I awoke yesterday morning to discover that our lovely houseguest had made hard-boiled eggs.  I like hard-boiled eggs.  I don’t really have cooking them worked out, so I don’t ever make them, but they’re pretty much the funnest food to eat.  They certainly have the highest fun to difficulty ratio of any food I can think of.  I like to carry them in my pocket.  It makes me feel like I’m carrying a delightful secret.  Plus, the shape of an egg is so agreeable for general fidgeting purposes.  Have you ever sat at a table and idly spun a hard-boiled egg?  You haven’t lived till you’ve done that. 

If there were no such thing as Easter, and no one had ever thought of painting eggs before, I’d have thought of it by myself, I’m certain of it.  The world is full of insane inventions that I can honestly say would never have occurred to me at all, not even in part, and it’s comforting to me to know that this one thing, painting hard-boiled eggs, would have been an invention I could count on.  I don’t really know how pulleys work, or why they don’t work when I think they should.  When my car stops working right, I have as much chance of making it run again by myself as a tobogganer has of making the mountain taller (though I do open the hood anyway).

I have an idea for an invention.  It’s a collapsible stepladder that’s shaped like a three-tiered wedding cake.  Instead of carrying it, you just roll it where you want to go, then pull it up, and viola.  Who doesn’t want to stand on a cake?  It would have a rubberized traction layer that was very reminiscent of frosting, which also made for easy rolling.  Cakes are, in part, made of eggs.

Once, at a céilidh, I met a guy who had invented a revolutionary new kind of mop and needed people to invest in their manufacture so that he could become a rich man and god among custodians.  I’m not making this up.  He needed like $15,000 to make the mop heads and he figured every custodian in the world would be stoked to buy one.  I told him that I didn’t have any money, though I wished him well, and that I had actually come to the céilidh to dance with girls, not talk to custodians, no matter how visionary.  I had had eggs for breakfast that morning.

Whenever I fry eggs, I always crack the first egg right in the middle of the pan.  This makes the finished yolk constellation pretty limited.  The shape is always set to some kind of lopsided thing by that middle egg, unless I cook six more and take care to arrange them around the middle one in a circle, which I’ve never quite done.  I ought to think it out beforehand, but I’m not a morning person.

I can never be sure how the egg I’m about to crack will turn out.  I fry eggs nearly every day, usually 3-5 of them, and I still always end up with the pan too hot or the oil to sparse.  Every egg I crack causes albumen to get on my fingers, which I think is a little bit gross.