Jamie Thingelstad

Circuit boards, chinese takeout and ultrageek action. What can be more fun!? Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. 🙂

Operation was successful on the first try. Now it’s time to play with the software side of things. Big thanks to Chris and Chad! That nice soldering work is all Chris, can’t take any of the credit for that.

I just finished reading what has to be one of the stranger books I’ve read. Stiff is in a way like an owners guide for future cadaver owners. That is to say, all of us. Mary Roach goes into impressive, if not at times unsettling, detail about the processes by which cadavers contribute to education, safety and numerous other ventures. It is initially off-putting but after a few chapters is very interesting.

I found the references to pre-1900 practices of regarding cadavers to be alarming and the advancements of recent years interesting. Perhaps most interesting was the next to last chapter regarding ecological burial. Most interesting I think was understanding how radically different various cultures work with cadavers and in general human remains.

Interesting read, glad to have read it, don’t think I’ll read it a second time.

I realized as I was watching Jay Farrar play on Thursday night that I’ve been watching him play music and sing songs for 14 years now. I’ve liked other bands for well over a decade. Bands like R.E.M. for example. But I there is no connection with a huge band like that like there is with the small band that you see every time they come into town. Tammy has a parallel to this in Tina and the B-Sides.

Farrar was billed at First Avenue, but was rescheduled to the Cedar Cultural Center after First Avenue shutdown. The concert would have been much different at First Ave. More energy I’m sure. But on the plus side you can’t smoke at the Cedar which is really nice and it is a much more intimate venue.

Farrar played a good set, almost entirely from his solo catalog. He played three Son Volt songs and no Uncle Tupelo songs. I liked this, even though I really love those old songs, there is something a little sad about someone playing songs a decade old to an audience yearning for the ‘glory days’. The fresh material was welcome and very good.

Farrar is a reluctant performer. He always has been. Very different than his Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy now fronting Wilco. Tweedy seems to love the stage and attention. Farrar draws away from it. He’s gotten better since the early days of Uncle Tupelo where he would never say any thing and just looked at his shoes while he sang, but he’s still not one to banter with the crowd. It makes his solo live performances somewhat awkward, but the music is that good and that real.

This morning we had a mini-fiasco right here at home! Tammy was taking pictures with the Canon Digital Elph. If you are not familiar, this is a tiny camera that you can put in your pocket. Great little camera. She was sitting on the floor taking pictures of Gypsie. I got my big camera and took a picture of her and Gypsie. Tammy decided it would be funny to put the wrist strap for the Elph around Gypsie’s neck and I could take a picture. This is where the fiasco starts.

Gypsie moved her head and got freaked out at the noise of the camera. She immediately went into hyper-frenzy mode and made a bucking bronco at the rodeo seem tame. She ran through the chairs of the dining room table. Across the living room floor. Jumping up and down as she could to free herself. Meanwhile this not-terribly-cheap piece of electronics is draging on the floor, banging into chairs and smacking against anything else nearby.

Gypsie then ran into our bedroom where she somehow got the camera tangled into the pull on our blinds and she actually ripped the blinds off the window! Who would have thought this cat had such mighty strength! She ran under the bed and at somepoint everything got all tangled up and she broke free of this weight on her neck.

Amazingly enough, the camera has some dents but it works fine still. The blinds require some crazy glue. Tammy was laughing like a maniac at all this. It was quite funny but I was freaked about the gear. After a deep breath, everything is fine. I really wish we had video of it though – was really funny.

So far, so good in the quest to return to normalcy on the bathroom scale. Mostly the sugar headaches are gone. Body is getting used to eating 4 meals a day and going to bed hungry. I feel good, even a little excited. Not logging food is nice, but I question the effectiveness. I know this is just my obsessive nature kicking in, so it’ll be cool. Friday set my starting point at 271.2 lbs and 29.7% body fat. I need to get back to my “100 Pound” mark so that means 232, the math is simple – I’ve got 40 lbs to lose. Whew!

To give some perspective here is a view of the last four-and-a-half years. Yes, that really is 340 in the upper left hand corner. I certainly am good at moving the line in either direction. Time to move it on down. 🙂

Time for the weekend. This week I really just focused on eating well. Didn’t do anything other than my weekly workout with my trainer for exercise. Next week I need to get the exercise rolling.

It seems that I always decide to start focusing on eating better and dropping weight on Mondays. More on that later.

Over the course of the last two years I’ve had a really hard time keeping my weight under control. For those that have known me for a long time you know that I used to be a “big guy” tipping the scales well over 300 lbs. I set a goal in 2000 that I was going to lose 100 lbs. It sounded a little crazy at the time, even to me, but I knew that if I set that goal clearly and publicly I would stick to it. And I did. It took about 10 months of very focused and dedicated effort and I got there.

I stayed in a range of 20 lbs for quite a while. Then things got disrupted. In a one month period I went back to work, got engaged and bought a house with my then fiance. Over the last two years particularly my weight has trended back up. It would go up for a while, then go down, then back up. As you can expect, it would always go up a little bit more than it ever went down.

Now I find myself at a point were I need to reassert more discipline and focus. I know what I need to do, I just need to do it. It’s Monday. It’s not a great time going into the holidays but there never is a good time. There is always an excuse why you need to push this stuff off. November 8th sounds just as good as any.

This is where you all come in. I know myself and when I lost my weight before a big part of my success was telling others I was going to lose 100 lbs and then not failing on that. So, it’s time I returned back to my “100 lb” weight which means less than 232 lbs. I need to drop around 40 lbs, we’ll see for sure on Friday. This is going to happen. And I’m going to share it with all of you. Wether you like it or not. 🙂

I expect two weeks that are pretty hard. Sugar withdrawal. Get used to exercising hard and regularly again, etc. Then it’s just staying the course. In the past I’ve always logged my food religiously when I’ve lost weight. I’m going to work hard not to do that. It’s a crutch for me and I really don’t need it. I think logging is tremendously powerful but at some point you know the data well enough and it’s not needed.

That’s enough for now. I’ll check in again on Friday and get the numbers started.

On Friday night we went to see The Incredibles on opening night. We erred on the side of caution and went to the later show to avoid the overflow of kids that were sure to go to the earlier one. However, on the flipside Tammy found it impossible to stay awake. Somehow we have really turned into early risers.

Pixar did a great job on this one. I remembered back to Toy Story and it’s amazing how far animation technology has come. The nice thing is that you no longer even think about the fact that this is all computer generated (unless you want to), it’s completely transparent which I think is proof that this stuff has matured.

The story was fun and funny. It was surprisingly longer than I expected. I guess I’m used to these animated things being 80-90 minutes and at 105 this was notably longer (or maybe it was the later hour!). Anyway, fun flick for all, recommend it.

On Saturday we found ourselves doing something that we both recalled we hadn’t done probably in a decade. We were hopping into the car to drive hundreds of miles just to see a performance. Now, a decade ago I may have been found doing a road trip like this for a punk rock concert, today we found ourselves driving 360 miles to see Ira Glass of This American Life.

We headed out on I-94 and went straight from home to Milwaukee. As we were driving I noted again that either Wisconsin has tremendously more road kill or they do not do a good job of cleaning up the roads. We saw more than twenty deer in various states of decay on the side of the road. Driving I-94 West instead of East for a dozen hours as I’ve done many times you will see a deer on the side of the road dead, but it’s rare. For some reason Wisconsin peppers the side of the road to a disturbing amount.

We arrived in Milwaukee and checked into the Wyndham hotel downtown. The hotel was perfect as it was in the same building as the Pabst Theater. We had dinner with a friend of Tammy’s family, Jennifer McDaniel. Tammy was friends with Jennifer when she was like 9 months old. We had dinner at the Water Street Brewery and then walked back to the theater for the evening with Ira Glass.

We saw Ira Glass perform about a year-and-a-half ago in Minneapolis and were amazed by how great it was. The show is about how they make This American Life. We both love the show – we listened to five episodes of it on our drive. The show that we saw was the same structure as the one that we saw last time, however it was still great. The content inside the structure was updated. I can’t encourage you enough to go see one of his performances.

By the way, the Pabst Theater we found out while there is the 4th oldest operating theater in the country. It was a very nice place with the exception of pretty tight seating as is common in old theaters.

I just finished reading the new Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything. I’ve read a number of Bryson’s books and they are all without exception great. I would recommend Bryson’s books to essentially anyone I know. I eagerly got this new book a while back. First, Bryson’s books are typically very funny. I didn’t find this one nearly as funny, but it wasn’t because he failed, I just don’t think he tried to make this as funny. However, it was very interesting nonetheless.

This is a good book for people who, like myself, find science really interesting but not so interesting that you want to read text books. Bryson does just as the title suggests and covers everything from the magma cooling and the formation of Earth all the way to leaded gasoline, cellular biology and the history of mankind! It’s a great book to fill a Cliff Claven like reportoire of interesting facts. Bryson correctly focuses on the things that the average person would find interesting and doesn’t delve into deep science. He highlights the politics of science and those rare individuals that spend their entire life focusing on a single species of moss.

Amongst the things that you can impress friends with:

• Did you know that Yellowstone Park is on top of a huge volcano that is likely to blow in the next few thousand years and take out a lot of the United States?
• Did you know that sometimes planes drop a 1,000 feet out of the blue? It’s rare, but it’s happened.
• Did you know that the same person that introduced CFCs also introduced leaded gas? He did more damage to the environment than perhaps any other single person.