It's worth noting when the Roediger House is honored with good company, and that was the case back on the first Friday of March. My childhood friend Todd Martin was headed home to Indiana after his latest visit with his folks here in North Carolina, and he graciously reached out for a catch-up over coffee before resuming the long journey back to his own family. I do believe this is his fourth RoHo stop-in over the last decade, following quite a long stretch where our paths didn't cross at all.
In addition to fresh-ground and fresh-brewed Starbucks Winter Blend coffee, I had also put together a simple butterscotch Bundt coffee cake to sweeten the reunion just a bit more.
It's definitely one of my old, old recipes, from growing up in Buies Creek, taken directly from the box of cake mix. It's usually a well-received hit when I serve it and then comes the embarrassed acknowledgement of its sourcing when I'm asked to share the recipe.
That first Friday of March was devoted to a different pursuit, once Todd hit the road again: the arrival of and setting up a new laptop. I bought my first laptop computer when I was a PhD student at the University of Virginia, in 1999 or 2000. I'd gotten hooked up with the professor who was the ed school's first appointed Chief Technology Officer, and he and another tech guru were talking about a great deal through UVa's computer wing of the Student Stores...and I snagged it for around $1,500, if memory serves.
Over the years, I've had to replace my Apple laptops about every four years but my latest one, bought in a crisis around Thanksgiving 2016, has hung in there for almost seven years. Over the last several months, though, it's become almost impossible to type on: sticking keys, repeating keys, extra spaces, or non-responding keys. This screen grap from an article I've been working on shows what spellcheck did not correct:
It is one of the "butterfly" keyboard models that Apple finally acknowledged was of a faulty design. However, because of its age, mine did not qualify for repair or replacement.
Costing very nearly the same as the Apple MacBook I bought in 2004, I am now in possession of—and typing this very sentence on—my latest Apple MacBook 14-inch Pro, with its M2 chip. Migration from its predecessor, to the tune of over 1 million files, clocked in that evening at just over two hours. I believe this hefty investment requires me to get back into my regular writing routine, though.
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