at home instead.

Emily and I managed to get a start on her diorama today.  This took a bit of work, partially because we did not have the proper base on which to do it so that made for a lot of extra effort.  We built the frame of the diorama and used packing tape to secure it to a folder microwave box.  A pretty silly way to go about modeling a waterfront but it did the trick and is very solid, if not attractive.

Emily enjoyed doing the plaster work to form the diorama.  She has never worked with plaster before, and admittedly I have barely worked with it myself, and thought that that was fun.  Doing plaster work is one of my favourite parts of modeling as well and I think that I am pretty decent at doing it.  It has been years since I had the chance to do this.  If I remember correctly, the last time that I managed to do model railroading was back when Dominica and I were living in Peekskill.  We modeled a vignette while watching the BBC show Waiting for God.  Isn’t it funny the things that get connected in your mind?

For lunch today we took the Grices to Ruchi Palace for Indian food.  Francesca has been wanting to try Indian for a very long time and they had a buffet on today so we decided to throw our diets to the wind and head there.

Lunch was excellent.  There was a ton of good food on the buffet including a lot of good vegetarian.  Dominica and I really enjoyed our lunches.  Francesca liked hers but found nearly everything to be too spicy and she was unable to eat very much of it. Emily does not like to try new foods and would eat almost nothing except for a little bit of naan.

This evening, pretty late, Dominica and Francesca went out to the movie theatre to see Breaking Dawn which is one of the Twilight movies that I refuse to associate with in any way.  Emily and I stayed home to watch the kids.

Medifast Status: Day 256, Down ~73lbs

The Grice family is staying with us this weekend.  Dominica and I slept with Luciana in our room last night for the first time in many months.  I have gotten used to her having her own room.  We got to hear first hand just how much she talks in her sleep.  It is really hard to sleep with her in the same room.

With our bed moved to the north side of the room and sleeping with our heads against that wall we could hear Liesl especially well through the air vent too.  I was surprised to discover that she appears to talk in her sleep.  I went in to check on her multiple times and she was always fast asleep.  But at one point she was talking quite clearly.

For lunch today Francesca and I went to Brookhaven and got takeout for the family.  This was her first time seeing the club in daylight.  It is a very different experience during the day.  We got there at two and they were just taking the chef’s table down so we had to order normal food.  It was a gorgeous day and the golf courses were very busy.

This afternoon Emily and I went out to do some shopping.  We hit Lowe’s and picked up paint for Dominica and my bedroom.  Dominica finally decided that we could do an Indiana Clay accent wall to the west (behind us when we sleep) and Crab Bisque on the other three walls.  I really like these colours.  She is not convinced.  We will see.  She said that if Emily and I went out and bought paint today that she would get to work painting the room right away.

After Lowe’s we also went to Hobby Lobby, to which I have never before previously.  They have a ton of stuff there, way more than any hobby shop I have ever seen.  And their decorating selection is quite impressive.

Hobby Lobby had some basic modeling kits from Woodland Scenics that we were interested in.  Emily thinks that model railroading sounds interesting so we are giving it a try.  She has never seen a model railroad before, I don’t believe.  But given the crafts that she enjoys I would be surprised to find that she does not find it entertaining.

Medifast Status: Day 255, Down ~73lbs

It is Friday and I have my Medifast appointment today so I went in to the office this morning for one of my few appearances this week.  Work has been surprisingly not busy considering that the freeze is now over.

I went to MediFast today and had my lowest check-in there ever.  Pheww.  I’ve been working hard trying to keep from gaining any weight over the holidays and this was kind of the moment of truth.  I’m not losing much but at least it continues to go down.  It is getting harder and harder to lose anything these days.

After Medifast Dominica and I took the girls to Brookhaven for lunch.  Lunch on Fridays is my favourite time to go there because they tend to have a good seafood selection then.  They had a great clam chowder, seafood cakes and more today.  It was quite good. Dominica is very glad that she came out because so often the chef’s table does not have things that she wants and she finds it very frustrating trying to eat there as often as we do because that limits the variety dramatically.  So this was good timing.

After lunch I just came home and worked from there for the rest of the day.  Dominica and I moved the bed in our bedroom and got the south side of the room cleared out and I ran the Rug Doctor in there.  We are going to save the north half of the room for next week.  So our bed is now up against the north wall and we will have to turn ninety degrees to sleep tonight.

The Grices arrived pretty late in the evening.  The house was looking pretty good by the time that they arrived.  Clean floors, the dishes all done, candles burning, fresh paint.  It is amazing how quickly the house is transforming.  If only we had the money to get the atrium done now rather than waiting a really long time before getting to be able to use it.  But it really does not make any sense to do anything with it, it seems, until after we go to Europe.  We will be returning to Texas in late June, most likely, and that will be a good chunk of the outdoor season that we will be in New York so investing in it now makes little sense.  But I hate not having it to be able to be used.  It is such a key component of the house.

Medifast Status: Day 254, Down ~73lbs

I stayed home from work again today.  I’ve been home nearly all week.  Not a lot of need to be in the office.  No one is there for me to see so it is pretty silly to be sitting there all alone attempting to work when I could be just as productive from home and not have to pay to drive in and back twice a day (because I always come home during lunch to see the girls.)

The floor in the living room is still pretty wet today but it is looking pretty good.  The Rug Doctor definitely does not get out the stains like my boiling bleach water method does – because the hot water does not sit for five to ten minutes on the floor working its chemical magic.  So it looks like I will need to do that a bit more on the toughest spots.  But the Rug Doctor does a good job of getting the floor to look more even as it hits everything.

Our plan is to start doing the Rug Doctor once a month until the floors are really clean and then moving into a seasonal schedule of doing the entire house four times a year.  Overall, though, the carpet looks great.

Our friend Andrew stopped by this evening to do some computer training and Dominica used the opportunity to pick his brain about places to go while we are in Belgium.  So he was at the house for a while.  He is going to be in Belgium with us for a little bit and we might reschedule things so that we are there for about a week all together.  He has friends all over Belgium and knows everywhere to go.  So we will get a guided tour of the country.

It is looking like our latest plan is that we are going to fly into Germany and spend a lot of time in Belgium skipping the Alsace and only seeing Germany briefly.  We will get a lot of time to get to know Belgium though.  That will be nice.  I much prefer staying in one spot and getting to know it really well rather than zipping from place to place trying to see and do everything and not ever getting a feel for anywhere.

Medifast Status: Day 253, Down ~73lbs

I finally weighed in down another pound!  This has taken forever.  I am really anxious to get this diet back on track but boy has it been hard.  The holidays make it such a struggle and now I am in to the habit of eating food that I shouldn’t.  That is going to be really hard to break myself of.

Today was a pretty normal day.  Dominica did some more painting.  The main hallway is now completely painted as is the one wall in Liesl’s room.  Liesl has been very excited to get a wall painted pink and she went with Dominica, I believe yesterday, to Lowe’s to pick out the paint that she wanted on her wall.  So three walls remain purple, the lavender-like shade that came with the house, and now one wall has a fresh coat of pink paint.

The hallway being done looks great.  So bright and new.  Really improves the look of the house.  The bar is the last remaining piece of this current round of painting.  Luciana’s room is going to get a pink wall as well but that is held off until after the Grice family visits this weekend since they need to be able to use that room and having wet paint is a bit of a pain.

The Rug Doctor arrived today!  We are very excited.  The living room was already empty so I went ahead and Rug Doctored the entire living room.  Now the floor is very wet.  That will take some time to dry.  We wanted to get it done before the Grices came with plenty of time to dry.  We have about fifty hours before they will get here so that should be enough.

Medifast Status: Day 252, Down ~72lbs

We are slowly getting back to normal life after the holidays.  We only have three more days until the Grices come up from Houston for the weekend so all of our house work as to be completed quickly.

I ended up working from home today.

Dominica started doing more house painting today.  The first stage was to begin painting the main hallway.  That went pretty quickly and the difference in the house is amazing.  We never realized before just how dark that hallway is but once the light, modern paint went on it (and we replaced a burned out light bulb) it really brightened up.  It is like a completely new hallway.

Dominica only got half of the hallway painted today but wow, what a difference. It also really makes a difference because that wall of the hallway is the most visible from the main part of the house and had the large patch of any of the walls from the electrical work done many months ago.  It looked awful because the patch was never painted over.  So this fixed that in addition to being a fresh coat of paint.

I can see very quickly that the house is going to be increasing in value very quickly.  I’m surprised that they never painted it and did some of this basic stuff before selling it before.  Maybe they would have and just never got to it.  We have done a lot to improve the house already.

This evening we went out to kids’ night at Brookhaven on the early side but ended up being there in an unexpected crowed.  It probably took us twenty minutes to get a seat.  The place was completely packed and for a restaurant doing a buffet that is pretty surprising.

The kids went to bed early tonight.  Luciana’s schedule is starting to change.  Her regular naps during the day are starting to dissipate.  Pretty soon she is going to be keeping Dominica running all day long.  Liesl was pretty tired and was able to go to sleep on the early side.

Medifast Status: Day 251, Down ~72lbs

Today is my first day back in the office after the freeze.  Our team has a holiday lunch scheduled today as we were unable to get everyone together during the holidays themselves as people are out of the office almost continuously during the seasons.

We went to Blue Ginger, the Thai restaurant that Dominica, Liesl and I ate at our first night in Irving over two years ago.  The owner still knows me and lunch was very good.  I went off diet for lunch and had some amazing fried rice.  Oh how I miss fried rice.  Before we went on the Medifast diet, fried rice from Blue Ginger and Coconut Thai Grill were major components of my diet.

So our big news for the day is that I got approved to do my office time in Europe from London rather than from Warsaw.  This changes everything in our plans for the trip.  It will save us a fortune in flight and hotel costs but now we have to start our planning process over again.  We have a lot more flexibility now in our travel plans and we can begin our trip wherever we want rather than knowing that we are in Warsaw for several days and figuring out where to go from there.

We were originally locked into flying into Warsaw and staying there for several days – which was going to suck because Dominica and the girls were pretty much going to be stuck in a hotel room for several days doing nothing.  That was not going to be fun and it was not going to be cheap either.  Flights to Warsaw were a lot more expensive than to elsewhere in Europe and the hotels there were not particularly cheap, partially because it is the business district of a large city rather than a rural area like we will be staying in for much of our trip.

So now we can start anywhere that we want and just need to be in London during specific days.  So at least we have a “pivot point” in our schedule that coincides with the last days that I will be working out of the office and once my time in London is done then I go straight into my furlough time and we are free to go completely off of the grid.

We did some paint planning tonight too and now have a pretty good idea of what we are going to be painting the majority of the house.

Medifast Status: Day 250, Down ~72lbs

The freeze in the financial industry ended last night and this morning I got up around nine and signed into the office so that I could get to work with some application deployments and system changes that people needed done at the first possible moment.

There was not that much work for this morning so it was probably under an hour before I was free for the day.

Dominica did some painting in the kitchen today.  We have been discussing this for a while.  Some time ago she painted half of the kitchen in a very 1970s green.  Now people might think that this eccentric and 1970s colour choice was made by me and I can see why people might think that but I assure everyone that I had nothing to do with the choice of colour for the kitchen and this was totally Dominica’s doing.  She had gotten halfway through the kitchen and then wasn’t sure if she liked the colour or not and stopped.  So for a few months the kitchen has been half fresh, bright green and half dull, dirty yellow.  The mix of the two was horrible.

I finally convinced her to at least finish the kitchen in all green and have it be all one thing.  Nothing is worse than half and half and honestly the green has been growing on me.  I think that once it is all green that she will see that it is actually a pretty good selection.  So she gave in and finished painting the kitchen in green.  It took hardly any time as the portion of the kitchen left was incredibly small.

The finished kitchen looks really good.  The green actually works now that we can see it.  It really goes with the style of the house.

I got word from Toronto this afternoon that the server is racked and powered on.  I logged in and started working on it today.  That consumed much of my day and I was very productive.

Oreo broke out in horrible hives this afternoon.  We have no idea what triggered it but it was very bad.  We had to medicate him and give him and bath and keep an eye on his all day.  Poor little dog.

This evening I ran out to Walmart and did some quick shopping.  I picked up some popcorn for us to eat while watching a movie tonight.  I also did some searching for some XBOX 360 Kinect dance video games that Dominica wants but was unable to find a reasonable price on any of the ones that she was interested in at Walmart, Target, Game Chop or even the dreaded Game Stop so I gave up on that.

I came home and we watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 on BluRay this evening after Liesl had gone to bed.

Medifast Status: Day 249, Down ~72lbs

Today we did some strategizing about what is going to get painted in the house.  We (mostly Dominica) are going to be painting a large amount of the house.  The bar, the living room, the hallway, our bedroom and parts of the girls’ rooms.  It is a major project.  That on top of some serious floor cleaning that we are planning to be doing soon.

Today was mostly a relaxing day at home.  This is my last “free” day before the freeze ends.  Technically the freeze ends this evening but no one jumps on doing work tonight but there will be work tomorrow morning.  So today is my day to just do nothing.

For dinner tonight we decided to try getting take out from Brookhaven.  We weren’t sure if our One discount would apply to food that we picked up so we cautiously gave it a try to see what would happen.  Our discount does apply so we will be doing this a lot more often since I can pick up food on the way home or just run out and grab it quickly which is handy since getting the girls ready can be more work that we can handle on a given evening.

Medifast Status: Day 248, Down ~72lbs

I stayed home as today is the last work day of the freeze.  No requests all day.  Nothing at all.  I do have worked lined up for Sunday morning, however, as the freeze lifts tomorrow afternoon so, as always happens, someone begs me to work on Sunday so that they can get a jump on their projects.

This evening, at eight thirty, I went out to go to ballroom dancing lessons at the Hotel Intercontinental where our friend Chris is teaching the intro lessons.  I got out there but the lessons were canceled for tonight just as I arrived so I picked him up and we went up to Sullivan’s off of Trinity Mills where all of the dancers go after the lessons are over.  We were there too early so just hung out in the lobby for a bit.  The bar there is live band and twenty one and over only.

There was a good crows and we listened the band Chinatown play.  They were very good and I have them on my Facebook page now.  They played a good mix of music and I think that Dominica would really like it so I am going to try to get her to come out when they return here in mid-February.  Chris danced a bit, being a dancer.  I danced just a little but I am a little like a flailing walrus so am looking more for lessons than to really go out dancing although actually dancing would help with getting a few hours of exercise in so I plan to try that as well.

Sullivan’s is incredible handy for us as it is right down the street from our house.  I had no idea how close it was or that it even existed.  Nice place.

I got home not too late and we were off to bed pretty quickly.

Medifast Status: Day 247, Down ~72lbs

We called around to the regional Costcos and they told us that the Rug Doctor is not stocked so we will need to order it online.  So Dominica placed the order for our Rug Doctor today and hopefully we will have it next week.  We got the Pro X3 which is MSRP’d at $799.  The Costco price is $349.  Quite a deal.  Even a refurbished Pro (not X3) is $425.  This was the best deal that we could find on any Rug Doctor by far.  We are very excited.  We love having clean floors.

It is a quiet day.  I’ve been working on getting the new server racked in Toronto without any success yet.  A lot of my projects are currently waiting for that to get completed.  I am very hopeful that that will be done this weekend so that I can get to work.

I am terribly behind, yet again, on SGL.  I am doing my best to get caught up.  I am writing this on the seventeenth but I have had notes sitting on my desk at the office for two weeks with what happened each day so that I could provide accurate updates.

This week is the last week of the freeze so I am trying hard to spend time at home with the kids.

Medifast Status: Day 246, Down ~72lbs

I went in to the office this morning.  Nothing unusual to report there.  We were going to go with Jenn to Costco today to see about getting a Rug Doctor but decided that there was reason enough for us to join ourselves that we decided that we would just go on our own and join at the Costco three and a half miles from our house.

I left work a little before noon to run up to the house and pick up Dominica and the girls.  We drove out to West Plano and hit the Costco there.  We decided to try out the upper level membership as we are hoping to use Costco pretty heavily now that we have joined.  Their prices really are quite good.

The Costco did not have the Rug Doctor, or any Rug Doctor, that we had wanted so we will likely have to order that online.  We did some shopping while we were there and got some clothes, food and coffee.  Costco has the Donut Shop coffee that we drink with the Keurig at roughly half of the price that we pay at Walmart for the same coffee so that is awesome.  That alone will easily pay for our membership!  We just have to be diligent about buying our coffee there and not letting it run out.

I decided to just stay home after going shopping.  There is plenty to do at home and no reason to be in the office whatsoever.  There is nothing going on there at all.  I love the freeze.

Medifast Status: Day 245, Down ~72lbs

I got to sleep in just a little this morning because I wanted to go to the Denton County tax office and get the Mazda transferred from New York to Texas.  The office opens at nine, I believe, so I did not have to get up all that early to get in there.

The line was not too bad at the tax office when they opened this morning although the parking lot was completely full.  It took me about two hours to get everything done that I needed to do including getting my insurance switched from New York to Texas officially.  So now the Mazda is officially Texan.  Now that we have that done our next task is to get Dominica and my driver’s licenses switched from New York to Texas.  That requires more paperwork than I have at hand so I need Dominica to dig that up so that we can deal with that.  That is for another day and is done at the DMV rather than at the county tax office.

I finished reading “High Five” this morning and started reading “That’s Not In My American History Book” while I was waiting to get all of the paperwork done for the car.

I went home and ended up just staying there until after lunch since it was so late by the time that I was done getting the car taken care of.  Then I went in to the office this afternoon.

Medifast Status: Day 244, Down ~72lbs

Today is Monday but because of when the New Year’s holiday fell today is a day off from work.  Banks are closed today.  Yay!  Dominica and the girls are driving up from Houston this morning.

I did some more floor cleaning and general cleaning around the house to get ready for Dominica to come home.  The floor is really looking good in the living room now and I got the kitchen all cleaned too.  The house is at record clean levels.

I listened to a little more of “On the Road” but could take no more and decided to take a break from the book and listened to most of Janet Evanovich’s “High Five“, the fifth book in the Stephanie Plum novels.  These are very entertaining novels and one of the few “light” novels that I let myself read along with the Kinsey Milhoune mysteries of which I have read all but the latest.  Sadly by Audible version of “High Five” is only available in abridged so I get the much shorter version of the story.  I hate when they do that.  Normally both versions are available but for some of the early Stephani Plum novels there is no unabridged option.  It is only a few of the many books, at least.

Dominica and the girls got home pretty early on.  They made good time and had no issues on the drive – other than the car smelling of spilled milk laced with onions.  The car kind of reeks at this point.  Dominica has the car covered in baking soda but it is not doing very much to soak up the smell.  This is going to require a rather thorough cleaning project.

Dominica was really impressed with how great the house looks.  I did both a lot of organizing as well as a lot of actual cleaning.  Liesl loves having the living room empty so that she can just run around and use the space freely.  Now that Luciana is crawling having an expansive, clean floor surface will be important too.

We were lazy today and decided to just get Panda Express as our last horrah to our time off from our diets.  We watched some Hulu Plus and relaxed.  Finally at home, just our family.  Liesl has been ready to come home for some time.  For days she has been saying that she wanted to come home.  She misses her house, her routine and her stuff.  She has a lot of toys and when she is at home she regularly rotates through them so being away from home there is no way for us to bring anywhere near as many toys as she is likely to want to use during that time frame.

Liesl and I took advantage of the open living room floor to do a large Dora the Explorer floor puzzle together.  Liesl thought that that was great fun.  She loves puzzles and doing a large one on the floor was very cool.  It is a real puzzle so very hard for a three year old to do but she did surprisingly well, I think, in helping me to put it together.  She puts the pieces together herself and can match many of them.

Tomorrow I am back to work.  The holidays are over but we have one week of the freeze left so this week will be completely slow.  Probably the slowest week of the entire year.  I will be in the office tomorrow but may be home much of the week other than that.

Medifast Status: Day 243, Down ~72lbs

Just a lazy New Year’s Day around the Grice household.  We hung out most of the day not doing too much of anything.  I got my car packed and planned to head out this evening to go back up to Carrollton.  Dominica and the girls are going to drive up tomorrow to join Oreo and I.

We spent the day mostly with Francesca playing Fable II.  She is making good progress on it now and the end of the game is in sight.  Like me, she has spent most of her life playing video games without ever having completed one.  Having never completed one she really doesn’t know how good they can be when you live through tens of hours of a story and get to see it come to fruition – an adventure in which you have played a pivotal role.

The only games that I finished when I was younger along these lines were some of the King Quest games, Black Cauldron, The Faery Tale Adventure, Pool of Radiance, Deja Vu and Uninvited.  Those stick out in my memory as rare games that I played all the way through when I was in my tweens and early teens.  During my college years I played through Earthbound and ChronoTrigger on the Super Nintendo but that was about it.  Out of all of the tons and tons of games that I have played over the years, most of them story-driven adventure and role playing games, only those few have I completed end to end.  There are, most certainly, a few others that I do not remember.  But they were few.

Then a few years ago I played through Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2 and got to see what a modern game last nearly one hundred hours can be like when played all of the way through and I’ve been hooked.  Games have really improved over the years.  Now I complete video games pretty regularly and try very hard never to play a game without intended to complete it.

We also played some board games this afternoon with Madeline and Emily.  I actually managed to beat Dominica, the reigning champion, at a game where you basically play twenty questions with a card on your forehead trying to figure out “what you are.”  Headbandz or something like that.  Madeline got it for Christmas.

It was about nine when I left to drive Oreo and I up to Carrollton.  I stopped at Panda Express, just down the street from the Grices’, but it had closed just minutes before – hence why I knew that it was nine o’clock when I had left.  So I went to McDonald’s next door and got myself some fillet o’fish sandwiches.  Not on diet at all but it was the best that I could do under the circumstances – I was quite hungry and had not had a meal all day.  It would be a long drive without any food.

I finished reading “A History of the World in Six Glasses” on the drive up.  Then I moved on to listening to “On the Road: The Original Scroll” by Jack Kerouac, considered to be one of the classics of American literature and the seminal work of the beatnik movement and one of the foundations of the hippy movement.  I have been meaning to listen to this book for a while.  It has been sitting in my library just waiting for me to give it a listen for over a year, most likely.

I listened to a bit of “On the Road” and must say that it is absolute garbage.  The writing of the book is poor, at best, and the story itself is boring beyond belief.  It is just some ineloquent ramblings of an extremely uninteresting person and his impoverished and unimpressive group of “friends.”  Mostly just people too poor and uninteresting to find themselves anyone else to hang out with.

I suppose I can only complain so much, I do have a really boring blog many, many times the length of “On the Road” and I am not hampered by having to write the whole thing on a typewriter as Kerouac did.  But in no way would I just take my blog and bind it as a novel and call it literature.  That anyone published this book is insane and that anyone bought it just blows my mind.  Not the worst thing that I have ever read but it is certainly close to it.

I am reading the original scroll version of the book – in the scroll, which was written as a single paragraph, the original names and edits are left in.  The book that most people read is a slightly modified book with all of the names changed to protect the people too embarrassed to be identified as the losers in the book.  The scroll is slightly longer and is supposed to read slightly better than the edited novel version.  Although I imagine that having paragraphs helps.  How anyone can write a twelve hour long book in a single paragraph is beyond me.  That’s not impressive at all.

Medifast Status: Day 242, Down ~72lbs

This past year has been the year of the new house and the new car and, of course, the new baby.  A pretty big year for us.  Technically we bought the house in 2010 but only barely and we were in New York almost immediately after doing so so it really felt like this year when we finally moved in.  Technically the GMC Acadia was from 2010 as well, but only just barely.

It is really hard, now, to remember that Dominica was pregnant at the start of 2011.  Remembering that we had Luciana is easy, but I don’t really remember Dominica being pregnant leading up to it.  That is very odd.  She was pregnant for a third of the year.  That seems so distant.

What is possibly the most amazing thing is that 2011 was the year of work being done on the house.  The new house was pretty much under constant construction for the entire year.  We’ve had contractors working on the house since January and some of them haven’t been heard from in half a year even though we still have their ladder in our back yard.  Anyone want to buy a ladder?  The work that was started then is still not completed and we have been living with that half finished work all of this time which is pretty ridiculous.  This was also the year of attempting to buy the house next door.  That sucked up several months.

We had a casual evening playing some board games and going to bed early.  We are all pretty tired.

Medifast Status: Day 241, Down ~72lbs

I went in to the office this morning.  Insanely slow today.  Just nothing going on.  For lunch I went up to Brookhaven with Nicki.  It was her first time getting to see our new club.  After lunch we swung in to the house to let Oreo out.

I left work a little early so that I could pack up the car and get on to the road to go down to Houston for the New Year’s weekend.  I got to the house and found that Oreo had had a huge accident in the living room and I had to spend the better part of an hour cleaning it up.  What a mess.  That was no fun.  So I was rushing to get the car packed and to get Oreo and I out the door after dealing with that.

I finished reading “Mass Effect: Revelation” on the drive down and started listening to “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” which is pretty interesting.  The book looks at how beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola have played a role in the development of civilization as we know it.

It was around ten thirty when I arrived in League City.  Apparently my Google Lattitude was working because I was just around the corner from Francesca’s house when my phone rang and Dominica said “I see you on Lattitude down the street, we are at Joe’s so just drive on down here.”  That is handy that they can see where I am all of the time.

Everyone was having a New Year’s Eve Eve party tonight.  They were drinking and playing silly board games.  I spent over an hour taking care of Oreo as he needed to eat and was having a panic attack.  I never really got to hang out with anyone tonight.  Oreo really needed me all evening.

We were not up particularly late.  Maybe one in the morning.  Luciana was long since asleep when I arrived but Liesl, being the party animal and night owl, was still up playing with Garrett for a while and was very excited to see me again.  I got to read her her bedtime stories tonight like I normally do.  Her bedtime routine is primarily me reading her several books each night now.

Medifast Status: Day 240, Down ~72lbs

I worked from home again today.  Work is just so slow that there is no need for me to go in to the office.  I spent most of the day continuing to play Mass Effect alternating with some hard core carpet cleaning.  The carpet cleaning is coming along well and the areas that I cleaned yesterday are very obviously large clean spots on the floor.  It is working well but you cannot do just single spots.  Once you start you really have to be committed to finishing the project.

I got in a lot of time on Mass Effect today taking my total playing time well over twenty hours by the time that I turned it off to go to bed.  Oreo thought that it was great just snuggling away with me on the couch while I played.  As I get deeper in to the game the story continues to improve.  It is very obvious that this is the same team that made Dragon Age.

I ran out to Target today and did a little shopping.  I had some basic supplies that I needed.  I picked up a new pair of jeans while I was out.  I am now down to a 34″ waist.  When I first started my diet I was wearing a 44″ waist!  That is some amazing progress.  Ten inches lost!

For dinner this evening I went out, alone, to Brookhaven.  I attempted to order a Salmon Cobb Salad but there was a mistake hearing what I said and I ended up with a Salmon Club Sandwich instead which turned out to be an awesome mistake.  That was delicious.  I am not supposed to have bread on my diet but since they had made the mistake and I didn’t want to get anyone into any trouble I just ate it and it was so good.  I would never have thought of using salmon like that but it really works perfectly.  This might have been the best club sandwich that I have ever had.  It just worked perfectly.  I put some thousand island dressing on it too which really worked well.

I finished reading “Wicked Plants” and started reading “Mass Effect: Revelation” which is a prequel to the video game.  I was really excited to find that that book was available on Audible.  It turns out that all of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age novels are on Audible.  I would never have even thought to look for them there.  That is awesome.  I rarely, if ever, stop and take the time to read a novel but as I really get into video game stories – as I treat video games like a form of interactive literature – they are an exception to the normal rule and I would like to read them, often.  But normally I only read technical books in print and everything else is through Audible.  Since these are available on Audible I will certainly be reading them all now.  For Mass Effect, for example, there is a book that comes before each of the games.  So I am reading the first one now before I complete the first game.  As soon as I finish the first game I plan to go on and read the next book in the series.

The third Mass Effect video game is due to release on March 6th.  I hope to have all of the books read and the first two games completed prior to the release date.  I doubt that I will buy the game right when it releases, but I want the option and at least want to have the older titles out of the way.

Medifast Status: Day 239, Down ~72lbs

I started reading Amy Stewart’s “Wicked Plants” on Audible.  I am really working my way through my Audible library this holiday season!

I worked from home today so that I could spend the day with Oreo and take him to the vet’s office this afternoon.  His left eye has been really bad for days.  It appears that his eye is bleeding.  He has been having severe eye problems for a long time with that one so we are really concerned.  He is completely blind so that is not the concern.  We are just worried about pain and infections.  We want him happy.  Being blind is very hard for him as it is.

Work remains insanely slow so today I managed to start playing BioWare’s classic Mass Effect for the XBOX 360 which originally released in 2008.  This is one of those video game classics that I have owned for a long time and have just never managed to get around to playing.  I have heard people rave about it but I do not get a lot of time to play video games so it has sat on the shelf waiting for me to have free time.

Oreo’s vet appointment ended up going pretty well.  His vet was very glad that we rushed him in as he is indeed bleeding into his eye but she thinks that she can help him.  So he had a long visit and a substantial change to his medicine regimen.  Overall, though, just being home rather than in Houston appears to have him feeling better.  Dominica was commenting on his odd behaviour while he was down there and thought that he was in a lot of pain but I am pretty confident, and his vet agreed, that the issues came from him being uncomfortable with the situation and not from physical pain.  Now that he is at home with me and all is quiet is appears to be incredible happy and relaxed.

I did a lot of carpet cleaning today.  I’ve started a new process where I put a large pot on the stove and boil the water and oxygenating bleach mixture so that it can really attack the dirt and whatever in the carpets.  I’m not sure how much of a different the boiling makes, outside of dissolving the bleach better and keeping me from leaving dry bits of bleach grit behind, but hitting the carpet with so much water and bleach at once allows me to move from spot cleaning to seriously attacking large swaths of the floor all at once.

I cleaned the carpets at the same time as playing my video game.  The water takes a good ten minutes to prepare and has to soak in the floor for about ten minutes.  So there is a lot of time in between treatments.  So I start the water on the stove, play for a bit, dump the water on the floor, play for a bit, clean up the water and repeat.  Each pot of water fills a minimum of two water tanks on the hand floor cleaner that I am using to suck the water back out.  I am getting tons of dirt out of the carpet and as I am cleaning “clean” carpet and not a spot that has had an accident or specific dirt problem it really highlights just how dirty carpets are.  I am very glad that I am bleaching them.

I had an hour and a half conference call this afternoon but other than that nearly no work all day.  I fed myself at home today, just steam in bag veggies and veggie patties from the freezer.  I’m working hard to use the food that is in the house and to keep eating as healthily as possible.  Today is my diet recovery day to help to get my body back on track.

I managed to play nearly twelve hours of Mass Effect today and am really in to it now.  That game is awesome.  It is no wonder that people are so passionate about it.  The storyline is really excellent and the game in general is a real departure both from most games available as well as from the games that I normally play.  It is a science fiction game, and normally I play fantasy, and it is an action adventure rather than more traditional RPG.  It is often listed as RPG but it really is only minimally that, at best, but the social interactions in the game are very much RPG so it is a bit of a genre buster.

The real strengths in Mass Effect come from its story telling and unique plot.  I have been drawn in and am enjoying the game immensely.  I am quite glad that I saved it until I was in a position to really get into it and enjoy it.  The sequel is actually supposed to be quite a bit better.  It is Mass Effect 2, not Mass Effect, with so many industry accolades.

Medifast Status: Day 238, Down ~72lbs

I got up this morning and worked from Joe and Britt’s house all day.  Dominica and the girls went to the Grices’ and went shopping.  Oreo needed a quiet day and I needed to work a little today.  There was extremely little going on at the office but we figured that there would be no real way for me to get work done so we just stayed there.  It was mostly a lonely day.

Around four I packed up the Mazda with everything that I would need to have for the week and drove Oreo over to the Grices’ where we had dinner and Dominica’s mother’s birthday cake.  It was fairly late when Oreo and I were able to get on to the road to drive north.

Having finished my last book yesterday, today I selected and read “The Book of General Ignorance“, also on Audible, on my long, lonely drive up to Carrollton.  The drive went fine.  Nothing to report there.

Because I have to take Oreo to the office tomorrow I will be working from home and getting some time in at the house.

Medifast Status: Day 237, Down ~72lbs

Today is Monday and because of when the holiday fell I get today off of work so I am able to stick around in Houston for a while before going back up to Dallas.  Really I could stay down all week but there is stuff to be done at home and Oreo really needs his quiet time.  He thrives when he is able to be alone and sleep all day without anyone interrupting him. His one eye is really looking bad and he needs to make a trip to the vet as soon as we can get him in.

This evening we all went out to dinner at Saltgrass for Dominica’s mom’s birthday which is actually tomorrow but not everyone could make it tomorrow.  Dinner was quite good.  I got coconut shrimp which was quite tasty.  This was Dominica and my first time going to a Saltgrass.  The food was good, nothing amazing but not bad, but I must say that the customer service was excellent.  Good enough that even though I am writing this blog post weeks later it stands out in my mind how impressed that I was with their customer service while we were there.  I would go back there just because of that.

Tomorrow I will be working from Joe and Britt’s house with Oreo during the day and will be driving back to Dallas in the evening.

Tonight I finished reading “The Great Age of Discovery” which I have been reading for some time.  This is book number two that I have completed during the holidays.  I learned a lot of South American and Central American recent history from this book.  Not areas that I know very well.

Medifast Status: Day 236, Down ~72lbs

We were up decently early this morning, like around eight, and headed over to the Grices’ with the girls.  Oreo stayed behind in his kennel at Joe and Britt’s house so that he could sleep.   The mayhem of opening presents would be way too much for him and there is no reason for him to be there then.

We ate the coffee cake that John and Michelle sent to us this morning which has become a bit of a Christmas tradition for us.  They had sent it to me while I was still up in Dallas and I delivered it down so that we could eat it here.  It was awesome.  Everyone really liked it.

We got started on the late side for the opening of presents.  This year is really crazy as there are so many kids.  Liesl was only somewhat involved in the present opening process last year and Clara was not involved at all.  But this year we have five kids opening presents with only Luciana being too young to take part.

Liesl, of course, made out like a bandit and has all kinds of cool, new stuff.  She had a great time and is very excited about her new toys, art stuff, school stuff, clothes, etc.

The big gift for Dominica and I is money for a Rug Doctor.  We will be buying that next week.  This year was the first year that we had figured out what we wanted to Christmas way ahead of time and have known what we wanted for about eleven months.  Normally we wait until the last second and then struggle to come up with the right thing to ask for.  This year we were prepared but spent the entire year looking forward to it.  It may seem like a mundane present but when you put as much work into cleaning carpets as we do it becomes one of the most exciting things that you can imagine.  We are really looking forward to deep cleaning our carpets on a regular basis.  They really need it.

Liesl’s big gift was Kinect for the XBOX 360.  Garrett got one as well.  We are hoping that because the Kinect works by watching the kids and does not require any remote that it will work better for them being so young than does the Wii.  Liesl has a really hard time taking the abstract concept of the Wiimote and figuring out how to translate her hand motions into video game interactions.  That every controller today is different makes this much harder.  She is good with touch screens and has some concept of keyboards and a mouse.  But Wiis and XBOXs, for example, have extremely different controllers that look much alike and the Kinect is completely different yet.  So there will be some learning curve, but we are hopeful.

The Kinect came with three games and Liesl got a Sesame Street game for Christmas too.  Dominica also got a Kinect game for Christmas based on a game show that she really enjoys but whose name escapes me at the time that I am writing this.

One of the coolest things that I’ve gotten for Christmas in a long time are whiskey stones.  These are square chunks of soap stone that you put into the freezer and then use instead of ice in a whiskey (or any drink.)  They keep the drink cold but do not water down the drink so they are way better than normal ice.  I have wanted whiskey stones for years and now I have some.

This evening I put in some time working on Francesca’s second computer – the one that recently got a really bad virus infection.  It has not been working for a while and they were unable to find any installation media for it (it was purchased used) so we decided to install Ubuntu Linux for her to see if that would work out.  I got it installed pretty quickly and she tried it out and was really happy with it. It has everything that she needs, looks way better than Vista, which is what was on there before, and should not have any need for anti-virus software making it was less cumbersome for her.

Madeline and Emily’s big presents were Apple iPod Touchs which are pretty awesome presents.  They are basically full-blown handheld computers with Internet access.  So now they have new ways to have handheld video games, music, movies, television shows, books, chat, email, etc.  I spent much of the evening getting the iPods set up and working.  It is amazing how much work it takes to get those ready for use.

Medifast Status: Day 235, Down ~72lbs

Christmas is one of those rare holidays where everything at the office completely stops and I really do not need to worry about checking in at all.  I can just disconnect and disappear.  Ah, I love it.

Mostly today was a very relaxing day.  Just hanging out with the family.  Lots of food.

We went to mass this evening at the church near to Joe and Britt’s house.  This is our first time going to this particular church.  We got there early but it was already standing room only.

After church we did dinner at the Tocco’s and then Dominica went back over to the Grices’ with her parents to help with the setup for Christmas morning.  I stayed with Oreo who is very nervous and anxious with so many people and dogs around and so much space that he does not know his way around.  He has been having a really hard time being down in Houston so I am trying my best to keep him calm and relaxed.

Dominica was gone for several hours.  Oreo and I went to bed very early and put in some time listening to books on Audible.  Audible has become a Christmas tradition for me.  We are always out of town for the holidays and both traveling as well as being out of town make me want to use Audible to listen to books.  I have been doing this for several years now and I am beginning to associate the holidays with book reading.

It was probably one in the morning when Dominica got back to Joe and Britt’s house.  I’m not sure exactly when it was as Oreo and I were already fast asleep.

Medifast Status: Day 234, Down ~72lbs

I am working today, not taking it off even though I am down in Houston.  I decided, as things have been so insanely slow at the office, to see if I would be able to make it all day without a computer, though, and to work purely from my Blackberry just keeping an eye on the emails.

Francesca made me a batch of egg nog cupcakes.  This is going to be awful for my diet.  The house is completely full of baked goods!  And there are not that many people to be eating the baked goods.  There is way more food than there is people to consume it.

I had to give in and go off of my diet.  There is just no good way around it.  So I’m taking the next few weeks off.  I’m going to try to limit the damage but it is not going to be easy.  Christmas food is some of my favourite so this is really going to be a struggle.  The egg nog cupcakes are especially tough because they are actually soaked in Maker’s Mark bourbon.  Mmmm… delicious.

Today was a very relaxing day.  We had nothings scheduled since originally I was supposed to be driving down from Dallas this evening but instead got the entire day here.  Liesl and Luciana were very excited that I can down.  They really miss me when we are apart – even when they have their cousins with whom to play.

Luciana is really close to crawling now.  She is scooting this way and that and getting up and almost ready to crawl but not quite able to get the coordination down of moving all of her limbs together.  Only a week or two before she is going to be highly mobile.

ikoniMedifast Status: Day 233, Down ~72lbs

I spent a bit of my morning dealing with an issue with UPS.  I had to get on the phone with customer service and they actually have no means of doing that.  I was really treated poorly and I was very painfully reminded why I prefer to always use FedEx if possible.  UPS really went dramatically out of their way wasting tons of their own resources just to make me a very unhappy customer.  They even had the audacity to tell me that I needed to call Canada to get what I needed – even though I had looked up Canadian customer service and called them rather than the American customer service.  They refused to answer why they were saying I needed to call another country and would not tell me in what country they were in.  I got passed from person to person, each one saying that the next person would help me but each one couldn’t and eventually they couldn’t even transfer me and had to give me a different phone number – the one that the web site claimed that I had called.  Their IVR system, the phone prompts, doesn’t even have a means by which to reach customer service.  If you have a problem you have to pick a choice and no choice leads to a human, none.

Considering that four UPS staffers had to assist me this was not a cheap process for UPS and at least two admitted that every single person who gets through to them is furious because of how poorly they have been treated by the IVR before reaching them.  I found that the only way that I could get through to someone was to swear at the IVR loudly and, from what I can tell, that finally triggered the voice detection algorithm to determine that it had failed.  I have no idea what got me through to someone and I could not reliably reach UPS every again if I had to.   So not only did UPS completely alienate me but they paid a lot of money to several workers to do it.  That the IVR is set to completely screw with their customers just highlights that this was no accident and required a lot of planning to make me so dissatisfied with them.  That they knew that it was an issue and were not changing it just show that the results were what they actually wanted.

Simple solution – stick with FedEx.  I’ve never had customer service issues there.

For lunch today, Nicki and I went to Brookhaven.  After lunch we ran to the house and let Oreo out.  The living room carpet is really starting to look good after I began my process of boiling a pot of water on the stove, mixing in Oxyclean and dumping it out on a bad spot of the carpet and letting it set for five to ten minutes.  That works great.  I can’t believe how well the floor cleans up from that.  It is labour intensive work but the carpet is starting to look, more or less, like new.  One spot at a time.

I went in to the office this morning and things were very slow.  Very, very slow.  I talked to my boss and told him that I was going to leave a day early and go to Houston this afternoon rather than waiting until tomorrow night.  He was like… “whatever, there is nothing going on here.”  We all agreed that this is the slowest that we have ever seen it.  Absolutely nothing happening.  No point to me being in the office at all.  There is no one here and no work needing my attention.

So I left around three thirty to run home and get everything packed up for the drive.  It always takes a while to get everything packed.  I don’t need to bring all that much, though, since I am only going for about five days and Dominica already has most of everything that we need there.

It was probably five thirty or so when I finally managed to hit the road heading south.  The drive went pretty smoothly, nothing really to report on the trip.  While driving I listened to Bill Bryson’s At Home which Dominica and I had been reading together at some point, probably over the summer.  I have given up on saving books to read with her because she can easily go years in between wanting to read something and I want to finish them and know what happened.

I did not quite finish the book on the drive but listened to the end of it in bed.  We are staying at Joe and Britt’s house while down here.  We have the entire upstairs “suite” to ourselves giving Dominica and I a room, Liesl a room and Luciana a room all to ourselves plus out own bathroom.  It really makes it easy for us to keep living normally.  The girls would not sleep well if we had to start sharing rooms all of a sudden.

I was tired when I arrived and Oreo and I went to bed a bit before everyone else.

Medifast Status: Day 232, Down ~72lbs

The Whitehouse needs your voice to know that Americans want the SOPA Bill to be vetoed.  SOPA will cripple innovation and freedom and is a means of big businesses to squash competition.  This link is directly to the president’s office and is Obama’s official petition.  Please raise your hand and be counted.  This is a critical protection of our freedom.  It is very encouraging to see our government finally entering the digital age

I decided to work from home today.  There is nothing whatsoever going on at the office and no reason for me to be there.  I’m trying to figure out if I should head down to Houston early since there is so little going on and I really miss my family.

Late this evening I decided that I really needed to buckle down and complete Dragon Age 2.  I have been putting it off because I am up to a really large battle that is way too much work (I have already died several times trying to get through it) and so I don’t have much incentive to pop in the game and work through it.  But Francesca wants to borrow the game and I am anxious to have it over and done with so I moved Oreo onto the play room couch and we snuggled while I worked my way through the last several battles of the game.

The ending of Dragon Age 2 was, in some ways, a bit of a let down compared to Dragon Age Origins but in other ways it ended with some surprises and is very much setting up the next installment and I have to admit that I am very excited to see where Dragon Age 3 is going to take us.  If Dragon Age 2 is just a setup for the third installment, I am pretty psyched.

I have not played any of the downloadable content for Dragon Age 2 as of yet.  There are basically three small expansions and I am unsure whether or not I will decide to play them all.  I know that I definitely want to play Legacy as it expands on the main story or at least on the main character.  I am less inclined to pay to play Exiled Prince and Mark of the Assassin but as the second one leads to the new webseries, I might just have to play it.

I am very happy to have completed another video game.  It is so rare that I fully complete one that it is a bit of a momentous occasion.  My plan now is to move on to Mass Effect, which I already own, on the 360.  At the very least I want Oblivion and Mass Effect completed before I make any attempt to undertake Skyrim.  I figure that Mass Effect will keep me busy into spring at the very least since I have not even started the game yet at this point.  Mass Effect is made by BioWare, the same people as Dragon Age.

After finishing the game I continued working for a little while and finally gave up around one in the morning.  I put on the Hudson and Day classic Lover Come Back and did some work on building a Solaris storage server.  After that I watched some of the beginning of Down with Love which is heavily based on Lover Come Back but filmed forty years later.  It was about three when Oreo and I finally went to bed.

Medifast Status: Day 231, Down ~72lbs

Found this awesome video from OSCON 2010.  Not a convention that I normally suggest that people outside of the industry attend but this particular talk by Paul Fenwick on the world’s worst inventions shows just how enjoyable these conferences can be.

Today is day two of my week of bachelorhood.  Oreo is always super snuggly when I am the only one home.  Luckily I have a bit of flexibility to sleep in this week since even if I get up late I can just run out the door.

I listened to some IT Conversations on the drive in to the office this morning.  For months now I have been listening to music while commuting rather than books or podcasts and that is like eating junk food all of the time.  Tastes good right at that moment but you don’t feel all that great after doing it for a long time.

Work is so slow.  There is just nothing going on.  I can go for hours without getting a single email.  The office is pretty much empty.  I am just going to stay home tomorrow.  Really no need to be in the office.  Oreo will like having me around all day.

For lunch I first had a quick Medifast appointment and then just went home and took care of Oreo and did a little work around the house and then returned to the office.

I spent the afternoon working on teaching myself Ruby on Rails.  I’ve done Rails work before, but it has been a long time and there have been some massively significant upgrades to the platform in that time.  So I am working through learning the latest Rails 3.1 framework and Ruby 1.9.  A lot has changed since I last used it so I am going through a large scale tutorial trying to really learn each step as I go.

After work, which I left just before five, I drove up to Brookhaven and did dinner out all alone.  It was kids night, so pretty weird to be eating alone.  I would have opted to eat in the Five Five rather than in The Grille but being in my work attire meant that I was not appropriately dressed for the Five Five so I just hung out with all of the kids running around.  The chef’s table this evening was very meat heavy and not well suited to me at all so I just got a salad with grilled salmon.  I ate pretty quickly and headed home a bit before six thirty.

I got home and spent most of the evening just hanging out with Oreo.  I did a ton of Ruby on Rails programming.  I got a little more of the house cleaned up too.  I did all of the dishes today and some more spot cleaning on the carpets.

Medifast Status: Day 230, Down ~72lbs

I slept in a little with my snuggly Oreo.  No need to get into the office much before nine during the holidays.  There is just nothing to do.  So getting a little extra sleep is nice and Oreo appreciates the company.

Oreo is loving having the house to himself.  He would prefer if there was someone around all day but he prefers having no one there to having lots of chaos.  He gets a lot of sleep and always seems to have his healthy and temperament improve during these stretches.  Little kids are very hard for an old, blind Boston Terrier to handle.

It was warmer again today with light rain on and off.  It was dark and drizzly all day mixed with the occasional serious rain from time to time. There is some light flooding going on all over.

I went home at lunch and ended up spending the entire time on the phone.  At least it was a productive lunch time.

Back to the office for a slow afternoon.  I spoke to Dominica and she and Francesca were out for an exciting afternoon of eye doctor appointments in Houston.  Dominica got an eye exam which she has been desperately needing for some time and decided to get herself contacts today.

My commute home was terrible today.  Instead of twelve minutes it took fifty.  The roads were all at a stand still – presumably because everyone panics in the rain.  Pretty silly.  There is hardly any rain.  Although, to be fair, there is quite a bit of standing water on the roads and you do hit some pretty massive puddles without much warning on a regular basis.

I stayed in tonight.  Did some work, watched a little of the first season of How I Met Your Mother, decided that I just was not in the mood for a video game and then spent a little over an hour working out with the Wii Fit Plus.  I had a good workout tonight.  I really need to get into a routine of doing this every day.  I enjoy the Wii Fit workout just because it is interactive and provides an automated recording of my activities.

Medifast Status: Day 229, Down ~72lbs

I got to sleep in just a little today, but not too much.  Dominica got up with Luciana and they headed over to Francesca’s pretty early so that Dominica could assist with the party preparations for Bennie’s 40th birthday party that is going on in San Leon today.

Liesl woke up just as Dominica left so there was no real sleeping in for me.  Liesl had me take her downstairs and then put on Barney for her.  Then it was time to send me on a hunt for her “chocolate milk” that she drinks every morning.  That took me a very long time, of course, since I had no idea where it was and no one at the Grices’ was answering their phones.  This is one of the issues with telephone communications now in the “cell phone only, no housephone” era – even with many phone lines going into the house there are still very regular occurrences where every single device is either dead, lost or inaudible and there is no way to reach anyone at all.  This reminds me why I am more than willing to maintain our housephone.  It keeps my house reachable and makes the availability of the phone a household responsibility instead of making the responsibility of being reachable the personal purview of each individual within the house.

Dominica came over to the Toccos’ around ten thirty and we had an hour and a half to get showered and dressed.  Then we loaded up the Acadia and drove a very packed car load down to San Leon, about forty minutes away, for Bennie’s birthday party at his dad’s house.

It was a good sized family party, lots of food. Lots of food that I should not have been eating.  That made it really hard.  Today was not a good diet day at all.

Liesl had a good time playing outside with all of the kids.  Unfortunately she had a run in with an agave cactus that cut her pinky and forehead.  That sent her inside rather unhappy.  And just before we went to leave she got her hand shut very painfully in a sliding glass door.  It was pretty had and we were definitely concerned about broken fingers but she came away okay but cried for a very long time.

It was nearly six by the time that we got back from the party so it was time to pack up the Mazda and drive Oreo and myself back up to Carrollton.

The drive was not bad.  I listened to another five hours of IT Conversations on the trip north.  Ten total hours in two days.  I am still very, very far behind in my queue.  I need to get out walking more often and listen to more podcasts.

It was about ten thirty when I got home.

Medifast Status: Day 228, Down ~72lbs

Oreo and I slept in a bit this morning but not nearly as much as we had hoped because I got paged out from the office.  It turned out to be a false alarm but it managed to wake me up just the same.  So much for sleeping in late.

I did more work cleaning the house and I located and packed up quite a bit of stuff that Dominica wanted to have down in Houston.  Luciana’s bouncer was the big item that needed to go down.  Luciana uses that quite a bit, as did Liesl when she was that age, and she needs to have it in Houston since they are there for so long since that is how she does her leg exercises.  Dominica also had several boxes for me to deliver.  A lot of our baby stuff that Luciana no longer needs (infant clothes, early baby bottles, extra burp clothes) are being shipped out to Jenn make in Philadelphia who is expecting soon.  This is the beginning of the “making space” that only happens once you are done having kids.  After Liesl everything just piled up because we were planning on having another but now we are able to start getting rid of the things that Luciana cannot use anymore.  It is sad to get rid of Liesl and Luciana’s old stuff but it is taking up space and we cannot get emotionally attached to every little thing – that would be overwhelming.

It is hard to give away a large amount of the toys and things that the girls enjoyed when they were younger.  Those items hold a lot of memories, but if we keep them the house will fill with them and they will just go into boxes and we will never see them again anyway.  Best to just get them off to someone who can use them now.

It ended up being one in the afternoon before Oreo and I finally got out of the house and onto the road.  The drive down went fine.  Traffic was not bad at all until I was on the south side of Houston approaching Galveston County.  Then things started backing up around Hobby Airport.

On my drive down I did some serious catching up on podcasts from IT Conversations.  I listened the entire way so that was nearly five hours of technology news and conferences that I managed to listen to.  Very good stuff.  I like getting time to just listen to my podcasts.  I get so much “mental broadening” from doing that but get very little opportunity to do it.

It was a little after six when I got to Francesca’s house.  We were there for just a little while before moving over to Joe’s house for the evening.  Dominica and the girls are staying over there for the month as there is a lot more space so that Liesl and Luciana each get their own rooms while Dominica’s parents will be staying at Francesca’s.

Dominica’s parents got in a little after seven and we all had dinner around eight.

Medifast Status: Day 227, Down ~72lbs

Yes, I am down another pound since yesterday.  My few minutes of yoga must have paid off

Dominica and the girls left for Houston a little after I went to the office this morning.  I am driving down to Houston to join them tomorrow but returning to Dallas on Monday while they stay down there for several weeks.  At least it will give me a chance to really get the house cleaned.

It is colder today but clear and bright.  Not bad.  Cold by Texas standards.

For lunch John and I went to Brookhaven.  With Dominica not around, I have little reason to ever go anywhere except for Brookhaven.  For the price it just makes no sense not to use it for every meal.  If I ate lunch there six days a week it would be only $30 of food for a full week minus Mondays when they are closed.  I can’t possibly cook at home for that price, not for the size of the meals that I get there.

After lunch we ran to the house and let Oreo out.  Oreo didn’t need to do anything so now I need to figure out where on the floor he went.  But no time to do that at lunch, had to get back to the office.  At least John got to see the house for a minute.  He had seen the old apartment but not the house yet.  Really, just about no one has seen the office.  John is only the third person from work to have seen it.  We had always meant to have had a house warming party but never got to it.  We still feel like we are still moving in.

I think because we move so much, so far and so often we do not have the “show up and set up the house” mentality that most people tend to have when moving into a new house.  We now show up and only get enough set up to get us up and running.  We don’t decorate or get everything “just right” as soon as we arrive.  The mentality that we are probably just going to have to pack up and move again right away is so strong that it really keeps us from doing that.  And for good reason, the apartment in Newark is the place that we have lived the longest since the house in Geneseo and that house we only lived in as our primary residence for three years and even then both of us were working away from Geneseo quite a bit so we never lived there as much as people who normally buy a house.  We had put a lot of work into getting that house set up and then we moved with so little warning so soon and have never been anywhere were we were really sure that we were going to put down long term roots.  Peekskill felt that way a little bit when we first moved in but it was only ten months before we were packing up again so even though we were planning on staying put we didn’t have enough time for it to really happen.

So the house is still in a state of flux.  We still need to do our “move in” painting and to hang pictures on the walls.  We still need clocks and basic decorations.  We still need our garage door opener back from our incompetent contractor.  The list goes on.

I also found today that the front pillars moved a little more and some mortar fell from the top of one of the pillars onto the front walk.  We need to be careful out there as bricks could come loose and fall.

Work was quite slow this afternoon.  I did not get stuck in the office late like on a normal Friday.  It was great to get to go home and have nothing to do.

I had decided that I was not going to go down to Houston until tomorrow.  I wanted some time to just unwind.

I got home and spent several hours cleaning the house.  It took very little time for the house to really perk up.  I got the living room, through which you could barely walk before, completely clean without a single rogue object sprawling about on the floor.  I did the same for the play room and then I vacuumed both.  I managed to get the front table cleaned off – something that almost never happens when I am not home alone.  I got the bar partially cleared off too, but did not manage to finish that.

Just from the work that I have already done the house is looking so much better.  It makes me actually want to spend time in the house.  It reminds me why we bought this house – it really is an attractive house with a comfortable living space once we get it cleaned up.  Now that the furniture is out of the house it is wide open space.  Oreo loves it.  He just rolls around in the middle of the room without fear of crashing into anything.

This evening I went out to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar for the evening.  Chris was going to join me early on and hang out but he got stuck at work until really late so I only got to see him for about half an hour.

Tomorrow I am sleeping in and then heading down to Houston in the afternoon.  Liesl and Luciana will be busy playing with their cousins and visiting with family so I would not really get time to be with them anyway.  Might as well relax and get things done up here.  Dominica’s parents are flying into Houston tomorrow evening.  I’m just going to be down there for the weekend returning back to Dallas on Sunday night.  Then I will be home, along with Oreo, for the week.

My next task is to finish working on the kitchen.  I got it cleaned up a bit but not nearly as much as I had hoped.  There are dishes to be done yet.  So that will be my first cleaning task on Monday following by the “eat in” area.  I want to get the kitchen table cleared and the general mess there all cleaned up.  We’ve had Liesl’s easel there for a while as well as her little Dora the Explorer folding table and those take up so much space and cause everything else to just pile up there which now includes a bunch of wood for the fireplace and two bins of things from the garage.  Oreo has a bed taking up space in there too but it is behind all of this stuff and he cannot get to it no matter how much he might want to do so.

All of that is before I even begin looking into cleaning up our bedroom.  That is going to be a major challenge to be sure.