Trying to rediscover myself.
I’m so very excited to be heading to The Northwest Coffee Festival today. This has become one of my favorite events to work. The festival is a consumer based coffee and food event. A ton of great roasteries and cafes from the area get together for two days to hold talks on the current state of the industry to customer service and serve awesome coffee.
I took these pictures on my way to the bus stop yesterday.
I had the great pleasure to work at TEDx Peachtree this Friday in Atlanta. Here’s a little time-lapse thingy I made. I’ll be posting a more detailed blog later this week.
_Panda
Today is the day we get to make coffee for the TEDx Peachtree masses. We’ve been brewing our butts off since eight this morning! It’s been so much fun working with people from Oklahoma, Georgia, Kansas, Missouri and Washington. I’ve had the pleasure of brewing Batdorf & Bronson’s Nicaragua Finca San Jose JavaNica with a siphon. Super chocolaty and lots of caramel. The attendees have been loving the coffee and they are asking a lot of great questions. Well I need to get back and prep for the next wave.
I’m so stoked to be back in the South after many years! When i was a child I spent ten years in Tennessee and I was actually born in Georgia. My good friend Jason Dominy invited me to be a part of a TEDx event so I accepted ..DUH! I’ll fill you in with all the details later. Now I must sleep. iloveyou
_Panda
My wife and I have started to fully organize our house. It’s been three years since we bought it and we are now just getting the furniture and other accessories that we have had to save up for. The last two weeks we dropped a couple bucks at Ikea to help facilitate. For some odd reason Angela loves to put Ikea furniture together which works out for me because I hate it. Today while she was building a book-case I had the idea to organize our Gameboy games. I kind of impressed myself.
The idea for the marker came from pulling out my Mario game only to find that the game was not in the case. The games come in little boxes that have a plastic sleeve on the outside that holds the cover. What I decided to do is cut a strip of paper and place that in the sleeve on the spine. We do a lot of paper crafts so we have a pretty large box of remnants that we keep. I went through the box to see if there was any cool paper that would do the job. I found a super awesome paper with owls and fun designs on it.
I cut the paper to be 3″ x 4.5″. My slip ended up being three inches wide because it worked with the patter best. You could make yours longer if you’d like but it does have to be 4.5″ tall to cover the spine. So now that you have your paper ready, open up the case all the way so there is enough room for you to insert your slip. Close the case and it’s done. Now when you cruise your games you’ll know which ones actually have the game in it.
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The good ol’ mason jar has been working perfectly for storing old beans. The one thing I somehow managed to overlook is the lid to the mason jar. I was so stoked about the paint job and forgot about the gas the beans give off. The other day I went to unscrew the lid and it popped off and made a loud noise. DUH!!! There was a bunch of gas built up behind the lid because it had no where else to go. My friend Marcus Young recommended cutting out the one way valve from a bag of coffee!!!!! IT WORKED! Have fun!
I currently live in Olympia, WA and I’m originally from the south which means I’m inclined to re-purposing mason jars. I have a Baratza Maestro plus at home and when I need to dial in the grind for a certain brewing device I don’t waste new coffee I use old coffee. To keep the beans from getting too gross I keep them in an opaque jar covered in ColorTex by Design Master. It’s a spray adhesive that has bits of multi colored plastic in it. After I’ve covered the jar with the ColorTex I let it dry overnight. I noticed that the jar smelled of spray paint afterward so I covered it in two coats of Mod Podge. This helped cover the smell and give the jar a more glossy look. I really love how the jar looks!
I’ve been struggling with updating this blog more often. In an attempt to help with that I’ll also cross-post some things I feel like you guys might want to see. I just posted a review on a really great new site tehcoffee.com Dan Baumfeld dreamed this baby up and it’s been picking up speed. These reviews are done by industry professionals. People that actually work as judges for the SCAA & BGA, cafe owners, baristas and other active members in the Barista community. You can trust that these reviews and the places that are reviewed are quality. The next time you go out for coffee check tehCoffee!
Direct link to the review——-> http://tehcoffee.com/reviews/86
_Panda
I decided to take a bike ride today, the longest bike ride ever. It was really only 17 miles. I’ve gone that far before but cumulative not all at once. Southbound on Rich road is kinda like a portal to the country. I’ve spent a lot of time in the country…like ten years growing up in Clarksville, TN. Every once in a while I like to go back there and rural Olympia is just the ticket. There are lots of barns and fields along Rich road as well as small “grocery” stores. There’s even a post office. Johnson’s Smoke House is on my route so I stopped by and got some Landjaeger.I stopped into Lattin’s but it’s closed on Sundays so I couldn’t get a fresh apple fritter! I was originally going to bike to Millersylvania park but I missed my turn at McCorkle road so I stopped at the gas station next to The Powder Keg and refueled on Red Bull. One really cool thing that stood out was the amount of trains I heard! I don’t know it it was just one train snaking it’s way through or if there were multiple trains but i felt like it was following me. I’ve been followed by trains before and it’s scary. Anyway I’m drinking beer now to negate all the calories I burned.
Thoughts of Clouds