• 📖 My Story

• 🕰 Right Now

• 🇪🇺 EU Marathons

• 🪣 Bucket List

• 🛠️ Tools I Use

• 🚭 No Smoking

• 🏃 Run Stats

• 🧮 Read & Run

What I’m up to Now

This /now page is inspired by Derek Sivers’ idea. See nownownow.com.

Last updated on 1st of February.

I’ve got the basics covered on my /about page, so head there if you’d like to know more about my life situation. This page is about what’s currently on my mind, and my immediate plans.

🪨 Work and Family

• Since selling my main company at the end of 2023 I’ve been a full-time dad of my four kids. My wife has recently finished her specialization as a physician and works as a GP, meaning most of day-to-day the household chores and care-work for our four daughters (aged between 6 and 13 falls on me since. It’s not nothing, and especially the school holidays are a lot of work, making sure all kids are taken care of in the best possible way. There’s no ceiling! You can always do more.
• Thanks to luck and some clever investing, our financial situation is good, though. I’m into exploring different avenues, but also enjoy writing code at speechbox.chat, a side project of mine since 2007.
• While that’s all good, the kids are getting older and will require and desire less attention in the coming years. This opens up the opportunity for me to work, and I plan on taking it!
• Becoming a “System Elephant” is on my agenda. In that linked blog post I explained the phrase, but the short version is that I’d like to take up a new job in an area that significantly and positively impacts society. My work in marketing started to feel so far removed from what people actually need and what would improve our world. There’s no shortage of those jobs, but I’ve got a few limiting issues, such as being 40 years old and not willing to start another 2-3 year apprenticeship or even longer university program. Also, I won’t have enough time to work full-time while still mainly caring for the kids. Other than that I’m pretty open to anything. If you’ve got suggestions or ideas for me – or know anyone –, hit me up at tim@tee.ge! Thanks.

💪 Health, Exercise, Hobbies

• I’m streak running since January 1st of 2022, which today are 1,147 consecutive days. At least one mile (1.6 km) per day, ’cause those are the rules! I’ve written a blog post about what that’s like when I cracked the milestone of running on 1,000 consecutive days! I don’t plan on stopping, because it’s just a fun hobby to me.
• Eating mostly plants as often as possible, but if not, defaulting back to vegetarian. Sometimes fish, never meat. Almost never any alcohol. No smoking, too – I stopped more than 9 years ago. Here are stats about that. In case you’re wondering: The trick was hypnosis!
• I’ve been enjoying writing since I started this blog in 2011, but lately that enjoyment has even increased. Which is why I’m doing more of it. In addition to the blog, you can subscribe to the newsletter, which I use to provide enriched notifications about new posts on the blog. Writing a concise and fun marathon running book which I plan to make available here at some point in 2025.
• Tinkering on teesche.com with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL has been lots of fun, too. For longevity of the code I avoid using any frameworks or libraries if I can, so building everything from the ground up is sometimes challenging, but also very rewarding. I’ve enjoyed working with the Strava API and have built the functionality to sync all my tracked running and cycling workouts to my own database. That way I’m free to calculate whatever I like based on the data and it also allows me to easily integrate some stats into my website. Some tiles appear in the Quantified section this way, I added a run streak day counter which automatically updates the descriptions of my Strava activities with the current run streak day number, and I created a separate running stats site here, too. And, after I’ve again started using the location logging app Swarm, I’ve written the code to sync my GPS locations back into my own database. 
• Starting in 2024, I have taken up another fulfilling web project which I initially coded on a weekend back in 2007. It’s been going ever since and is even earning a bit of money. I have done a full rewrite within the first three months of 2024, and detailed the process in a blog post. Check out the project, which is a free shoutbox chat widget for your own website, here at www.speechbox.chat.
• Daily guitar practice, although sometimes for just a few minutes. Still trying to get the major parts from some of Polyphia’s songs perfect which is challenging and fun as well. I upgraded my guitars with Tim Henson’s (of Polyphia) signature semi-acoustic, the Ibanez TOD10N, because it sounds and looks so cool. That led me to playing some J.S. Bach on it for fun, which requires lots of concentration from me. And since my kids took part in a week-long band practice workshop and came out of it wanting to play the electric bass at home, I got one immediately. Playing bass is awesome, too, and daughter #3 has taken up formal lessons on it. The other kids all love to play the piano, so the band is coming together.
• My drums are also used often. I’m pounding on the electronic pads of the Roland TD-17KVX as hard as I can, accompanying rather simple songs mostly by the Rage Against the Machine, Coheed and Cambria, or Taking Back Sunday. Not going for improvement of my chops here, it’s mostly because the drumming itself is so satisfactory.
• Since 2016, I have decidedly made reading books a new hobby and part of my life. Over the years since then, the amount of books I read has gone up and the fun and knowledge I’ve been collecting, too. Every couple of weeks, I usually finish another book and publish my notes on it here in the /bookshelf section.
• Podcasting. Recording sound has been of some interest ever since my time as guitar player in a funk band back in the day, so I had the idea to just record me reading my own new blog posts for those people who want to save time. The result: a Podcast! I enjoy those few hours spending on it every few weeks.

More about my story and history is on the /about page.