Tag: Coffee

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Weekly Post 11/18/19

Highlights:

  • Quick Family trip to Disney World

Lowlights:

  • Cold and overcast in Florida
  • Bears Lost to the Rams
  • Horrible Mochas

Goals for this week:

    • Breakfast smoothies all week and find a place for lunch salads

The family and I headed down to Orlando to spend some time at Disney World and get some good extended family time in before the holiday gauntlet comes barreling down. Having two families within driving distance means that every Holiday equals 2 holidays. 2 Thanksgiving in one weekend is fun but a lot of time spent in the car when all you want to do is sit on the couch and digest lol

It’s nice we can get together before all that starts and enjoy our time together without being time-crunched in a natural spot where everybody can chillax and have a relaxing time without the usual hosting pressures.

The highlight of the trip was Brunch with Mickey and Friends. Tons of great photo ops with the OG Disney crew, they all came by one by one once the table had finished their 2nd plate of the buffet. The actors did a great job handling all the little children and the varying age of the groups. They mad sure every guest that wanted a picture got one and we’re very aware that I had the Sony A7II camera and not iPhone and the charterers made sure to give me the majority of the poses so my camera could do all the hard work and send off the pictures to everyone after the brunch.

I was pretty happy with how most of the pictures came out. I can tell that I am getting better at composing my pictures. I am starting to see how a picture should be framed before I raise the eyepiece to my eyes. In turn, I’m becoming a lot more efficient at taking pictures. I use to take 1000 pictures and the only handful would be worth editing or post right out of the camera. Where now am constantly moving to be in the best shooting position resulting in a better sample of pictures without having to wade through 95% to find the better-looking pictures. Now it’s about 20% decent looking pictures with about 1/2 the number of total pictures taken.

There happened to be a coffee shop that masqueraded itself as a full-service Starbucks when I did my trip due diligence to figure out my food, drink and golf options for the trip. I was very stoked to see there was a full-fledged Starbucks on a property within walking distance to get my Mocha fix all week. As soon as we walked up the first time I knew something was up as there were no building architecture ques of the usual Starbucks look. Then I saw it, the sign that put me in a 5 min depression “Starbucks Coffee Proudly Served Here” I didn’t have any hope for the Mochas after that, but since I’m a glutton for punishment I went ahead and got a Mocha each morning I was there. The mochas scored 5 to 6 out of ten on my scale with major points being deducted due to the overuse of nasty chocolate syrup. The other major factor was the expresso tased like it was over roasted burnt and gave some off-flavors that I didn’t enjoy. I was happy to get back to the airport to have a decent Mocha at a real Starbucks.

The weather did not want to cooperate while I was in Orlando. It just happened to be record-breaking cold weather while we were in Florida, seriously it was low 50s and high 40s on one of the evenings. There was one night when it wasn’t freezing, but still pretty chilly I was able to sneak away and hit the hot tub and smoke a cigar.

It was a fun night to smoke one on vacation but it was most certainly against the rules to be having one in the hot tub. I was on edge the whole time, all nervous that I was going to get busted and ruin the family vacation. Looking back what were they going to do? Lock me up and kick my family out of the Villa?? 99% sure they would have just told me to put it out and leave the hot tub.

Overall this was a great trip and something I look forward to all year. Yea the weather could have been better but if you need nice weather to have a good time- change your fun parameters and start having even more fun.

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Weekly Post 10/21/2019

Highlights:

  • Fired up the grill
  • Driving Range Session 

Lowlights:

  • Ate 2 Desserts On Monday
  • The Bears Are Embarssing 

Goals for next week:  Zero mocahs during the work week.

In the long-time effort of trying to reduce and or eliminate caffeine from my diet. Mochas/expresso has been the toughest to raign in. Kicking the soda habit only took three months. Albeit I did stop cold turkey style, the coffee is much more a social/ fun engagement for me layered with the added benefits that the jolt of caffeine gives on those weekend end mornings after a fun night out.
Maybe I need to change my goals to something more achievable in a short time and put some wins on the board and build off that success. So starting to this week My new goal will be to only have mochas 3 or fewer in a week. I will strive for 2 of those to be on the weekends and stay away from the weekdays as much as possible.

A quick recap of the Bears the past weekend. We sucked and I’m not ready to talk about it yet. This season is dangerously close to falling off a cliff. Not sure who to blame here but it feels like a lot of bad coaching decisions have not prepared this team at all for this season.

Got to fire up the grill this week for the first time in a while. Since both, I and the wife are back at work full time and the baby is at daycare. Family time has been condensed to 200 minutes daily. This has cut out a lot of time for things like grocery shopping, dry cleaners, golf. One of the services we have found to help maximize the time spent at home and not running errands was Hello Fresh. This meal-delivery service drops of ingredients for 3 meals a week. All of the ingredients are separated in a way to ensure a meal in less than 30 minutes. There have been some meals that took longer than that but all of those were due to a longer oven time, but the prep time is wicked fast. All of these meals are designed to be cooked with the least amount of tools and create as little mess as possible to eliminating the need for me to grill anything. I’m sure we could be grilling most of the meats that have come in the meals but they mostly cooked in a pan with sauce. So it was a real treat when I found some great looking bone-in ribeyes at the market this past weekend.

The weather was a little warmer on Sunday so I went to the range for an early morning practice session. I hit the first 5 or 6 balls well then the next 25 progressively got worse and worse. This time though I was able to work my swing back to some decent ball strikes. That process took way too long if memory serves me right it was close to 40 balls which do not is able in a regular round of golf. This is why we practice though. The best swings of the day came form hitting my 52 and 58-degree wedges. All of a sudden I’ve developed some distance control. I played a game where I would aim for the 25,50,75s yard flag and was sticking balls within a couple of yards and hitting the flag a few times. This is a major game-changer for me, if I can take the distance control to the course I should be giving my self ton of more par chances and maybe even some birdie puts on the Par 5s Now I just have to get out and play but it does feel like the golf season here in Chicago is about to slam shut.