Jamie Thingelstad

Realized we had some big usability issues in our donation tracking sheets for day 1 of Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser (right side). I designed a complete redo of it for today’s sale (middle) that I tested this morning and is much better. I also created a candle guide to include with the candles! 🤩

We are ready to host our fifth annual Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser today! We are supporting Animal Welfare Institute, Border Angels, The Food Group, and Sandy Hook Promise this year.

I picked up my new glasses today. I’ve had to use readers for a while but in the last few years my eyesight has gotten worse. It was time to get a better solution.

These new glasses are progressive lenses that according to the marketing have 400 specific lenses for every position you look. They told me it will take a couple weeks to get used to them and so far when I put them on it is definitely something to adapt to. Things are sharp but it all seems strange.

I’m hopeful this will result in my eyes not being so tired at the end of the day. 🤞

POAP 7487921 at Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser .

Even the kids elementary school has gotten into this “6 — 7” thing. 🤷‍♂️

Tammy and I hopped in the car for Lebanon Hills this afternoon to get out in the woods and hike a bit. Tammy always finds it a touch annoying that I want to have a route planned out and know what trails we are taking. She would rather just start walking and see where the path takes us. Today, we did it her way and just started walking. Turn left here, right there.

About 3 miles in I wasn’t really sure which way we were going and I will admit that I tried to make extra long glances at the trail maps as we passed them. But I stayed true to the task and just followed wherever Tammy was leading us. The trails seemed familiar.

After a while we got on some trails that we both thought we had never been on. There was also long stretches with no intersecting trails which isn’t common in Lebanon Hills. After what seemed like a mile we saw a parking lot and another trail map, but it wasn’t our parking lot.

A highlighted trail winds through Lebanon Hills Regional Park, near Valleywood Golf Course.

Somehow with our random turns we had navigated ourselves to the completely opposite side of the park at a different parking lot. We were 4.5 miles in and I admit to considering for a moment getting a Lyft to take us to our car, but it was a nice day and off we went to return to the other side of the park.

A man and woman smile while standing by a lakeside with autumn foliage around them. A person walks down a dirt path surrounded by autumn foliage under a clear blue sky. A man and a woman are smiling in a forested area with autumn foliage in the background. A serene lake is surrounded by autumnal trees under a partly cloudy blue sky. A man and a woman are smiling for a selfie on a sunny day, standing on a wooden pathway surrounded by autumn trees. A grove of tall, leafless birch trees stands against a clear blue sky with scattered autumn foliage on the ground.

Tammy and I were talking about movies from our youth with Tyler and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure came up. Tammy decided this needed to happen so tonight we watched this 1989 classic. I can’t say that it held up that well but there were some good laughs. Tyler thought everything about it was strange and why did they say words like “excellent” so much. We told him it is just like saying “fire” today. He disagreed. Keanu Reeves is so young in this movie. Tyler started to take the plot apart Inception-style with the time travel — it does not stand up to the test. And just like all movies that are before everyone having a smartphone it is wild how there are no phones in the movie.

Making more candles for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for next week! I got the labels a little faster so we can put those on before pouring making it a bit more efficient. ⏱️

Making Things 4 Good candles!

Started with 8 gallons of wax and 60 candles later...

Figured out some support for these double wicks in the XL candles.

Triple smash burgers tonight! 🍔

Tammy led the way while we all helped and the shed is in better shape than it ever has been! I didn’t get a before picture — but you could not see any of the floor before.

Driveway markers are in. Let it snow! 😊

Fall. 🍁

I’ve been using a Libre 3 Plus continuous glucose monitor and paying more attention to the specific foods that cause blood sugar spikes for me. By making tweaks to what I’m eating, when, and the order of foods I’ve lowered by baseline from 90 to closer to 70 with less spikes.

Writing blog posts backdated a couple of days to when the thing actually happened is the most extreme form of not writing for the timeline. It is a gift to my future self when scanning my on this day page to have things show up in the right spots.

Tammy and I have went to the Twin Cities Film Fest showing of Good Fortune tonight at the Edina 4 theatre. It was our first time at a Film Fest event and we got to be all official and vote on the movie. Also, the Edina 4 theatre is just a great place to see a movie in general, but an even better place to see a movie during the Film Fest with tons of dining options nearby to make it a great evening.

The movie itself brings tons of star power with Keanu Reeves, Aziz Ansari, Seth Rogan, Keke Palmer, and Sandra Oh, with Ansari writing and directing it.

The movie tells the story of Arj who is struggling to get by and living out of his car and Jeff who is wealthy from tech investing and has whatever he wants. Their lives get switched by Gabriel the Angel and they get to experience each others reality.

We both gave it ★★★★ and enjoyed the quirky and funny takes while telling a meaningful story.

Tammy, Tyler, and I went to Tron: Ares tonight at Emagine Willow Creek. I’d been wanting to see this since the day it came out.

I saw the original Tron when I was 10 years old living in Jamestown, ND. As a kid that loved computers and spent hours writing mangled BASIC programs the movie was amazing. Some friends and I liked it so much that we wanted to be in the movie. We got frisbees and painted them to look like Tron discs and attempted our own version of disc wars at night. Note, it hurts to get his with a frisbee in the head. 😬 I also put a ton of quarters into the TRON arcade game back in the day. Since then I’ve seen all the Tron movies and shows including Tron: Legacy, Tron: Uprising (series), and now Tron: Ares.

In short, I’m going to like this movie if for no other reason than I enjoy seeing the Tron “world” continue to exist and grow. The production and SFX for Tron: Ares were incredible and in general I find their nods to tech to always be fun. It made me chuckle that while Tron envisions a world where a program can materialize in the real world, you would still have people running killall on something that is for sure a Unix shell. I thought Ares did a good job of also illustrating how simple tasks given to an AI with “by any means” could go terribly wrong. I also liked that Ares himself goes through a process of determining right and wrong and starts to express feelings.

The high point for me was Ares going back to the original Tron grid and meeting Flynn. This was a high-point of nostalgia and I could have stayed in that scene for a while longer.

With that said, and I did like it, some things I didn’t love:

• The storyline took a hard pivot in my view to get to a good v. evil plot point. We now clearly have Encom framed as the Rebel Alliance and Dillinger Systems as the Empire. I’m straining the metaphor but it feels like Ares specifically wanted to get those archetypes setup for future releases. I could gripe a bit about the overt multi-channel product planning being pushed into the story line but all the Star Wars fans could just say “yeah, been there, done that”
• There was no revisit to the ISO’s from Tron: Legacy, short of Quorra’s picture being referenced in the very last scene.
• The premise of things in the “grid” (aka cloud?) coming into the real world is a bit like time travel. It opens up all sorts of “yeah, but what about” story line issues.

Overall a good movie either way. I’m completely and positively sure they are already working on another Tron movie, and I’ll be there for it. 🤓

My cousin Josh’s most recent essay Can-Can is a great read told from his own experience as a college professor.

So, in 34-years of bumbling towards being as overly educated and as idiotic as my oft concussed cognition will allow, the prevailing wind on college campuses has carried the message of learning how to think, rather than being told what to think, and never accepting a set of beliefs, or most anything, uncritically. Question everything, and more importantly, everyone...especially yourself.

Delightful.