Whew. Am glad today is finally over!

  I was awakened this morning by a certain new puppy whining outside the bedroom door. I foolishly thought she wanted to go outside. She only wanted company, she had already peed and pooped on my carpet. Sigh...To add insult to injury, it was only 4:45.  Needless to say, I am bushed tonight at 11:45 ! This is the picture the sun came up to while I was sitting on the front porch in my rocking chair with the dogs . I guess I need to put water in the birdbath! lol (And yes-I have a rocking chair. 2 of them, in fact, on my front porch.)

  I woke the Irishman up at 5:15 because he wasn't up yet. Curiously enough, he had apparently forgotten to set his alarm. (Thank you, Bella)  I made him breakfast and we ate and he left for work around 6:30. By 7 AM, I was out back in the garden picking beans, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. By 8:30, I was sitting in front of a mountain of green beans, nipping and cleaning them to get ready to can.  I canned over 30 pints of green beans today and 6 quarts too.  I took the last batch out of the canner at 7:30 PM, just as we were getting ready to eat supper. We grilled a couple of the filets I had in the freezer, I cooked up a bunch of baby sweet potatoes in the bottom of the box from last year, and sauteed fresh green beans, summer squash, onion, and whole garlic in olive oil and butter.  I was starving. And exhausted.
 Here are some of  the fruits of my labor of love:

  Am thinking of setting up a summer kitchen out in the studio. A friend has an electric stove she wants to get rid of, and it would be great to have somewhere to do some of this stuff so that it doesn't overtax my air conditioning like it did today. Having 3 burners on (lids and bands, tea kettle, and canner) creates a lot more heat than you would think. Something I'm thinking about anyway....

When I was a kid, we lived in an old Victorian house that had a summer kitchen. It also had a smokehouse.  The house itself had turrets and an attic bedroom and was very cool, like an old castle.

We are going to dinner and a movie tomorrow night with some friends. It will be nice to get out and socialize, not to mention eating at my favorite Chinese place and getting to see the new Tom Hanks movie--Larry Crowne.  I'm really looking forward to it.

  They said tonight on the news that the heat wave is coming back.  We just had 2 whole days where the temps were reasonable...only in the high 80's.  lol  Makes me think of the way they jimmy the gas prices up and down and now we feel blessed when we have gasoline for ONLY 3.69/gallon. Anyway, there's a heat advisory starting Sunday night at 5PM that is supposed to last until the following Friday. There have already been 2 deaths from the heat around these parts.  Scary.

  Alrighty...I am going to bed here in a minute.  I feel like I have been whipped, lol. I also got some laundry done and some floors vacuumed and so tomorrow should be a pretty easy day. Unless I decide to make jalapeno jelly.  (I do have kind of a lot of peppers out there....)

Sweet dreams, y'all.  Gabi--I am so glad to see you back blogging. Love ya, girl!

Namaste.