Jamie Thingelstad

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.

I found out today that First Avenue has closed its doors. Anyone that spent there twenties in the Minneapolis area in the 90s spent many very fun evenings at First Avenue. It will always be remembered, and hopefully it comes back!

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 quarts of water
• 10 sticks of cinnamon
• 10 all spice berries
• 1/2 teaspoon whole cloves
• 2 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 gallons of apple cider
• 2 quarts of orange juice
• 1 cup of lemon juice

Directions

1. Bring water, sugar and spices to boil for 10 mins.
2. Let water mixture cool for 1 hour.
3. Add apple cider, orange juice and lemon juice.

I store it back in the gallon jugs I buy the apple cider in. The more times you reheat it, the better it seems to taste.

Friday Night Lights is the movie that you get when you mix Hoosiers with Any Given Sunday. The movie has the great but completely unrealistic action shots that make Any Given Sunday so much fun. This is high school though, not pro or even college, which really reminded me of Hoosiers. It even had the alcoholic Dad that embarasses and abuses his son subplot where he comes clean in the battle to “win State”.

I did like it though. It was an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours and even had me pumping my fist a couple of times at the choreographed action on the screen.

I really don’t care for daylight savings time. There are a couple of things I appreciate. The balance of getting more light earlier and later is a give and take. Mostly I really dislike how it disrupts my sleep pattern. It always seems to take a full week for me to get used to it. It’s like mini-jet lag without moving anywhere.

My method for dealing with it is very specific. I like to make sure I change every clock before I go to sleep, and then I wake up somewhat unaware that anything changed. I forgot to do that last night so I had to run around first thing this morning before I became cognizant of the time. As I was changing the 15th clock it dawned on me that we have household clock proliferation.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

• Digital cameras all have clocks. Had to change two of these. Let’s see, there is enough computer in here to do amazing stuff with imaging but no ability to automatically change the clock?
• Remote controls!? You bet. Two Philips Pronto’s with their own clocks. They can learn IR codes and do all sorts of gymnastics that make them worthwhile. Dealing with DST is not one of them.
• One Polar wristwatch. It can tell me what my heart rate is and theoretically my VO2 Max but no clue about handling DST.
• Microwave and ovens both have clocks, two more. I’m not going to blame them a lot since the electronics are so basic. But it sure would be easy to fix.
• The phones have their own clock. Kudos to them for taking the time of the master unit so I don’t have to change it on every phone. But it has date and time, it’s trivial to adjust for DST as well!
• I count at least 10 good ole’ clocks that I had to change. Can’t blame them, it’s just a AA battery with a clock mechanism.

Only devices to deal with this on their own are the computers and our TiVo. There has to be a better way.

Tammy and I volunteered at the Circus Juventas Boo Ball last night. I think it’s a fairly common thing that volunteering for small to medium sized events is generally a somewhat chaotic and unorganized event. We were initially given the task of “walk around and just help out with things” which was quickly turning into “you just get into the event for free” which I felt a little bad about. After all, didn’t seem like volunteering to me. In the end though we were asked to help direct people as they came to the event to get them into the right line – will call, cash or credit card. In short, we had a job that would have been done better by some moderately decent inanimate signage.

Some observations from our evening of volunteering…

The Boo Ball is a 21+ event and working the door we did get to check out all the costumes as people came in. The men didn’t really have any rhyme or reason to their costumes. There was a really good mummy and some notable scary looking costumes, but no prevailing theme. However, for the women the theme was clearly, shall we say, revealing? It seems that Halloween events must really be an excuse to look as trampy as you can without worrying what your girlfriends might say. I’m not complaining of course, this is just an observation.

Additionally, you would expect that queuing people into the right line would be a fairly simple task. And in fact, early comers to the event were fairly observant. However, you could tell the few drinks at the bar before hand as people arrived later significantly degraded their ability to comprehend anything quickly. A couple of times I thought I was explaining particle physics to someone looking for an answer to “Do you have tickets already?”.

The event was pretty cool. I’d recommend going to the Boo Ball as a participant in the future. If you are curious how the heck we ended up volunteering at Circus Juventas it is because Tammy and her sister are taking their adult circus classes. She loves it. I keep telling her to write something about it here, but she is shy. 🙂

After vowing to never buy another video game system ever again after dumping more money than I care to even think about into the Dreamcast a few years ago and before that into the cutting edge 3DO I finally broke down and bought an Xbox.

Mod Chips. The Xbox has proven to be one of the most modifiable consoles out there. For not a lot of money I can get a mod chip that snaps onto the board and replace the hard drive with a whopper 200G drive and instantly I’ve got a really fun, media center type PC.

You can FTP files to it, it can play music, photos, videos off of your network. You can copy entire movies to it, even entire Xbox games. How cool!

I just got the unit last night and am getting myself a mod chip now so I can rig it up with everything that I want. Out of the box it’s not all that exciting. Homebrew apps on your Xbox – very fun!

I’m sitting here watching 60 Minutes tonight and they are doing a piece on electronic voting. If there is one place where I would say that open source would make a lot of sense, how about this? The software that these systems run sounds horrible and has almost no security mechanisms included in it.

This problem can be solved, these companies just seem to be pathetic.

Tammy and I enthusiastically went to see I Heart Huckabees last night at the Uptown. We had seen a preview a while ago and it was completely confusing but hooked us in a big way. I won’t try to explain this movie. You can imagine that a movie that is focused around existential detectives may be a little odd. It is. And the cast is great. Highly recommended.

The movie isn’t in general release yet, it will be released this Friday. A hidden bonus of seeing it in limited release were some free Huckabees t-shirts. 🙂

This past weekend we spent our weekend up on the North Shore just north of Two Harbors, MN at the Grand Superior Lodge. Tammy and I drove up on Friday with a dinner stop at Bellisio’s in Canal Park in Duluth. Tammy’s family joined us and we turned this weekend into the first Olson family vacation.

We had breakfast at the Rustic Inn Cafe just across from the lodge on Saturday and then made our way to Tettegouche State Park to check out the falls. The weather was very cold, just barely above freezing. The hiking was scrapped because of the weather being so cold. We celebrated two brother-in-law birthdays that evening with dinner back in Duluth at Angie’s Cantina.

Sunday morning we went to Gooseberry Falls. A trip to the North Shore isn’t complete without seeing Gooseberry and the weather was much better this day. We hiked out to the shore of Lake Superior and admired the water for a while. Everybody else took off to head back home that afternoon and Tammy and I spent another day at the lodge on our own just reading and watching a movie.

We had a great breakfast at Betty’s Pies, another North Shore staple, and then headed back to the cities. It was a nice time, if a little cold. I put some pictures up from the weekend as well.

The Uncivil War is not a book I would have typically purchased for myself. It was sent to me along with an invitation to a discussion group. Humorously enough it was sent by a law firm while Lebedoff goes on at some length about how lawyers are one of the specific groups that typically make up his unimaginatively titled “New Elite”. I’ve been particularly interested in the presidential campaign this year and this book showed up at the right time so I decided to give it a read.

Lebedoff’s text describes a “New Elite” that he believes are fundamentally against majority rule, which he ascribes as one of the most important functions of the American democracy. He believes that this New Elite is in the process of trying to take America away from Americans. While Lebedoff proclaims the book to be non-partisan it is somewhat hard to believe as he spends the first 170 pages of the book showing how Democrat = Liberal = New Elite and how the Republican = Conservative = The Left Behinds. The Left Behinds are his name for those that believe that the majority is right.

It’s hard to swallow his naming and categorization of people in these bins. Perhaps any text that tries to take such a simple approach to the American public is bound to have these type of problems. Perhaps it’s also my own personal beliefs that conflict with Lebedoff’s and make his theories seem so conspiracy theorist and convoluted. Of course the author could simply write me off by saying that I were one of the New Elite. As any prejudiced label is bound to do, it makes the argument simple by writing off the opposing opinion. Something that he proclaims the New Elite does all the time.

It took 180 pages and nearly the entire book for Lebedoff to make any reference to a republican agenda or elected official as a member of the new elite. He picks Newt Gingrich and even when he does he pardons Gingrich with temporarily using New Elite tactics. Please…

I do believe there is a “New Elite” but it’s not limited to liberals and educated people. There clearly is a desire to minimize the majority electoral practice in favor of the game of politics. And both parties are equally guilty of this.

As a final note, I found it somewhat revealing that while the author goes on and on about majority rule and how important it is he makes no reference to the fact that Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and lost the election. As Lebedoff even uses this election as an example of the success of the Left Behinds, I find it surprising that there was no reference to an action that flies clearly in the face of what Lebedoff suggests is so critical to the future of America.

Last night Tammy and I went to Defending the Caveman by Rob Becker. I’d heard this was a really funny show and was not disapointed. Becker’s 100 minutes of reflection made me laugh pretty hard.

It’s worth checking out if you have the opportunity.

I wouldn’t say that I’m a Francophile, but blocking cell phone signals in theatres sounds like a great idea to me!

I got to be the spectator today while Tammy did her longest running event ever. Today was the Twin Cities Marathon and Tammy ran the sister event in the morning called the TC10 or the Shortcut to the Capital. Her longest run prior to this was a 9 mile training run and she wasn’t starting with a lot of confidence this morning. She has had trouble running because her knee has been hurting every time she runs.

Today was no exception, her knee started hurting her after a couple of miles but she kept going. She was able to make the whole 10 miles and averaged just below 10 minute miles. She was disappointed since she felt the run wasn’t too bad, but her knee was absolutely killing her. Without the injury, she felt she could have done so much better. She’s limping around fairly badly now. I’m sure it will be better in a couple of days, but she’ll need to take it easy for a bit.

I was very proud of her either way – and it was kind of fun to be the spectator and photographer.

Having your own website is pretty fun. You get to be your own editor and can decide what things you feel are important and want to share with people. Sometimes things happen that really don’t seem that big. For example, you may get rain gutters installed on your house. Why would you ever put that up on a web site? Who else would ever care about that? Probably nobody.

You may think that getting a new vacuum cleaner would be the pinnacle example of such trivial nonsense that has no place being shared with others around the world. It’s just a vacuum cleaner! Who cares!? Really. Get over it.

Well, I’m telling you, this is not just a vacuum cleaner. This is a miracle machine. It sucks dirt and cat hair with an efficiency that brings a tear to your eye. It leaves a visibly cleaner and more enticing carpet in it’s trail. It is the Dyson DC07 Animal.

First off, how cool is it that the vacuum is called Animal. Really, they’ve figured out how to get a man to actually care about what the vacuum is. Animal! Grrr! The thing is big, tough looking and purple. A manly purple, none of this lilac business. It could be in the shop, but it’s meant for your house.

The real sweetness is tasted when you fire this thing up after reading the instructions. You really have to read them, it’s a bit complicated. This is a turbine vacuum. No bags for this baby. And it’s got this super cool clear turbine thingamajig where all the dirt and most notably cat hair spins around like it’s in a little tornado. We ran this thing three times in a row in one room and took a half-gallon milk jug stuffed full of cat hair off the floor. There was more there, but we stopped for now.

When you take the dirt tornado thingamajig off it’s like this Ghost Busters contraption that you take over to your trash can, pull a trigger, and the bottom flips off and the junk falls out. Yeah baby!

If you have a pets, you need an Animal. This thing will suck the eyeballs out of a frog through the patio door. Amazing. I’ll be sleeping on the carpet tonight.. it’s that good. 🙂