Jamie Thingelstad

School cancelled for tomorrow due to extreme cold. Tyler was ecstatic to hear the news. Forecast is for -15 °F at 8am tomorrow and the cold snap breaks around noon. 🥶

The Weekly Thing was supposed to be back this last weekend but I decided to extend the winter break one more week. Expect the first issue of 2025 next weekend!

We completed “The Museum” at Puzzleworks today in 58m 48s. There is a whole genre of escape rooms that are creepy and this was our first that was even a little in that genre. We had a great time solving it with our nephew Levi. 👻

Today we returned to Copper Cat Escape Games in Brainerd so that we could try the Deep Woods Cabin room. When we were here yesterday we were talking to Allon after finishing our room and loved his passion for Escape Rooms. He said this Deep Woods Cabin room was his favorite and we wanted to give it a try. We had a great time!

The room has a great backstory and you start in the woods outside of the cabin. Your first task is to figure out how to get in. The story is rich and the puzzles are just perfect. There is a wide variety of things to figure out. Your not just pounding codes into locks but have to really put the scene together.

We were completely immersed from the very beginning. We were challenged but everything connected together. I’m proud to say we completed the room with no clues and 13m 08s on the clock. There were several puzzles that made us smile as they came together.

We were very impressed with Copper Cat Escape Games. If you live in the Twin Cities it is a two hour drive and I think it would be worth it if you like escape rooms. You could book two or three of the rooms. Deep Woods Cabin is definitely one of the best, if not the best, that we’ve done in Minnesota.

See list of escape rooms.

I have multiple UniFi G4 Instant cameras mounted outside and this cold snap is the coldest they have experienced. Well below the -4° F specification. So far they are holding in there.

At the Chocolate Ox for January ice cream. Melting? Go outside! -9 °F.

Lots of R-rated socks at Zaiser’s in Nisswa. 🙈🙉🙊

Benefit of it being -11 °F? Easy to flash freeze a Rafferty’s Veggie Supreme pizza to bring home for Tammy’s sister.

I set up a Guestbook for my site copying @jimmitchell who saw it at @alexwolfe site. Thanks to Guestbooks by meadow! The CSS is default. Maybe @mtt will want to Tiny Theme it? 🤩

I could not care less about Tik Tok, and would consider it an upgrade to the Internet for it to be removed from the US, and frankly everywhere else. The fact people care so much is proof of its intentional addictive design.

What you do when you’re Up North and it feels like -24 °F.

Grand View Lodge on a very cold -7 °F (feels like -22 °F) night.

We had a great time solving Granny’s Recipe Rescue at Copper Cat Escape in 48m 18s! We had five “rookie” misses that we caused us to “face palm”. 🤦 We are coming back tomorrow to do another room!

See list of escape rooms.

I suspect the reason Apple Intelligence mail categories are only supported on the iPhone is at least in part because of the difficulty with synchronizing that state across multiple devices. Feels similar to People identification in Photos at first, but Apple can’t control the backend on email.

I’ve used Sanebox for a decade to defer emails, but now I’m trying Fastmail and I’m realizing how nice it is to be able to individually specify a defer time per email instead of just having two or three options as folders. Downside is I can only defer in the Fastmail clients.

After much debating I finally decided to get a new laptop and ordered a MacBook Pro with M4 Pro and configured nicely. This thing is going to be fast! Will be especially nice for photography. 😎

I’ve been a Sanebox user for over a decade on all my mailboxes. I’m trying going without on my personal email and using Apple Intelligence features with Fastmail support for defering. Sanebox hasn’t been innovating for a long time and I want to see if I really need it.