Just to let you know that the refund from Apple was put to good use: an espresso machine for the office. Stainless steel goodness. We haven't fired up the coffee pot since.

My first espresso was in the early eighties at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. I was running errands with my supervisor, Tech Sgt Knudsen, and we swung by his place in base housing to get a sandwich. Sargeant Knudsen spent much of his military career in Europe, marrying a british gal, picking up some odd language traits, and acquiring a taste for good coffee. Restationed stateside he brought along a copper and brass contraption which looked nothing like coffee makers I'd ever seen.

"Wanna a cup of coffee?" he asked.

"Sure. I like coffee."

"This is REAL coffee."

"Uh, sure..."

What the heck is REAL coffee, I wondered. This is back before Peets, Starbucks, and espresso drive-ups, when coffee was cheaper than a soda. Sgt Knudsen messed around with pipes, beans, trays and a bunch of other stuff, making a racket which didn't sound at all like coffee. Then he handed me a dainty white porcelain cup, right out of Alice in Wonderland, which had this pool of blackness in the bottom.

Crap, I thought, he forgot to add water.

It was awful. He suggested that I sip it slowly and relax, it's not like regular coffee. Yeah, got that right. It was like all of the coffee I'd had so far in my life condensed into a couple of tablespoons. I smiled, lied that it was good, and steadily worked my way to the bottom, nibbling regularly on the little English cookies his wife had left out. A funny thing happened though, maybe it was the caffiene kicking in maybe something reconfigured in my brain, but by the time I was done I actually started liking it.

So here I sit, typing this and waiting for an espresso machine to warm up. No brewing a quick cup of java here. It's a process. You're always trying to get a little bit better. And when you get good, really, really good, you might just make a God Shot.

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