Look, The Wright Brothers Once Stayed Overnight In Maine

Aug 5, 2018 · 2 minute read

In other news, I have completed my bureaucratic journey to becoming a real, proper resident of Ohio. I now have a shiny REAL ID-compliant driving licence and shiny new Ohio plates for my car. And for those sad that my NC ‘First In Flight’ tag was being retired, the new plates proudly claim ‘Birthplace of Aviation’. Because apparently states fight over what credit for aeroplanes that they can stick on their licence plates.

To celebrate, I stood in a line for about 30 minutes and bought a bottle of bourbon. Not just any bottle, mind you, but the first 4-year bottled-in-bond bottles from our local distillery (annoyingly, their website has been down since Wednesday, but maybe it’ll be back up soon?). I also put these together over the weekend:

Heaven Hill Collection, Vol. 1: caramel and infused gianduja. pic.twitter.com/Om7K51KZQ3
— Ian Pointer (@carsondial) August 5, 2018

I have a feeling that there’s going to be a lot more Heaven Hill-related experiments in the near future. Turns out that soaking hazelnuts in bourbon and then making them into Nutella is A Good Idea. A plan for later in the year is to get a new batch of cacao nibs and do something similar, but ending up with a dark milk chocolate bar (idea nicked from Maverick). And also an idea to recreate a Fat Duck recipe now that I have more of a bourbon selection…

Finally, I succumbed to the cult of the new and bought a new Macbook. It’s been over three years and my old machine has been complaining about its battery for about eight months now. It’ll have a nice new life in the farm upstate, don’t worry. After running Migration Assistant and again marvelling at the idea that in this 2018 Mac, I still have so much stuff from my original iBook in 2002 lying around on the hard drive, I have settled into the new TouchBar-powered future. It is odd, when typing, to see words and emoji flash up where there really should only be a bunch of function keys.

Still, the screen is much nicer, the sound is really good, and while it’s perhaps little surprise given that it’s a 2018 machine rather than a 2015 one…it feels so much faster. Hurrah! I’m really going to miss MagSafe, though. I am clumsy enough that it has saved my older laptops on many an occasion…