Jamie Thingelstad

City Hopper KL1317 heading to Warsaw, Poland. 🇵🇱

Flight delayed and one of the last six flights to depart MSP tonight. Airport is otherwise empty. We may end up being the last flight of the night! Gate agents have been working like crazy getting connections fixed. 🫩✈️

Boe Memorial Chapel. 📍

Chapel Choir celebration outside of Boe Chapel.

At today’s Minnesota Card Show I built my Alakazam and Perrserker collections. Tyler loves collecting and it is a fun thing to do together.

When I played D&D I was always a Wizard hence the connection with Alakazam.

My lineage is very Nordic, hence Perrserker, a Viking Pokémon.

We all got Pokémon packs from Journey Together to try our luck at the Minnesota Card Show.

Checking out Pokémon cards at the big Minnesota Card Show event!

Finland the happiest country for the seventh year running.

Yet some argue that the real reason is that the Finns sweat out their negative thoughts. Finland has roughly 3.5m saunas, more than one per two Finns.

I enjoy sauna and it is notable that it is extremely meditative, which we know has benefits, and notably you phones and mobile devices don’t even work in them. Coincidence or part of the benefit? 🤔

One of the ways that a blog can be a gift is to give others the option to go on journeys with you to locations far away. In 2023 our family took a trip to Switzerland & Italy, and we spent four wonderful days in Florence (day 14, 15, 16, and 17). It was a great (if not hot!) time.

Since we had been there just two years ago it piqued my interest when I saw fellow blogger Barry Hess was going there with his family to visit their daughter that is there for school. And what a gift Barry gave to himself and us with these wonderful daily recaps of their trip. It was fun to remember our own trip, and to see what they explored over a longer stay in Florence.

Here is each of his posts by day with great overviews and photos.

• Florence: Arrivo (Mar 27)
• Florence: Rimpinzati di Cibo (Mar 28)
• Florence: Arti e Musica (Mar 29)
• Florence: Arti II e Calcio (Mar 30)
• Florence: Giornata Libera (Mar 31)
• Florence: Davide, Le Chiese e i Dottori (Apr 1)
• Florence: Sonno e Regalità (Apr 2)
• Florence: A Cortona (Apr 3)
• Cortona: Riposo (Apr 4)
• Cortona: Esplorare (Apr 5)
• Cortona: A Florence (Apr 6)
• Florence: Finale (Apr 7)

Reading along made me want to go back. 🇮🇹

Lake Harriet. 📍

Finished 3.97 mile walk in 79.1 minutes (19.92 min/mile). Such a great evening to be outside. 🚶‍♂️

Dan Kelly’s Pub. 📍

First time ever trying pull tabs. All losers.

Finished 3.97 mile walk in 78.2 minutes (19.7 min/mile). Whole family took a lap around Lake Harriet. Ran into Darin from Urban Wing.🚶‍♂️

“the loss of the ability to contemplate — which, among other things, leads to the absolutization of vita activa — is also responsible for the hysteria and nervousness of modern society.”

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

I am trying a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) for the first time. I got a Stelo unit on a recommendation. I am very curious to learn how I react to various foods and activities. 🤓

A Baker’s Wife’s Pastry Shop 📍

A nice Sunday morning for some donuts from Baker’s Wife.

These days we mostly interact with maps in a singular, digital manner. However, if you want to have a guaranteed way to get a conversation going in a group put a map in front of everyone and shortly the stories will start coming. “I remember when we were here and this thing happened.” A long time ago I was in Canada at a remote location fishing. Every evening over dinner the entire group would hover over the map of the area and share stories of the day. “This is where we caught this huge Northern.” “Over here is where the Walleye are in the morning.” “We took the boat down this stream and it was too shallow for the prop.” Maps can be an incredible way to tell stories.

Telling stories with maps is one of the things that I wish blogs did better. My blog has posts that I created from all over the place, but you wouldn’t know it to read it. You can see my archive of thousands of posts, but you cannot easily see the posts I created in Iceland, or various times I visited a specific state. How about the blog posts on a road trip that connect together to tell the story of the whole trip?

This desire to tell stories through maps is why I got really excited to see Micro Social add support for locations. Micro.blog has supported location data for posts since the very beginning. However, it has always felt like an afterthought created to allow people to import Foursquare activity. I’ve wished for years that the Micro.blog app would attach my location to all my posts. I get not everyone would want this, but it would seem to be an easy add for those that do. Now at least I can use Micro Social to do this.

Ultimately I wish that my blogging platform would allow me to use location like I use time stamps. The time stamp of a post is the when. The location is the where. The archive page shows posts by the when. There should be a map page that shows posts by the where. The same way I can create collections of photos, I would like collections of posts and then show a map of those collections. I can edit the time stamp of a post, I would like to edit the location of a post.

Even social platforms that do collect this information do this poorly. I suspect they mostly use location as another surveillance tool to target advertising as opposed to creating a new way to share things.

Full support of location data for posts would create a whole new way to tell stories and connect the writing on your blog together. I’ll keep wishing, but I know that if I could add and edit location data to posts I’d be doing that during gardening, and it would create an incredibly rich and vibrant way to tell more stories.