Oh yes, I can totally understand that. I don't even use the eeprom on the RTC pcb 
as I don't want to "consume" it by mistake. I just use a breadboarded one.
Writing on EEPROM should only be called once if it is enough.
I'm just switching pins on and off so it really doesn't matter. But I want to get familiar with flags as I always wondered if I have something in loop and I need it to have a delay, then it would delay the whole loop so that's not always good.