one out of... eight... ain't... so bad?

Here is my eggplant and tomato germination setup:

South-facing windowsill, with a fuzzy athletic heating pad (hey, germinating is athletic work for a little seed) from CVS to keep them at the cozy 75-80F preferred soil temperature. On the right you can see the tomatoes shooting up sprouts all over the place. 7 out of 8 tomatoes are reaching for the light. On the left are some conspicuously inactive squares of dirt. No, those are not mud-pie brownies I made out of frustration with my (currently broken) oven. It's eggplant, doing not much of anything despite my coddling them with cozy heating pads. But wait, what's that I see?

We have an eggplant! It may be only 4 mm high, but baby, it's ALIVE and GROWING. Of course, the other 7 cubes of dirt are still doing a whole lot of nothing, but the tomatoes came up slowly over a week, so I still have hopes for the other eggplant seeds. Did I mention I've replanted the eggplant seeds three times? I had read conflicting information (conflicting "rules" are the special fun of being a gardener) regarding the correct depth at which to plant eggplant seeds--some say 1/4 inch, some say a bare dusting of soil, others say consistent heat is the most important thing--and so I ended up hedging my bets and planting seeds at three different depths. Unfortunately, I do not know which depth this seedling came up from, so there's a lovely science experiment opportunity missed.
Here is what I'm hoping my aubergine will resemble:

Seeds, again, ordered through Seeds from Italy. These babies take 80 days to fruit, so I'm hoping for a long summer.  

Edit: There are now three eggplant seedlings! I wish more had germinated, but now I know better how to plant them, for next year.