It all started with gift cards.

Last year, or maybe it was the year before that, my dad asked for my help researching home espresso machines. He had found himself in the market. I thought it was an odd request, since my dad doesn't even have a coffee pot at home, but he had recently acquired a new girlfriend, and even though she was a proper British tea-drinking lady, I thought maybe she enjoyed espresso as well.
So I turned to my friend the internet, looking for the best value in home espresso machines. I found a couple good choices for him, I thought.
Then, he told me that he wanted to buy his machine from Starbucks. (Why I did research when he knew what he wanted and where he was buying it from is beyond me. But that's the way things go for me and my dad. He makes me suffer.)
He wanted to buy a machine from Starbucks because he has Starbucks gift cards, which he had been saving for a year or two. He is a milkman, and his residential customers give him small gifts at the holidays. Over the past 5 years or so, gift cards have usurped cookies and Hickory Farms packs as the gift of choice, so Dad had a stack of Starbucks cards three inches thick.
Now, a normal person might see a stack of gift cards like that and think,' HEy! I never have to buy coffee again!' But not dad. Even though he does stop at Starbucks EVERY DAY for a non-fat latte, he paid cash and saved his cards, until he had enough for the Ascasco Dream Espresso Machine, which retails for more than my refrigerator. He reasoned that it is better to get something durable for free than something disposable, like cups of coffee.
We shopped around for the perfect Dream. It took about 3 weeks and multiple calls to stores from Eugene to Bellingham to find the right finish, and to get it transferred to Oregon, where *I* would trade the stack of cards for the machine, saving 10% sales tax.
We did the deal, Dad took his coffeepot home, where it looked fantastic on his counter. He made exactly one cup of coffee with it. He did not use it because 1. He worried that caffeine would affect his heart. The daily latte at the Starbucks store seemed to not figure in to this worry. Evidently. only caffeine consumed at home is harmful. And 2. There are a lot of steps involved. Espresso is complicated.
So this year, he brought the machine to me. I have to admit that I was intimidated by it. It is the fanciest thing I own beside my husband's truck. This morning, I unpacked it (Dad saved the original box, of course) and all the accouterments he supplied- pre-measured espresso pods, shot glasses, tampers, a frothing pitcher with thermometer, and an extra handle for the machine. (I remembered tracking that extra handle down. I think it came cross-country.)
Here is the whole shooting match. Isn't it gorgeous?

And here is the first cappuccino I made with it. It is delicious, even though I used the Starbucks pods and Starbucks espresso is not my favorite. Maybe some day I will get good enough to make foam art. Maybe soon I will learn the difference between cappuccino and latte.