Jamie Thingelstad

I pre-ordered the Ledger Stax on Dec 10, 2022 and after a very long wait I got notified that they will be shipping in June! I have two on the way. I am looking forward to trying the Ledger Stax out after a 17 month wait!

For Mother’s Day I ordered some Freese’s Candy for Tammy. We had these when we were in Milwaukee and she has declared them her favorite Turtles. They are delicious. So I ordered one pound of them for her as well as a pound of salted caramel in milk chocolate.

I timed the order so it would come next week, but they shipped it fast and it delivered even faster. They dropped it off on Saturday at 2:34pm.

In just two hours, an intrepid squirrel approached. The squirrel smelled it, pushed the box around, tipped it over, and got to work at whatever delicious smells were inside.

This rascal even took a break sitting on my chair! 🐿️

After the mayhem was in full swing one of the neighborhood rabbits thought they would check it out too.

Over the course of that afternoon and the next morning several squirrels stopped by to check out the situation.

When we got home we found both boxes of chocolate completely emptied and bits of the box scattered around. I hope those squirrels were miserable from all that sugar.

Finished game of Five Crowns — Mazie was the winner!

My bro-in-law Max and I getting ready for the 80’s Prom Murder Mystery Party. 🕵️‍♂️

Double rainbow from earlier today. The primary rainbow was so colorful. Even the green is clearly visible. 🌈🌈

I haven’t had any coffee since April 1st. I’ve abstained from coffee and caffeine because of three different factors.

1. I have high blood pressure and caffeine is not good for that.
2. I’m not a good sleeper and caffeine is bad for sleep.
3. I don’t have anxiety problems, but tend to be anxious which caffeine can aggravate too.

Going into this I had reduced my coffee intake. A few months ago I dropped my coffee consumption from 24oz a day to 12oz a day. When I did that I noticed no material changes and figured less was probably better. So when I decided to drop it entirely I figured it wouldn’t be that hard since I didn’t think I was having that much coffee.

I sure was wrong. Stopping coffee and caffeine was much harder than I expected. The first day was fine, but the second day I had a persistent headache. I felt like I was in slow-motion all day, kind of in a fog. And I was so tired in the afternoon and evening that it was all I could do to stay awake. The third day was the same. It wasn’t until the fourth and fifth days that I started to feel more normal.

I didn’t think the caffeine I was consuming was having any real impact on me — but the impact that the removal had tells a different story.

How about the three areas I was focusing on?

So far I haven’t seen any material change in blood pressure. That is disappointing to me but I think speaks to other factors being more impactful to that metric. The physiology still suggests that combining high blood pressure and caffeine is a bad idea. So abstaining from caffeine is still a good idea even if I’m not seeing it on the blood pressure sensor.

The thing that I have had the most profound improvement in is sleep. Removing caffeine entirely had a more profound impact on my sleep than I could have imagined. Both qualitative and quantitative with the data from the 8Sleep. I’m falling asleep much faster and earlier than I was before. I’m getting about 30 to 45 minutes more sleep a night, mostly by getting to sleep earlier at night and less waking time in the middle of the night. I’m waking up at 6am and feel rested. Something I genuinely have never experienced.

The last factor of anxiety doesn’t have any way for me to quantify. I don’t know of any clear differentiator that I can point to for this. My best indicator would be ease of achieving a peaceful mind when I meditate, but my meditation practice has been very sporadic this month.

I find the sleep improvements to be great. I also do like the lack of dependence on getting coffee in the morning. I do miss the ritual of coffee, particularly on the weekends. I’ve sourced some high quality caffeine free tea to give that a try for when I would like that experience.

I’m not ready to say that I’m not a coffee drinker. We’ll see where the future goes. I’ll just take it one day at a time. 😊

Tammy and I had an enjoyable evening at Constellation Fund Bright Night 2024. Constellation Fund uses a data-driven approach to fund a variety of non-profits in the Twin Cities area with the goal to eliminate poverty. Constellation takes an approach similar to Robin Hood in New York or Tipping Point in San Francisco. Bright Night is their annual even to celebrate the great work the organization is supporting.

Bright Night was held at the Uptown Theater amidst a complete chaos of road construction. It was the first time I’ve been there since the massive renovation and it is very nice!

Hanging out with friends Julie Berman and Hal Kaufman.

Constellation had this setup to show how they use metrics to drive impact-based decisions.

Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the band that opened the evening but they were good.

I’ve always wanted to…

Andrew Dayton addressing the group and sharing progress of Constellation Fund.

Ran into Greg Blasko at the event, one of the founders of SportNgin.

Tammy and I were both excited to see that Laamar was closing the night out!

See Bright Night from 2021, 2023, and 2024.

At St. Olaf enjoying Mazie singing in Manitou Singers for the Spring Concert featuring Andrea Ramsey’s Suffrage Cantata.

Recent concert that I most regret not going to — Bruce Springsteen.

We attempted to solve the Utopia room at Lock & Key Escape Rooms today — alas we didn’t quite get there. It is there hardest room, and we skipped hearing the solution so that we could make a return trip and try again with Mazie there too! 🔒

See list of escape rooms.

We had a delightful afternoon at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Tulips are blooming! 🌷

For fun I added my website to the IndieWeb Webring. 🕸💍 I also added an h-card microformat tucked away in the footer of my site. I styled it not to display but the validator picks it up fine.

1. Woke up around 5:30a to the chirps of a CO detector telling me the 9V backup battery is low.
2. Let Lucky out and then realize a neighbor with two dogs is walking down the alley triggering Lucky to start barking and running around like a crazy animal.
3. Get keys to run an errand and accidentally activate car alarm while putting shows on.

😬

We saw Hard Miles at Edina 4. Based on a true story, it tells the story of a counselor taking four young men in a correctional school on a long bicycle ride to find themselves. Their destination is the Grand Canyon (which kept reminding me of a similar theme in the movie Grand Canyon. I have a soft spot for movies that prominently feature cycling. Plus Matthew Modine who I first remember from Vision Quest was great in it. His character goes through his own emotional journey in the trip as well. Recommended!

Happy Birthday to Tammy! 🎉 I took the afternoon off for Tammy’s birthday. Mazie wasn’t able to be at home so we drove to St. Olaf and took a nice walk through the Natural Lands with her. We then returned home and got Tyler from school, opened present, had a nice dinner at Pajarito and then a movie at the Edina 4 Theatre! 🎂

Today was a particularly fun session of blog gardening:

• Realized that we walked the High Line in New York exactly 11 years apart and didn’t know it, first in 2012 and then in 2013.
• Shared 1-year anniversary of a milestone with SPS team.
• Reminded of the Cherry Blossoms in Kyiv.
• Linked all five High Line blog posts together.
• Fixed three photos that had been lost in past blog migrations.
• Used Internet Archive to fill in missing information from a conference I attended in 2016.
• Added a photo from Lightroom that had never been on my blog because it was hard to do that back then.
• Added over a dozen hyperlinks to various posts making them and the web better.
• Fixed a handful of typos.