Between Meetings & Meals — Episode 018
A wine that punched way above its price, chicken parm with the whole crew, and what the beach keeps teaching me about perfect conditions.
It’s been a minute since the last one. Longer than I meant.
Not because it was a slow stretch. It was probably the busiest one I’ve had in a while. A lot built, a lot going on, and a lot of nights that did not go according to any plan.
That last part is kind of the theme.
Because when I look back at the stuff that actually stuck — the bottle, the dinner, the weekends at the beach — almost none of it was scripted. It wasn’t the perfect version. It was whatever was in front of us, made the most of.
Here’s this week’s Between Meetings and Meals.
The Pour
This week’s bottle was Baby Blue by Blue Rock, the 2022.
I scanned it before buying, the way I do now, and it stopped me for a second. 4.1 stars. Over six thousand ratings. An 85% match for me. And a little badge that said among the top 1% of all wines in the world.
For thirty-three bucks.
After the Del Dotto splurge a few weeks back, I was not expecting something to overdeliver like this at that price. But it held up. Smooth, easy to keep pouring, the kind of red that makes a regular night feel a little more dialed in without making a thing of it.
I keep relearning the same lesson on this wine journey. The expensive bottle is fun once in a while. But the ones that stick are the ones that punch way above their price. A $33 bottle that drinks like the top 1% is more my speed than a $95 (that we got for wayyyy less) trophy.
Not the fanciest option. The right one.
The Table
Chicken parm night.
Turned out to be one of the best “get everyone involved” meals we’ve found, and I did not expect that going in.
It was a busy night. Anisa had a lot on her plate, and instead of everyone scattering to their own corners, we turned dinner into the thing we did together. The girls, Alanah and Addy, ran breading duty. Aiden was on noodles. I floated around and kept it moving.
Here’s why it worked so well.
One, everybody in this house already eats chicken strips. Chicken parm is really just chicken strips with a promotion. Familiar enough that nobody’s skeptical. Elevated enough that it feels like an actual meal.
Two, they got to get dirty. The egg bath, the breading, the little assembly line. Kids love a job that lets them make a mess with permission.
Three, it’s mostly set and forget. Once everything was breaded, it went in the oven and did its own thing while we hung out.
The best part had nothing to do with the food.
It got everyone off Roblox. Off the screens. Into the kitchen, hands messy, actually talking. We took a busy night that could’ve been everyone-for-themselves and turned it into a team thing that helped Anisa out and made a memory while we were at it.
The chicken came out great. But that wasn’t the win.
The win was everyone in one kitchen on a night that didn’t have to go that way.
The Edge
You Learn It By Getting Your Hands In It
Watching the kids bread chicken got me thinking about how I’ve actually learned everything useful this year.
Not by watching.
By getting my hands in it and making a mess.
This past stretch has probably been the most I’ve ever built. Websites for the team. A setup for a business one of my kids is getting off the ground. Sites for a few local shops. A whole program I can hand to other cities. Different jobs, different people, and not one of them showed up with a perfect brief or ideal conditions.
The only reason any of it got done is that I stopped waiting to feel ready and just started.
That’s the part I think people get stuck on with AI. They want to understand it completely before they touch it. They watch another video. They read another thread. They wait for the perfect entry point.
But this stuff doesn’t really click until your hands are in it.
You start something, you hit a wall you don’t know how to get over, you figure it out in real time, you make a mess, you clean it up. That’s the whole loop. Same as the egg bath and the breading. Nobody learns to cook by watching cooking.
The tools got good enough that starting is easy now.
The only thing left is being willing to get dirty.
The Lesson
We’ve been going to South Padre for years now. Same beach, more or less. Never the same day twice.
Some weekends the water is that clear blue, tiny waves, soft sand you sink into. Other weekends it’s murky and rough, big waves, hard-packed sand. Sometimes it’s wall-to-wall people. Sometimes we’ve got a stretch to ourselves. We’ve had picture-perfect weekends, and we’ve had ones where it rained half the time.
Here’s what I finally noticed.
We had fun every single time.
Not because the conditions cooperated. They rarely did exactly how we pictured. We just took whatever the day gave us and made the most of it. Rough water becomes wave-jumping. Rain becomes a lazy morning inside. Crowded becomes people-watching. You adapt, you’re still together, and it still counts.
I think that’s the whole thing, honestly.
We spend so much energy waiting for the conditions to be right. The right bottle. The perfect plan for dinner. The ideal week to finally start the thing we keep putting off. The beach day where everything lines up.
It almost never lines up.
But the good stuff was never really about perfect conditions. The wine that overdelivered for thirty bucks. The chicken parm on a chaotic weeknight. The beach weekend where it rained and we had a blast anyway.
You don’t get to pick the conditions.
You just get to decide to be all the way in whatever you’ve got.
That part’s on us.
Between meetings and meals, that’s the one I keep relearning.
The conditions are never going to be perfect. Get your hands in it anyway.
If this resonated, the newsletter is where it continues — one honest email at a time.