Allen Eskelin - CEO of Peak Portfolio
About Allen

CEO of Peak Portfolio, management consultant, and author. I also blog at soloconsultants.com and publish The SoloLIST, a weekly newsletter for solo consultants. [profile]

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Renewing my appreciation for coffee

If you want to really appreciate something, give it up for a period of time.

I recently gave up coffee for 2 months and switched to tea due to stomach digestion issues I was having. The digestion issues cleared up in a few weeks so I believe the acid in the coffee was messing me up. After 10 years of drinking multiple cups of coffee a day, I definitely missed it. So now that my stomach is doing well, I decided to have a cup of coffee once every few weeks or so. 

Last week I met my friend Steve at Starbucks and we had a french press of Sumatra. Because I knew this would be my only coffee for awhile, I sat and smelled it for about a minute before sipping it. Then I slowly drank it, really focusing on enjoying each sip. The interesting thing is that is smelled soooo good and tasted even better than I had remembered coffee tasting in a long time.

That got me thinking about other things in life that are taken for granted and not fully appreciated for what they bring to us. Do we actually need to give something up in order to fully appreciate it? Or perhaps it's just a state of mind for slowing down, being present, and focusing on fully enjoying it.

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Posted 4 months ago

From Coffee Snob to Tea Snob

   
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From_Coffee_Snob_to_Tea_Snob.zip (29 KB)

I remember back when I was about 4 years old, I was sitting in my dad's work van and he let me try a sip of his coffee. Yuck! I hated it and couldn't understand how anyone would like it. Fast forward 23 years and I find myself working on retail technology at Starbucks. Employees receive a pound of coffee every week and the coffee rooms are setup like a store. I figured I'd better give coffee another shot to take advantage of these perks. Starbucks coffee was definitely better than I remembered my dad's coffee 23 years earlier but I still wasn't a fan. I decided to give it some time to see if I acquired a taste. Initially, I liked the mild coffees but over time graduated to the bolder coffees. During my 7 years at Starbucks, I became a coffee snob, even by Starbucks standards. I even became a certified Starbucks Coffee Master, which required tasting every coffee in the line up and passing a bunch of tests about coffee and how it goes from crop to cup.

A few months ago, my stomach started getting bloated really bad. I tried changing my diet, eliminating soy and dairy, and drinking a lot of water (and coffee). After a month of no change, my doctor convinced me to give up coffee for a month just to see what happens. Maybe the acidity of the coffee was messing with my stomach.

I figured an easy way to give up coffee after 11 years of many cups a day was to replace it with something else. Tea was the closest substitute. Within a week my stomach was back to normal and now I've been drinking tea instead of coffee for two months. Over this time, I've been sampling a number of teas and have found a new appreciation for tea. My current favorites are Numi's Decaf Black Vanilla - Indian Night and Numi's Berry Black - Raspberry Darjeeling Black Tea . Like coffee, there are very subtle flavors in tea and you have to build a vocabulary for describing what you're tasting. I'm still a beginner but am well on my way to becoming a tea snob.

Any other tea snobs out there? What's your favorite tea and do you have any suggestions for websites/blogs focused on premium tea?

 

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Posted 6 months ago

Using Electrical Wires for your Home Network

   
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Using_Electrical_Wires_for_you.zip (62 KB)

After reading about some of the potential harmful effects of using wireless in your home, I decided to try out this solution by Netgear . I just purchased and installed a pair of Netgear XE103G-100NAS Powerline Ethernet Adapter and a Netgear XE104 85 Mbps Powerline 4-Port Ethernet Adapter. All you do is plug one into a power outlet and the others at different power outlets in your home. They automatically connect to each other and provide 85 Mbps connectivity. The other advantage is that you don't have to run wires throughout your home and no longer need to deal with signal strength like you do with wireless routers. I've used it for a few days and I'm sold on the technology. Also, the pricing is comparable to wireless networking.

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Posted 7 months ago