Just a quick update. Friday morning’s soft-boiled eggs were even MORE perfect than the batch from Thursday, but that’s because I screwed up the first time. See, I was trying to get a little more runny yolk without leaving lots of gooey white, so I was experimenting with the timer.

It turns out that 3 minutes of boiling is not enough. I cut into the first egg, and it gooey-gushed all over my hand.

Remember my comment about “throwing them against the wall to see if they’re done?” Well, I couldn’t resist dropping them into the sink to see how they splattered. It turns out that an under-cooked soft-boiled egg splatters pretty well, AND yields a satisfactory “SPLUTCH” noise as it does so. And the sink is easier to clean AND easier to explain than the walls would have been.

4 minutes of boiling, that’s the ticket.

This afternoon I spent some quiet time picking through my CDs and marking the ones I’ve ripped to iTunes. There were over 200 of them. There’s another 127 here to be ripped, plus an uncounted stack (maybe 100, perhaps 150) in the basement, some of which are duplicates, and most of which have never been opened.

I’ve mentioned that I was a record producer for a while. As part of that job, I was a member of the FCMA (Faith-Centered Music Association), which had voting and awards and all that back-patting stuff. I was there when the FCMA was first chartered. My friend Bob Ahlander was one of the founders, and in his own words, the Association existed to “raise the bar” for music released in the LDS market.

The other thing it existed for was to mail Howard 30 or 40 CDs a year, which he was supposed to listen to and vote on. Obviously I wanted to vote only for my own stuff, and equally obviously, that’s no way to run a “raise the bar” association. Voting became a chore, and when I stopped being a record producer, I stopped paying my dues, and the CDs stopped showing up in the mail.

Some of those CDs are quite good. A rare few suck so hard you’d think we were below sea-level. Most of them are “nice,” or so I suppose, since I haven’t opened them, but they’ve been nominated for awards here and there.

Well, my Pop music collection (the stuff I paid for) has mostly been ripped. Only a few of these religious discs have been. Today I was mulling over the fact that I don’t have much “Sunday-flavored” music on my iPod, and it occurred to me that the time had come to finally organize things so that I could fill up my hard-drive and de-clutter the CD-shelf. And so the project began. It’s a nice Sunday activity, turning the marketing loss-leaders of my former competitors into captive ones-and-zeroes so I can enjoy their work with random, shuffling anonymity up in the kitchen.

As of this writing my iTunes Music Library has 9.31 GB of data in it (I’m not asking for bragging rights – I’ve SEEN what a properly huge iTunes library looks like). I’ll have exceeded the storage on my 15 GB iPod before this project is complete, methinks. That’ll be nice. That’ll force me to CHOOSE what I download to the iPod, which will have me happily unearthing things I didn’t know I had, and listening to new-to-me music without spending money.

–Howard

This morning I had the breakfast of the effete barbarian: soft-boiled eggs.

I’m pleased that I got them just right — the whites were solid, and the yolks were runny. Cooking an egg like that when you can’t SEE how done it is, that’s a real trick. That’s not the kind of seat-of-my-too-large-pants cooking I usually do. This requires an actual TIMER. I suppose I could do the spaghetti trick, and throw them against the wall to see how done they are, but I’m betting Sandra would quickly make the cleaning of the kitchen my exclusive responsibility.

Effete barbarism… see, you cut off the top of the egg with a knife, and then take a spoon and scoop the edible bits right out of the shell. If I had egg cups I’d feel more effete and less barbaric, but there’s still something primal about breaking an egg open and eating gooey stuff right out of it. I suppose it’s a little less primal for me using a spoon, and adding salt, but when the yolk spilled down the side of the eggshell and I licked it off? Hey, I felt like a ferret, or maybe a velociraptor — salt and spoon notwithstanding.

I HARD-boiled some eggs yesterday so I could have ham and egg salad. In this case “ham” is replaced by “TREET,” which is Armor’s answer to Hormel’s SPAM product. It was roughly half the cost, and they said it was supposed to taste like a Virgina Baked Ham. They can’t print lies right on their packaging, can they? Maybe they can get away with it… I have no idea what a Virginia Baked Ham is supposed to taste like, but I assume by its mention on the side of the tin that it’s supposed to taste GOOD.

The TREET did not taste good. The egg-salad was great, though. On a lark I went ahead and added chopped TREET to it, and behold! A miracle! Egg-plus-Miracle-Whip is a strong enough flavor that I couldn’t tell that a pseudo-Virginian ham-bake had occurred anywhere NEAR my bowl of fats and proteins. I guess that’s why they call it Miracle-Whip.

(Note: I know, I know. Miracle Whip has sugar in it. The total carb-count of my two-egg salad was around 7g, max. I do keep track of these things, you know.)

Well, I was on a roll, so I tried another experiment. I asked Sandra to tear off a couple of leaves of Romaine lettuce, and I spooned the Miraculous Egg-TREET Salad onto them. The effect was interesting. The flavor changed a bit… the Romaine sort of “legitimized” the whole concoction with a green crunchiness, as if to say “NOW it is a REAL SALAD.” Then there was the VISUAL effect. “See, honey? I’m eating a fancy thing-on-a-leaf, instead of spooning a bowl of yellowish slop into my cake-hole.” Amazingly, it was tasty enough that Sandra liked it too, and since I’d made more than I cared to eat myself, I gave her a leaf-full.

I bet barbarians ate off of leaves ALL THE TIME.

–Howard

I’ve tried lots of diets in my decade as an only-slightly-overweight test subject. By far the most effective have been induction-phase low-carbohydrate diets. Yes, I tried them before they were a national fad (by about two years, depending on your definition of “fad”). Yes, I’ve researched them. I’m dieting again. Click if you want to read about it.