Whew… finally got my chocolate mint all harvested last week and hung all over the kitchen and utility room to dry. Also got all the bell peppers frozen, the hot banana peppers canned, 18 pints of salsa canned (two have already been eaten), and the blueberry bushes planted (with a LOT of help from my wonderful, strong hubby!). Can’t wait until next year to try the blueberries in a smoothie. At least I think I can pick some berries next year. Anyway, the challenge now is to keep them alive, and safe from bunnies and deer.

While the apple harvest was slim this year, we still managed to gather a couple of good-sized boxes of usable apples with the help of some friends.  Already made two caramel apple pies – one for us and one for a good friend.  Yuuummmm!  God is good, His bounty is gracious!

This year Rick also decided he wanted to plant red kidney beans. How cool is that?!  We’ve never tried anything like that before. They grow like peas in a pod, and when it’s time to harvest them you split the pod and remove the beans. He had them laid out on a screen in the garage for quite a while, but Iowa summers tend to be a little too humid for drying beans outside. We finally brought them in and put them in the dehydrator. As they dried, they shrank, so for two days I listened to them falling through the little spaces in the dehydrator like coins dropping into a piggy bank. Yesterday was our first sample of the beautiful red beans.
I made a big old pot of chili. And when I say big…  the chili recipe I’ve always followed calls for two cans of chili beans, which equals 29 oz. My first lesson was that 29 oz. of dried beans equals about 62 oz. after soaking. 😛  This is OK. I just doubled my already big batch and decided to freeze some. Look at that – I’m already ahead by having some chili in the freezer. I also used some of the tomatoes from our own garden, as well as tomato juice that I made earlier in the summer and froze. Rick thinks the home-juiced tomatoes have a distinct (translation – unpleasant) taste. I, personally, couldn’t taste whatever it was he was tasting.

Thursday was a hectic day at work. Someone called in sick and I was left to run the front desk primarily on my own. In the middle of taking special Inter-Library Loan requests, checking in and out books, and searching for a Barbie-sized picture of King Tut’s sarcophagus for a little gal to use with her school project (dad said she was going to mummify a Barbie – yikes!), I managed to get a virus on one of the desk computers. When I called our local computer guy, he chuckled and told me I might as well just unplug it and bring it in to be fixed. Sigh…  Bless his heart, he had that computer in and out of his shop within an hour and a half! No small feat as his shelf was lined with computers waiting to be fixed. Apparently we aren’t the first to contract this virus.

Oh, and I forgot to mention in my last blog… I’m once again a published writer! This article is more what I envisioned doing in high school – news of a political nature. Here’s the link:  http://endtimesupdate.com/pakcollapse.htm