Between Meetings & Meals 005
Familiar Plates and the Calculator Moment
The Pour
This week looked a little different.
I was under the weather and not moving around as much as usual, so instead of chasing something new, I reached back to a bottle I have had a few times before.
1924 Double Black Red Blend.
This one comes out of Lodi and usually lives in that under the fifteen-dollar range. It is not trying to be fancy, but it brings something unique to the table. The first thing that always stands out to me is the oak. It leans heavier than most bottles at this price point and almost drifts into whiskey or bourbon territory (loosely speaking), which honestly is probably why I like it as much as I do.
Anisa is not fully sold on it, which is fair. It definitely has a stronger, more liquor-adjacent profile than some of the smoother Paso bottles we usually keep in rotation.
But for me, this one hits.
Blackberry. Dark fruit. Vanilla. Oak that actually shows up. And at this price point, it feels like a solid casual night bottle when you want something with a little more personality.
Not every bottle has to be a home run. Sometimes you just want something interesting in the glass.
The Table
Have you ever been to Anita’s in Edinburg?
If you look closely at the menu, there is a small section with a few names on it. Richard. Zach. Kyle. And Dan.
Yeah. That Dan.
What if I told you that plate was named after me?
Here is the short version. 👇 (Here is the long version 👉 Full Story Here)
Somewhere between 2009 and 2012, when I was back at Edinburg North as a physics teacher and freshman football coach, lunch was basically a timed sport. Thirty minutes if everything went right. Less if it did not.
A group of us started rotating through Anita’s because it was close, fast, and they understood the rhythm we were living in. Over time, after one too many burger basket runs, I finally asked them one day:
“What can you make me that is a little healthier?”
What followed was not some formal menu meeting. It was just a real conversation in the middle of the dining room. Grilled chicken. Charro beans. Sauteed vegetables. Corn tortillas. A little cheese. Some salsa to bring it together.
The next day I ordered it again.
Then again.
Then one day it quietly became a thing.
The Dan Special.
I had it this past Sunday at lunch for the first time in a while. When the waitress came up, I smiled and said, “I will have my plate.”
She knew exactly what that meant.
We all laughed a little.
And it was just as good as I remembered.
Anita’s has grown a lot since those lunch rush years. Bigger space. Second location. A well-earned following across the Valley. It is always good to see local spots level up like that.
If you are in the RGV and have never been, it is worth the stop. And if you are trying to mix in something a little lighter than the usual comfort rotation, the Dan Special is still sitting there on the menu.
If you want the full behind-the-scenes story on how that plate ended up with my name on it, I broke it all down here:
👉 [Full Story Here]
⚡ The Edge
This week I have been spending more time inside NotebookLM again.
If you read my The AI Toolkit eBook (talking to all 8 of you), you already know I am big on turning scattered information into something usable. NotebookLM has quietly become one of the more practical tools in that stack, especially now that the output options have expanded.
Once you drop in your source material, you are no longer just chatting with your notes. You can generate structured outputs that actually help you think and move faster.
Right now, the toolkit includes:
• Audio Overviews
• Video Overviews
• Slide Decks that export directly to Google Slides
• Mind Maps
• Flashcards
• Reports
• Infographics
• Quizzes
• Data Tables
The Slide Deck and Audio Overview features in particular have gotten noticeably better. If you are sitting on long PDFs, research docs, meeting transcripts, or internal planning material, this is one of the fastest ways I have found to pressure test what is actually inside your own information.
The tactical play is simple.
Start feeding it real source material. Not summaries. Not random prompts. Your actual working documents.
Then watch how quickly patterns, gaps, and talking points start to surface.
It is not magic. But it is getting more useful every month. My high school son is already using it to study… which brings me to the next part.
🧠 The Lesson
Lately I have been thinking a lot about how we are actually using AI around our kids and inside our work.
Not the hype version.
The real version.
Because whether we like it or not, we are living through another calculator moment.
If you go back to the 1970s, schools were in full panic mode over calculators. People were convinced kids would forget how to do math. That it would make them lazy. That it would break something fundamental in how they learned.
None of that happened.
Calculators did not destroy math. (shout out to the TI-89 users out there) They changed what mattered inside math. They moved students from grinding through long division to actually thinking about the concepts behind the numbers.
The tool did not kill the skill.
It elevated it.
AI feels like we are standing in that exact same moment again, just at a much bigger scale.
At home, I try to keep one simple rule.
Both and.
I still want my kids to understand the mechanics. We still write. We still think. We still talk things through. But when real curiosity hits the room, we do not ignore the tools sitting in our pocket.
We open them.
If Alanah asks something random.
If Deven brings up something I have not thought about in years.
If I hit a wall in my own work.
We just ask.
What I care about most is modeling the behavior in real time. Staying curious. Staying willing to look things up. Staying comfortable, saying I do not know, let us figure it out.
Because the future is probably not going to reward the person who can do everything manually.
It is going to reward the person who knows what good looks like and can direct the tools to help them get there faster.
That is the real shift.
And honestly, it is happening whether schools are ready or not.