• 📖 My Story

  Who is this person?

• 🕰 Right Now

  Monthly update on my focus

• 🇪🇺 EU Marathons

  All 28 EU capital city marathons

• 🪣 Bucket List

  Lifetime goals and achievements

• 🛠️ Tools I Use

  Explore my tech choices

• 🚭 No Smoking

  These stats are staggering

• 🏃 Run Stats

  From the beginning to today

• 🧮 Marathons & Books

  Track my year’s challenges

What I’m up to Now

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

Last updated on 3rd of October.

I’ve got 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 last year I’ve been a full-time dad of my four kids. In March, my wife has increased her daily workload as a physician by switching to a centrally located cardiologists’ office, meaning even more of the household chores and care-work of our four daughters (aged between 6 and 12) now falls on me. 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.
• Thanks to luck and some clever investing, our financial situation is good, though. I’m into exploring different avenues, including blogging here on teesche.com, but also 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 want less attention in the coming years. Also, starting in Spring of 2025 my wife Sophie will reduce her workload again. This opens up the opportunity for me to work, and I plan on taking it!
• Becoming a “System Elephant” is on my agenda. I love this expression, but I’m aware it requires explanation. Remember during COVID, everyone was in lockdown except for those who worked essential jobs. Jobs which society couldn’t function without. In Germany we called those jobs “systemrelevant” at first before replacing the term and beginning to describe the people working those jobs as being a part of “Daseinsfürsorge”, i.e. “care of existence“. I was told of a situation where a kid said his mom still needed to work despite the lockdown because she was a “System Elephant“, misunderstanding the word “systemrelevant”. Now, having recently read the book “Bullshit Jobs” by British anthropologist David Graeber and becoming acutely aware of the tendency of our society to employ people and give them meaningless tasks, it’s become clear that the invisible hand of the free market oddly doesn’t solve this problem, either. More than a third of all people in Western Europe claim their job doesn’t improve anything at all about the world and that no one would notice or suffer any losses if they were to stop tomorrow. To a degree, my old job running a company in web design and marketing was also irrelevant and inessential. I accept that. But going forward I’d like to do something that actually changes anything for the positive. 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, for the first few years 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! A thought I recently had but haven’t followed up on is air traffic controller. Anyways, 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 1,025 consecutive days. At least one mile (1.6 km) per day, ’cause those are the rules! Recently, I’ve 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. Super rarely some fish, never meat. No alcohol since April 1st, 2023. No smoking, too – I stopped more than 8 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 for free here, end of 2024.
• Tinkering on teesche.com with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL has been more fun lately, 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 recently 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 do whatever I like with the data and it also allows me to easily integrate some stats into my website. Some new tiles were added to 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.
• 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 even earning a bit of money, but I haven’t paid it the attention it deserves. I have set the goal to do a full rewrite within the first three months of 2024, and that has succeeded to the day. Check out my 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 recently 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.
• 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 Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, 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.