Eggs Benedict

I think Eggs Benedict is one of the best low-brow fancy meals. Poaching eggs and making hollandaise both require better than average cooking skill. It’s just hard enough to do right that you can really impress your friends if you can pull it off.

I’m at Slim’s (of course) finishing a plate of Eggs Benedict with hash browns. The best part of this dish is slicing the eggs open just right, so that the molten yolk runs down into the hash browns. Now each bite of crispy shredded potato is drenched in rich yellow goodness. Eggs Benedict looks beautiful on the plate, but becomes a horrid disaster after even the first bite. You have to commit. You can’t linger over this dish. You can’t idly pick at it like nachos. You have to dig in now or it will get cold and ruined.

I am here trying to take advantage of a quiet Saturday morning to do some writing. I’ve brought my new “computer” prescription glasses and I hate how well they work. My normal walking-around glasses have progressive lenses with a reading, medium, and distance vision zones. But apparently that’s not enough for my old-man eyes. So now I have a second pair of glasses which allow me to focus on that odd desktop distance where your monitor would be. And dammit they work great. If they didn’t work I could blame science or the eye doctor, but the fact that they do work, and work well, means that my stupid eyes are the problem. It’s 2024 why can’t I get new eyes?

I’m hoping to indulge in a rare dry winter day in Portland to finally clean up the yard after months of wet weekends. Wet or busy. I’ve been working a lot of weekends lately. My team is down three people thanks to new babies. Therefore, I have spent several Saturdays coding. This is strangely, OK? I can’t reliably get this work done during the week, thanks to meetings, and other duties. So I code on the weekends. I’ve been working on some big updates to a pair of mobile apps that my company supports. The updates have finally shipped. My shoulders are lighter. It has not been as smooth of a process as I would have liked, but the apps are in their app stores doing their job.

Writing code for an app, a website, or a little dumb script to a job is such a rewarding process. Type a little code, save, build, reload, and there are your changes coming to life. It’s like a slow form of telekinesis. You think a thing, write it down, and it becomes something. It’s remarkable. I find it sits somewhere between painting and writing. When painting I see something, either in front of me or in my mind’s eye, and make it real with my hands. When I’m writing my fingers race across a keyboard to record my thoughts as I think them. If you read my written thoughts, those thoughts become your thoughts. Telepathy at scale.

Coding does both of these things. Being forced by circumstance to dive back in and try to do a good job at it has been strangely rewarding, if a little tiring.