I’m supposed to be writing a paper on narrative and expository text comprehension instruction which sounds super fun, but I’m feeling rebellious. I think I’ll talk about my battle with the eggs instead.

This weekend there is a large conference involving many teenagers and requiring a great deal of food. I should interject that no one in their right mind would ask me to cook for anything important, but I was asked to crack eggs which could probably be done by a trained monkey so I figured I couldn’t get into too much trouble.

I’m in, how many do we need?

“20 dozen”

That’s a lot of eggs.

Having fed my family for decades, I consider myself a veteran egg cracker but any scientist will tell you that when you expand the sample you’re bound to run into outliers, mishaps . . . and possibly disasters of biblical proportions. How do we know Noah’s flood wasn’t experiment 5,900,612 +/- in God/human causal relationships? It might also explain why the cord on my lamp only causes cancer in California, which I don’t understand at all. But I digress. I had been given my mission and I headed to Costco where eggs are sold in institutional quantities.

Naturally, cracking 20 dozen eggs takes a little advance planning. Once I had all the flats stacked on my counter, I laid out all my supplies: scissors to cut the plastic wrap, a big green bowl to catch the shells, and gallon-sized Ziplock bags which a little kindergarten math told me should hold 2.5 dozen each to make it all come out slick and even. I also hunted up a stainless steel bowl large enough yet small enough to hold the cracked eggs, yet still fit into the mouth of the Ziplock bags without the infernal side splash that tends to occur when you try to pour from a fixed round bowl into an amorphous, shifting plastic hole that could be a triangle or a square depending on how its feeling. I’ve thought of everything, what could go wrong?

The first five bags went off without a hitch; 12.5 dozen eggs safely delivered from their shells, yokes (mostly) intact and floating in the clear, sticky fluid that cooks white and made me gag as a child. I was totally humming, finished in no time.

Then there was bag six.