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Adam Hill (He/Him) is a dad who loves science, cooking, math, engineering, skepticism, espresso, and politics! He has been a teacher, an engineer, and now a software business analyst. Curiosity now and forever!

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PHYSICAL

• Burley Bee Bike Trailer – This is our family’s second car – it has room for 2 kids and plenty of groceries! I pull it behind my ebike, and it is safe and lightweight.
• Nanofoamer Pro – easy foamed milk for cortados. Jut got my Kickstarter model, and it outperforms other foamers while also being able to do tiny amounts of milk, perfect for cortados and piccolo lattes. Issue #151 featuring Ben Reuter already mentioned my espresso maker – the Flair, though I have the Pro 2 model. With these two things + a hand grinder I can make home drinks better than any big machine, with a tiny countertop space.I recently got an organizer so my espresso setup looks pretty nice 😊
• MagSafe wallet – I kept forgetting my ID on the rare occasions I drive. Now, I always carry my two most important credit cards, my ID, and an emergency $20. My big wallet stays behind 95% of the time, and my butt + posture thank me for it!

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DIGITAL

• Eat Your Books – an online cookbook index. If we want to cook a type of recipe or use a particular ingredient, we can search our cookbooks (and a few favorite blogs) and see ingredients. It’s so nice to actually use the older cookbooks that aren’t on the top of our minds, and we can plan a week’s meals without pulling too many books off the shelf. It’s just an index though – you still need the book for the full recipe if the author didn’t publish it on a blog. Free account worked for a while, but the premium was worth it for us.
• Mixel – cocktail recipe app. Clean interface, high quality recipes, ingredient tracking. It will tell you based on what you have in your bar what drinks you can make, and it can suggest if there are recipes only missing one ingredient. It says I can buy Orgeat syrup and unlock 51 recipes, or Green Chartreuse to unlock 35. I pay $12 a year for access to all recipes, and since it has replaced buying 2-3 cocktail books a year this is a steal. The free recipes cover all the basics, and the quality of the recipes is quite good – very little adjustment needed for my tastes.

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INVISIBLE

• If it can’t fit on your calendar, is it worth doing? In “4000 Weeks”, Oliver Burkeman suggests that it is surely impossible to schedule reserved time for everything on your ambitious to-do and project lists onto your calendar. This highlights the importance of prioritization – it is much more impactful to decide where to direct your attention and time rather than on increasing the speed at which you complete tasks on a list that is always growing faster than you can complete. I wish I could teach college-aged me this lesson!

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What’s in your NOW?

We want to know what’s in your now — a list of 6 things that are significant to you now — 3 physical, 2 digital and 1 invisible. 

If you’re interested in contributing an issue, use this form to submit: https://forms.gle/Pf9BMuombeg1gCid9

If we run your submission in our newsletter and blog, we’ll paypal you $25.

02/21/24