Green Bean Hell and Eggs

THIS GUY - is not my friend.

This guy and all his ‘ Homies ‘ I’ve been finding - shouldda taken a different road - to somebody else’s garden.

This guy - and several of his ‘ Homies ‘ - no longer exist.  Maybe now my tomatoes - pole beans and jalapeno peppers can live in peace - until I pinch 'em.

I’ve been saying that the past several days have been a trip to ‘ Green Bean Hell ’ around here.  Had I been watching them daily - once the flowers arrived - they would have taken forever to get ready for harvesting.

I planted a few extra plants this year.  And I didn’t stand around holding my breath.  They came in much earlier than expected.

I harvested - cleaned - blanched - and bagged up 13 packages - by myself - on Tuesday.

Come Wednesday - I got back out there and picked a few more in the morning - while Dwayne slept for a few hours after coming in from work.

He climbed out of bed and headed out to the garden with me - after having a half-chance to catch his bearings and wake up.

By the time we came in that evening - we walked in and discovered we were without air conditioning.

We’ve experienced several off/on/surge power outages on a daily basis over the past few days - no thanks to the insanely high temps and humidity.  And having no air conditioning - after the last few hours we'd just endured - did not leave us too pleased.

And - we had all these green beans - besides the ones crammed in the kitchen sink.  Left these in the bathtub to keep them crunchy until we could deal with them in the early morning - while it was still somewhat cool inside the house.

( See the brick?  We don't use this tub for anything but showers - and I forgot - no plug!  I stuffed plastic sandwich wrap in the drain and put the brick there to hold it down. )

We ended up rushing like crazy - getting up early Wednesday morning to get these puppies dealt with before it got way too hot - and before all the consumption of power from the temperatures started causing more of the off/on/surge power outages.  Had laundry and a few other absolutely necessary things - which also required use of electricity - that I handled in between - whenever I could.

We didn’t finish bagging green beans before having to close all the windows in the house.  We opened up the door to the basement.  Set up an Oscillating Fan down at the bottom of the stairs to shoot the cool air up to us.  LOL


The air conditioning repairmen didn’t show up until after 3:30pm. 

We got lucky.  The capacitator had gone out.  All the power problems of late are suspected as being responsible for causing that problem.  And we were running a little low on Freon.  We got off very lucky - less than $200.00!

By then - we had put 27 more bags of green beans in the chest freezer.  We took showers - loaded up the truck with supplies - drove to Louisville - and met Casey and Stacey for some night fishing.

I didn’t catch a thing.  It was after midnight by the time we got back to the dock.  We had a 45 minute drive to get back home.

Casey didn’t wanna clean the 7 Crappie - so he sent them home with us.  Dwayne found eggs in one of them while he was cleaning.

If you know anything about fish - especially Crappie - you know that there should be no eggs in June.

I dunno - between the weather we had last year - as well as TVA messing with the water levels during spawning season - it looks like the bio clocks on all the fish are just totally jacked up.

It was a shock of a surprise to us both - that would have to wait until morning for discussion.

It was already 3am.