amanda untangled

Thanks to Paul from Defiant Sloth for bringing two more video rental shops to my attention—I literally just learned about The Video Shop Mpls yesterday. And thanks to Robert Birming for encouraging the JulyReply challenge. — My husband was laid off from his job eight months ago. Money started to get tight. Non-essential items, starting with streaming services, were getting cut from the budget. We don’t watch a lot of TV to begin with, but we enjoy our Friday night ritual of baking a frozen…

I said goodbye to Google yesterday. I’ve had Gmail accounts for as long as I can remember (at least since 2008ish, as I was heading off to college) and it feels weird to not have it. Two years ago I completely switched over to iCloud email, and still I hung on to my Gmail accounts. Because what if I needed it? Ugh. I wasn’t getting a ton of mail there anymore, but anything that did hit that inbox was forwarded to my iCloud account. From there I unsubscribed from anything I didn’t want to…

I’ve become more and more disenchanted with ebooks these days. I know, I’ve posted about this before. But bear with me because my brain has been buzzing about it lately. On the one hand, I like having a book with me wherever I go. On the other hand, I hate that I don’t actually own those books. And yeah, I know I could go through the effort of getting Calibre and removing the DRM and getting a Kobo and blah. It’s just too much effort for the 20-30 books that I already have physical copies of.…

I don’t know when the transition happened. Email used to be fun and exciting, like you’d actually look forward to seeing that you got a new email, rather than annoyed by whatever marketing email you accidentally signed up for five years ago. These days, most of the emails I get are shipping notifications (alright, those are okay…), emails from my child’s school, a couple of substack articles, and promotions for a new sale happening. This is after I went through and did a mass unsubscribing - it…

Writing to you from a feverish state, but saw Peige’s monthly reflection over on Pretend Typewriter and was inspired to look back on the month of April. Yes, I know it’s May 8. + The first couple of months of my new job have been really good! I planted potatoes, beets, carrots, cilantro, and dill in my garden. My little tomato starters are thriving! :) Met with one of my Booksta buddies. The trees and bushes are leafing out <3 I discovered estate sales and have thoroughly enjoyed meeting new…

I’ve been following Cal Newport for some time (known for his book Deep Work and Digital Minimalism). I’ve come to look forward to his weekly podcasts on attention, focus, and life without social media. Today, he dropped a podcast titled “How Do I Build Cognitive Fitness?” (Alternatively, his YouTube video with the same content was titled “How Do I Reverse Brain Rot?”, so I’m curious which one got more clicks). In it, he outlines five ways that we can improve our cognitive fitness and challenges…

I quit Instagram in October 2025. It’s been a weird and winding road getting here (and honestly the last six months have been weird to begin with, a story for another day), but I finally feel like I’ve found a virtual home. When I quit Insta and Booksta, I had the best intentions. The plan was to go all in on my Ghost site, tell my friends on Instagram that I’d be writing my book reviews over there and they can get them right in their email inbox. It was great. Until it wasn’t. It was quite…