Beans without gas

Another trip to the market last week, and I decided to go crazy and buy a different kind of beans. I'm not sure that the picture is doing justice to how lime green they are.


I'm not sure what they're called, and I'm not sure what the real difference is between these lime green beans and the purple ones I've been cooking with so far. They taste kind of the same to me, they're about the same size, they look remarkably similar except for color, and they certainly cook the same. At the market, after I decided that I wanted to try something new, I asked my friend, "what's the difference between the two?" After a flurry of Swahili between her and the seller, she translated the response: apparently the purple ones cause lots of gas, and the green ones only cause a little bit of gas. Sign me up.



This is a picture of my bathroom/shower. You'll notice the switches on the wall outside--the small one is for the light and the big one is for the water heater in my shower. Here's how the heater works: when you flip the switch it activates some gadget on the head of the shower that heats the water as it leaves the nozzle. If you turn it on before you've turned the water on, you get scalding steam--not fun. So, you have to turn the water on, then turn the switch on, then fiddle with the water so that the amount coming out doesn't overpower the amount of heat the gadget produces. You may also notice that the switches are quite some distance away from the door, which means that after you're done with your shower, you have to leave the water on, get out of the shower, reach around the doorframe dripping wet and cold, turn the heater off, then get back in the shower and turn off the water. It takes some skill. The point of this story is that this switch no longer works, and while I wait for it to be fixed, I get to sponge bathe in ice water in a drafty concrete room in 60 degree weather.

As a side note, the lemon soap is good at its word. I have used it for both laundry and personal hygiene and it works marvelously for both. Now I smell refreshingly like lemon, in addition to my laundry. I am hesitant to take it into the kitchen and use it (there's an odd mental block about using a single bar of soap to clean the sink, me, and my clothes) but I'm sure it would work just as well there.