With Easter 2016 right around the corner, parents everywhere are getting ready to color some eggs. Often times with the kids help. A fun activity for the family, sure, but a little messy as well.
Eggs are fun for the hunt. I loved it when we colored the eggs and I loved it when mother hid them all around the house and or outside in the yard. I loved looking for them. Great times!
One of things I hated though, was trying to peel those suckers. It took like five minutes and in the process, I would rip away half the outer egg.
It would seem, in hindsight, mother didn't know how to properly cook an egg. However, by the time little Ami came along, she figured it out.
For me having grown into quite the cook, I too figured it out. There appears to be a secret to boiling an egg in so that when you go to peel it, it comes right off, almost naturally.
Some would say there is no secret, you just boil and let cool.
NO! Bad cooks. There is a secret! So allow me to reveal to you how to boil the perfect egg.
It's simple, right? Well, not quite. I like to place no more than a dozen eggs in my pan. (Mostly because that is all it can hold unless I stack them, which is a big no-no. If you stack them, there is a bigger risk for breakage / leakage. You don't want that. Noboody wants that. Unless that's what you want in which case, knock yourself out.)
Once the eggs are in the pan, I then add water. Now, some people believe you need to completely cover the eggs, but this is a myth. I like to only cover 3/4ths of the egg, leaving a little white belly showing.
Now that we got that part resolved, we then place it on the stove burner. Hopefully, you don't have it on high. For stoves that have numbers, 8 will do fine. Either way, gas or electric, or in some cases, out here where I live, wood burning stoves, you just want to boil the eggs on a medium boil. That's it. Nothing more fancier than that. lol
I never time my eggs for boil. I use the sense of smell. For me, I let the water boil at least 95 percent away into evaporation, or 99 percent. But I know when my eggs are done because for a brief few moments, I can smell them all over the house. It smells like someone is cooking up some scrambled eggs or maybe, eggs over easy, or sunny side up.
The point is, you really let eggs boil. But when you finally take them off the stove, you must quickly place them in the sink and under the faucet and begin pouring cold water over them. The objective is to cool the egg-shells as quickly as possible.
I run cool water over them for about 30 seconds to a minute. One way to tell if you cooled them correctly is to take one out of the pan and hold it for about ten to fifteen seconds. If they feel about mild to luke warm in your hand, then they are cooled. You can start placing them back in the carton to be placed in the refrigerator. And yes, I recommend you put them back in the fridge and cool them for another hour at least before coloring them. It is very important to cool them properly as it is to cook them properly. (Which is thoroughly)
You could peel one or two right after cooking them to eat, but you have to be careful because while the outer part of the egg is medium warm when you take a bite, the inner portion of the egg, most notably, the yoke, will be extremely hot, so be careful. Keep something cold close by to wash it down with.
But before I wrap this post up, please let me say that there is a proper way to peel the egg also. I like to crack one of the ends on the counter, then with it in my left hand, I gently spin the egg around and with my right hand, I gently squeeze the top where I cracked it. I squeeze it all around and slowly work my way down the egg, about halfway. The egg shell begins to break apart on its own and before you know it, it breaks apart in big sections and slides right off. Do this for the entire egg and once you get good at it, you can peel an egg in a matter of seconds and without tearing off any chuncks from the egg.
You see, there's a film inside the egg that forms when you boil it and if you don't boil it correctly, it will stick to the egg and or to the egg and shell. What you want it to do is stick to the shell only. The only way to achieve this is to cool it down immediately after boiling them.
Hopefully I have saved to from another hard boiled egg peeling disaster. Now, go out there and show Easter what you're made of. lol
Oh, the power of songs. We cannot deny that some of them hold such strong memories and no matter how much time rolls by, when you hear that song, those old feelings come back again to haunt your heart. Well, the same applies to me too.
There are plenty of songs that when I hear them, I reflect to a person, place or thing. Some memories hit harder than others. One song that hits me harder than most is "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield.
Every time I hear it, I think of her. Tiffany. Or was it Stephanie? Crap! I can't remember. Oh well, for the sake of old times, I'll call her Stephanie.
Anyhow, whenever I hear that song, I think of Stephanie. A 15 year old girl about to turn sweet sixteen. I was 17 and was in the Army reserves already and was just a few weeks away from going on our two week active duty at Fort Bragg.
Stephanie and I had been messing around for several weeks leading up to this particular weekend. She lived with her parents and a brother right across the street from my oldest sister. I would go stay with her when I used to go up to Columbus for my weekend out of the month duty and that's when I met her.
I eventually transferred to a unit in Chillicothe, which was with whom I was about to do my two weeks of active duty with. Even though I no longer had to go to Columbus, didn't mean I would stop going up there. I almost always wanted to go hang out with Stephanie. We would take off together to this outdoor movie theater and watch movies from my car. We also took advantage of what the back seat offered. This particular weekend was no exception.
There was one small problem though. At least, at the time, I considered it a small problem, and that was, she also had a little thing going on with this other guy who was a few years older than me. I was determined to win her over. That's how crazy I was for her. Man, she was hot, hot, hot. That face, that hair, that sweet body. She was everything physically I ever wanted in a girl and she was really fun to be with. She was a very happy-go-lucky girl.
We went to the movies this particular Saturday night like was always did ever other weekend and we romped around in the backseat - just like we always did, when she finally broke the news to me after we climbed back into the front seat.
We had discussed the situation before many times so it did not surprise me that she would suddenly bring it up out of the blue in the manner that she did. What was surprising was what she decided. "I'm making it serious with John so this will be the last weekend for us."
KERPLUNK
"Say what? Really? But ...."
"I'm sorry Carroll. I really am. I like you. I like you a lot. But I've really fallen for John. I really want to try and make it work with him."
I tried my best to talk her out of it, including, "What are you going to tell your mom? You know she prefers me over him."
"Then you can date my mom. I choose him." She fired back quickly.
"When did you decide this?" I asked her. She turned to me and practically scooted onto my lap. "A few days ago. Carroll," she continued, "I care about you so much. Other than the sex part, you're like a brother to me."
I wanted to throw up.
"Carroll, you're going on your two week active duty soon, and then you said you were going to join the Navy when you got back. The active Navy."
"That's the plan." I stated. "But I wanted to, or maybe, I mean, I thought that maybe you and I ...."
"No." She softly spoke. "I don't want that."
The silence would have been deafening had it not been for the speaker in the car window and the movie coming over it. "I see." I whispered.
And just like that, it was time for me to move on. I quickly learned that love was a bitch. In fact, she was more than just a bitch, she is a super-bitch!
I wanted to poke my eyes out. But I took a deep breath and accepted it for what it was. I knew she had a tough choice to make and I only had a fifty-fifty shot. That's how I thought about it back then .... flash forward to about fifteen years later.
I was sitting at the kitchen table in my sisters house when a dark blue van pulled up next to the curb. My sister stood up and looked out the window at the vans direction. "Who is that?" I asked her.
My sister walked to the door and opened it up. I saw a blonde girl get out and open the yard gate, making her way towards the house. "You don't recognize her?" My sister questioned me in return. No sooner did she say that when, it all came back to me.
Stephanie walked in and said hello and handed her some money. "It's all there." She told her. "You can count it if you like."
"I trust you." My sister assured her. "Do you remember him?" She rounded out.
Stephanie took a look at me and smiled. "Yes, I remember him." Then she addressed me. "You haven't changed a bit." She told me.
"Hello, Stephanie. How you been?"
"Pretty good. I'm still with John." She informed me. I figured as much. "Really? That's so wonderful."
"I better get going." She announced, turning around and walking out saying her goodbye's.
My sister turned to me. "Now are you glad she didn't pick you?"
I slightly gasped. "Why? Just because she put on a few pounds, and cut her hair, and her face has turned into an old catcher's mitt?"
"She and John also live in that van."
"What? No shit?"
My sister shook her head. "No shit. They park at friends houses, and driveways, alleys, and even rest areas."
"All year round?" I asked.
"All year round." She answered. "Pretty much."
And just like that I breathed a huge sigh of relief. "No wonder she picked him, she wanted to be the wife of a bum."
And while I was happy all these years later that she picked him, back in the day it was devastating. But it was another lesson in 'be careful for what you wish for' kind of thing, I suppose, seeing how much she let herself go, but I also thought that maybe she wouldn't have turned out the same way if she had picked me. I mean, would we have lasted? .... Who knows? But I guess I can say that she stuck by the guy to this point so maybe she made the right choice - for her.
It turned out that shortly after she dropped out of school the following year, she lived with him in an apartment until he got fired shortly after her 18th birthday and ever since, they been living in that van and he has been going from odd job to odd job. But man, the years were not kind to her. I also heard she did a lot of dope and pills and stuff, and really, really drank a lot. So yeah, that was what she turned into, but she was with her guy and I can only hope she was still happy.
But man, back in the day, she was a beauty queen. She was awesome. She was .... Jessie's Girl!
I know that in today's modern age of technology, putting together a fake video of an UFO is really an easy task. And often times, it is done. People now-days just shrug their shoulders at it and probably don't even give it a second thought. And why should they?
For skeptics of the 'ancient alien' theory, it's hard to convince that this stuff could be true because they are all like, "show me the proof". And yet, when you show it to them, they choose to continue living with their eyes (and minds) closed.
To write about extraterrestrials or even to put something of the topic in your paintings today, it probably means nothing, and or gets little to no reaction of any kind. But when you look at the paintings from the renaissance era, I'm inclined to believe that it means just a little bit more. It means a lot.
Back in the renaissance times, people took things a little more serious. They took life a lot more serious and they explored each and everyday for new discoveries of any kind.
Looking up in the sky was probably their "television" time because there was probably nothing else to do very much what with iphones and ipads not having been invented yet. And I'm pretty sure they spent countless hours looking up at the sky at night to watch the stars. That and their imaginations were probably 90% of their entertainment.
Imagine how their imaginations flowed when they saw something that flew across the sky and maneuvered like it was being operated by some kind of intelligence. I bet they were so shocked and mystified that they wrote it down and documented the experience. Maybe even, they painted pictures of what they saw or what was told to them that others may have seen.
Many would write this off as exactly that, imaginations gone wild, but before you lock and load that explanation into your brain, consider this, back then, when people wrote something down, it was something of major importance. Back then, when maybe a hard stone or cave wall was your canvas, you didn't rely on imagination to create a fantasy. Nor when they first developed a form of paper, it was not something they would waste. Nor canvas. Oh, no, the writers and the artists of the time did not waste their skills much on doodling. They were more into capturing the world around them. And I believe this also includes the things they saw in the sky.
What impresses me the most about these drawings and paintings is, how these flying discs look like what we perceive them to look like also. But back then, the word 'discs' or 'UFO' just wasn't in their vocabulary yet. I mean, back then, the word 'car' or 'truck' or 'airplane' were not in their vocabulary. They used the words that were in their vocabulary which was things like, 'chariot', or 'cart' or maybe 'dragon', or something close to that.
Skeptics will continue to say that these UFO images were inserted into the painting(s) by the artist(s) for "effect" purposes only. I disagree with this assertion. Clearly, these artists were trying to express what it was that they saw and or experienced with their own eyes.
More and more researchers, scientists and ancient alien enthusiasts are coming to the conclusion that there are deep meanings behind these drawings and paintings, leading more and more of them to believe that we have been visited by traveler's from other planets and galaxies. It also leads many to concur that our early ancestors came in direct contact and perhaps were influenced by extraterrestrial beings. To this day, no one has ever given a reasonable explanation for why these flying discs were included into these paintings. Were our ancestors capturing events that were taking place accurately? Were they trying to leave something behind for future generations to see? Or are these paintings nothing more than artists using their artistic license to create, and stir up, controversy? Or were they just plain nuts? ..... You decide. I have already made my decision.
I think the best job in the world would have to be being a librarian. I'm not quite sure how much they get paid, maybe minimum wage, maybe more, but be that as it may, whatever they are getting paid, it's too much. It's too much because it looks so easy to do. I mean, you loan a book out and do some computer work. When people return books, you log them back in, put them on a cart and then at some time later, roll the cart down the book aisle and put the books back on the proper shelves. Easy peasy lemon squeezey.
I'm actually sitting in a library right now, as I write this. It's the day after the Super Bowl and I got a headache, the runs, and I'm coming off of a wicked dream. I dreamed that a girl I know from the internet came to visit me. She didn't visit me at my home, but instead, at an Internet Addiction Center. lol Yeah, I know, right?
Anyhow, we made out a little and then she left. As I walked back into the center, heading for my room area, I found out my very expensive silkish towels were missing. Apparently, the staff helped themselves, Those things cost 20 bucks each. I was furious. I mean, I was furious!
Then I woke up.
The reason I am sitting in a library and writing this post is, I have come to a place of extreme boredom in my life where every day is virtually the same day as before. (Ground-Hog's Day!) And I wanted to change things up for a little while, so I had my internet connection removed and now if I want to get online, I go to the library, or I hook up with my laptop off of someone elses wireless. I also decided to lighten my load a bit and sell, give away, or trash most of, if not all of, the junk in my home. I got too much crap!
Well, I had too much crap. It's starting to dwindle down a bit. I sold my desktop, along with my printer. I sold some other electronics like one of my stereos. I sold my collection of porn. (Now you know I mean business). I sold more of my DVD's. Everything goes!
Well, not everything. But I ask myself, do I use it? Do I need it? Do I want it? And if the answer to all three are NO, then it goes. One YES, and I keep it.
I don't know why I am doing this, I just am. Too much clutter is bad for the soul.
Finally though, my life has gotten back to normal somewhat. I mean, people haven't been bugging me much lately for an autograph or anything. I like my life better when nobody knows who I am. I never wanted to be famous, but the Goodreads bullies threw me to the world. The only thing I could do was ride the wave. I mean, if it is destiny that I be famous, then why fight it? But fortunately for me, the bullies finally stopped, for now, and I get to drift back into obscurity where I thrive a lot better.
And while I never wanted to be famous, I do want my work to be known. I want my work to be more famous than me. If I wanted the glory, I wouldn't have used a pen name to begin with. Although, inside my pen name lies my real name so, it's a quagmire. (I'm a quagmire).
The point is, I am a lot happier when everything is quiet. Right now, everything is quiet.
I enjoyed what little snow we got thus far. Back in January, when we finally got hit, I got snowed in with the 14 year old daughter of a very good friend of mine. We survived the two day ordeal. It was actually kind of fun. Then a few weeks later, on a Saturday, we went to Columbus to look at some artwork. And coming up this early Spring, she and I will take a week to ten days to travel the east coast to look at some lighthouses. Sounds like fun. She's an aspiring artist and she loves lighthouses. She wants to start painting them, and she thinks if she were to actually see them with her own eyes, and take her own pictures, her artwork will be better for it.
She may have a point.
One thing though, she also writes poetry and she wants to write songs too. She's learning the play the piano. Sometimes she drops by and practices on my keyboard. She's a great kid. I have known her and her family for eight years at least. I've watched her grow up. I guess she is like my adopted daughter. But it's an awesome feeling knowing that she was inspired by my work. (That's what she claims). It's quite an honor to be credited for inspiring someone to get involved in the arts. I hope she sticks with it.
Health front: Everything is going smoothly. My health is fine. My mother has finally gotten her problems fixed. My nephew gave us a scare recently. Other than that, not much happening in the health watch area.
I will leave you all with this thought. "The Super Bowl halftime show kind of sucked."
Please retire Peyton Manning. Seriously, just retire already. It's time.
