Tag: trevorwgoodchild

Coffee Adventures

Tuesday Feb 27th, 2018

Press Play for added atmosphere -Dennis Kuo’s Midnight Coffee

I love coffee – I grind my own beans and I never drink preground coffee. Blech! A year ago I had no idea what the wonders of grinding my own beans fresh would be, or how much better this made coffee taste. I was working at Facebook (that’s my day job) and one of the managers named David P. showed me how to make espresso. I expressed to him when the topic of coffee came up, that I didn’t drink Facebook’s coffee that was provided because I no longer got any caffeinated buzz from it, to combat the post lunch food coma. David offered to show me how to make espresso to up the ante.

That was the beginning of my journey into the coffee intelligentsia. I started making espresso every day at work, grinding the beans, frothing the cream, pouring hot delicious super caffeinated espresso into paper cups. After I was briefly laid off, before being hired again a few months later, I went through withdrawls from not having freshly ground coffee.

I was freelancing as a social media marketer at the time & decided to buy my own espresso machine. It was nothing special, just a Mr Coffee espresso machine, but it got the job done.I discovered how much I love Cuvee after reading many coffee reddit threads & forums about the best coffee in Austin. I learned about finding beans that were roasted within 3 days of my purchase. And then, I learned a new way to brew.

Pretty soon, I had perfected making the best espresso that little machine could make, and quickly impressed my friends who happened to stop by in the morning with just how full flavored and packed with a punch my espressos could be. I don’t follow the traditional small cup espresso route, making just a couple of shots. I usually fill up an entire glass like it was coffee because, well, I enjoy drinking coffee beverages so much, why skimp on the amount?

I found myself going to coffee shops like Epoch, and becoming disappointed with their espresso skills, being too spoiled on how I like to make espresso, and the beans I like to use (Cuvee Meritage is phenomenal). But, it was all for the best, because now, I could produce coffee at home that was much better, imo, than any coffee shop I went to. Fresher, tastier, more full bodied, and so on.

Fast forward a few months later, I’m working at Facebook again, and have a long discussion with one of the IT guys, Eric G. about coffee. I share my experiences making espresso and we talk about the different caliber of grinders and machines for making espresso -which can get pretty pricey. Eric advised me to focus more on making a high quality cup of coffee than on buying a $500-$1000 espresso machine.

The Aeropress

Eric introduced me to the Aeropress, made by the manufacturers of the Aerobie ring. Having thrown the Aerobie ring, a super long distance frisbee, as a child, I was nostalgically surprised to find out the same company made their own version of a French Press. My friend Jeff had given me a French Press years ago but I somehow lost it when moving to my townhome I currently live in.

So, I took Eric’s advice, bought an Aeropress, and used the burr grinder he recommended (technically everyone takes Eric’s advice since he works in IT). The coffee I made was above par in excellence, and I appreciated his suggestions. Grinding coffee by hand was a unique experience, I hand ground beans I used to make espresso and coffee grinds and I am pleased with the results.

Now, drinking coffee via Aeropress, espresso machine, and regular cone filter but grinding my own beans via burr grinder or my electric grinder, I was pretty happy…for a while. I tried many flavors of Cuvee as well as 3rd Coast, but, eventually wanted to try something new. At my friend John L.’s house, celebrating his wife LeeAnn’s birthday, I met a woman there who was the girlfriend of John’s old roomate from college. She suggested I try out Anderson’s coffee.

Last weekend I rode my new blue bicycle my mother gave me for my birthday, to Wheatsville, then to Anderson’s Coffee where I bought a pound of their house blend to start off before trying more expensive blends.

It was an interesting looking place with a wall of coffee mugs for sale on shelves. I love buying new coffee mugs and made a mental note to buy a new mug on my next visit. I rode my blue bicycle to Central Market and bought Cuvee’s Spicewood blend as a fail safe in case I didn’t like Anderson’s coffee. I have to have good coffee people! I wake up every morning at 6:20am to study Spanish, and that cup of jo really helps me become focused faster on learning indefinite article pronouns and the future tenses of ir: Me voy beber cafe todas las dias en la manana (I’m going to drink coffee every day in the morning).

I could barely wait to get home & try the new coffee:

I measured out a cone full of whole beans & poured them into my electric grinder:

Then started pouring the Anderson Houseblend beans into the grinder:

The freshly ground beans are now cascading beautifully into the coffee cone:

The Pour: Less than 30 seconds later, the boiling water was poured:

While some schools of thought advocate the water poured on coffee to be of a temperature between 195 F (91 C) and 205 F (96 C) – I choose to boil the water mainly because I haven’t seen a sacrifice in taste to equal coffee going cold faster. And I love cold coffee -when I’m deciding to have cold coffee (I’m actually drinking cold coffee right now as I write this). Not so much for a glass of hot coffee to go cold faster, hence, my boiling the water.

And now, drum roll please, the finished cup of Anderson Coffee House Blend is held up to the sky, steam wafting up to the ceiling, pre-1st sip, to marvel at its glory:

I got that cup from the top of Mauna Kea mountain, at the Visitor Center on the Big Island, Hawaii. It’s a special cup to me, I remember walking down the mountain for a mile or 2, in 25 degree temperatures, carrying this cup, staring at the stars with my son. The stars were super bright and close, I’ll always remember that moment when drinking out of my Mauna Kea coffee cup.

The Verdict

It was ok. I liked it. Was it great? Hard to say. Perhaps it will grow on me. The first moment I sipped freshly ground Meritage I was in heaven, and it never changed, that flavor of Cuvee has always been the most pleasing to my palate. Next week I shall try the more expensive blends and see if one appeals to me. The kind barista offered to drink sample sips of each blend before I purchased, so I think I shall do that.

Even if this flavor isn’t amazing, and didn’t wow me, I’m still drinking Anderson Coffee House Blend every other day to variate from Cuvee, which was my main goal; to find another kind of coffee I liked, to shake up the routine. This goal I achieved.

Cheers!

Wonderful Future

Sunday January 21st, 2018

One of the things that I’ve learned on this crazy tight rope walk and balancing act that life can be is that: Memories of the past make me change for the future.

I know I wasn’t a child prodigy playing concerto violin professionally before reaching 10, but I also know there’s solid gold potential in each of us. All it takes is a catalyst, a few well timed moves, and haha…a winning lottery ticket to turn it all around.

Maybe I’ve been a fool so long I cannot tell the difference between an imaginary future and what I’m headed towards. Or maybe I’ve finally reached the critical mass of serendipity and as much as forces inside myself tell me to give up, now is the time to grind harder than ever.

We all face set backs.

Sometimes I feel like they all pile on top of me and regret bitch slaps me like a pimp on the corner of some god forsaken alley of lost dreams. And then I suck in my gut and man up.

Laziness is so easy to give in to. And to be honest, aside from parents who don’t believe in you, friends who are too caught up in their own drama to give a damn about supporting your dreams, and the luck of the draw, laziness is the cherry on top that is the ultimate dream killer. Because it takes work. It takes the gumption to get up, get out there and DO SOMETHING. Anything as long as it keeps that forward momentum going. As Outkast raps, “Get up, Get out and Do something!”

Hangover Reconnaissance

Today I wrote 8 pages in my upcoming book, The Beauty of Now. I’d rather have written 22 pages, but shit, it’s better than Net Flixing and chilling the entire day, and nursing a wine hang over from the night before. I had such a crazy fight with my son’s mother last night. Without discussing it with me at all, she sent a sheriff to my door with official forms to change my son’s name.

Huh?

This was a slap in the face and then some. It’s a challenge to have to deal with the struggles of burgeoning entrepreneurship, student loans, and planning a trip to New Orleans but now..out of the blue…she wants me to just check a box without having a discussion first??

Somewhere along the way, when she decided to up and move my son and her to a border town by Mexico in South Texas, she made the decision that I wasn’t allowed to parent our son in any way and excludes me from everything in our kid’s life. Whether it’s the clothes he wears, the food he eats, the school he goes to, or his behavior, she forbids me to parent our son.

It’s been a long road to develop trust with my son and we’ve made great progress, but events like this show me that my son’s mother is still stuck in the past 8 years back or something. Which is ok, to each their own, but when it hurts the quality of life my son has, it becomes an issue.

Apparently he’s been going through off and on, some bullying about his name. But instead of tell me about this, and let me help and support my son, emotionally and as a dad, I just get this constable at my front door handing me legal papers to change his name. She threatened to forbid him to go on a father-son trip to New Orleans we are planning this summer unless I just agreed – without talking about it.

Perhaps I’m crazy for thinking that a child shouldn’t get tattoos, or make any other life long decision and wait until he’s actually old enough to legally change it himself. I expressed to her that this seems inappropriate to demand me to change my son’s name legally without ever bringing the issue up beforehand.

If there are bullies at his school, making fun of his name or harassing him, shouldn’t this be something we both talk to his school’s administration about? This is a bigger issue than a name if our son is getting messed with at school. We should be talking about that, right?

Why is this the first I’ve heard of it? Changing his legal name, based on what may be a childish whim of his, seems more of an issue of not being able to tell him no when he wants something than actually about bullies.

Either way, it seems reasonable to at least have a conversation about this before sending a constable to my door with name change papers and commanding me on the phone to sign them or else she’ll take me back to court for child support. Doesn’t this seem a bit off? Can I be involved in my son’s life and help him through this before we make a decision he may regret as an adult?

SNAP…0 to 100

She starts yelling at me on the phone about what a horrible person I am and how if she could she’d never have told me anything. It got so bad and mean, I have to disconnect saying “You are being mean and hateful right now, I cannot continue this conversation, goodbye.”

After about 6 years of not being able to see my kiddo on a regular basis, being denied basic visitation rights, and being stood up numerous times, even on his birthday, halloween, and other holidays, and having be constantly insulted for…wanting to be in my son’s life? Attempting to be a good dad, be present, and teach my kid healthy social skills?

I realized that no matter how hard I tried to be kind and patient, there was a line she kept crossing and it was getting abusive to sit there, be ordered to do things, excluded from any decisions for how my son grew up, and be the recipient of a filibuster of “I hate you” like statements.

So, when she started going down this path, I realized that it was up to me to say no to being yelled at and insulted and to proactively end our conversations when they went that way.

That’s what happened last night. And I was super depressed, feeling like I had done something wrong. She always made me feel that way, like I was someone that didn’t deserve to be alive or in my son’s life. But I know this isn’t true. The last text my son sent me last night was:

In the Aftermath…

I make myself dinner, and pour a glass of wine, a nice merlot, trying to process what happened. Trying to figure out if I was really a bad person and how exactly was asking to be part of my son’s life such an…offensive request?

It’s easy to get discouraged about your life when you have someone in your life that is a negative force. My dad was like that, always very condescending and insulting me constantly. It took me years to heal from his emotional scarring. Now I find myself triggered in the same way that he used to make me feel bad all the time.

Today I had to take 20 minutes and remind myself, that I’m a good person, worth loving and caring for. The shockwaves of the previous night were so intense, but I knew better. I’ve been down this road before. Never take someone trying to demean you seriously, never take their words as the gospel.

To Zone Out Or Not To Zone That Is The Question

As much as it was tempting to spend the entire day zoning out on Person of Interest, Continuum, Aquarius or Jerry Seinfield’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, I got myself out of the house. Walked a mile or so to Central Market, and bought some delicious grape leaf dolmas and Cuvee Meritage coffee beans.

Walking to my townhome rain fell softly around me.

It used to rain often after I had fights with my baby’s momma. I always thought in the past it was a sign of bad things but today I rediscovered the rain as a source of life and refreshment to the plants. I found myself watching David Duchovny’s Californication and almost tearing up when his daughter said her one wish was that her parents could get back together.

My son has expressed the same thing to me. I can’t wave a magic wand and make that happen, but I can continue to work on my dreams, and not give up. David Duchovny’s character in Californication is a somewhat deadbeat but with style writer, and I found myself becoming inspired. I sat down, got out my source material, one of the journals from 2003, and wrote 8 pages.

Ironically it was detailing the day Tina and I first got together and started dating. I looked through this window into the distant past and realized no matter who she is today, and no matter how ugly and mean she acts towards me, she once had a light that shined within her.

I hope she finds it again. I appreciate the good moments we shared in the past 15 years of our life and that’s what I celebrate. A few things I’ve learned in this crazy walk of life is that being appreciative is the key to happiness and leading a fulfilling life.

I’m keeping my promises

I’m keeping promises to my son, and my promises to myself to follow this path of being an entrepreneur, using my talent to write to author my first book and build my own business.

Onward and upward, with no glances over my shoulder at could have beens or would have beens. Just appreciation for the present moment and how much beauty I see in myself, the world, my son and a wonderful future.