is there any more pie?

Marriage is never easy.

Some of you know this.  You know who you are.  (Hint:  you are wearing wedding rings.)

Here is my story:   The Mystery of the Missing Beans.

Feel free to have an opinion in the Comments section.

Brief backstory:  Banjo Man is a health fanatic.  He eats a lot of beans.  He eats enough beans to explain that new mysterious ring around Saturn.

Two weekends ago I invited some friends over for a casual Saturday night dinner.  We were to have a black bean-pineapple chili in the crock pot and catch up with each others’ lives.

Unfortunately a snowstorm happened and we postponed the gathering until this past Friday night.

I had assembled the ingredients (2 cans of black beans, 1 can of fire-roasted tomatoes, 1 can of crushed pineapple, and assorted spices) on the kitchen island but had not put them in the crock pot.  So I left them huddled together on the island for the following Thursday night, when I would assemble them for Friday’s dinner.  I was going to be out of the house running errands most of Friday and needed to have the crock pot ready to go first thing Friday morning.

But when I went to make the chili, the two cans of black beans were missing.  I wondered if, in a strange fit of cleanliness, I had put them back where they belonged.  I looked through the upstairs pantry.  I searched all through the downstairs pantry.  There was one can of black beans in the downstairs pantry, a can that had been there originally (I had taken two of the three cans upstairs the week before).

I asked Banjo Man:  Did you eat the black beans that were on the island???

I ate one of them, he said.  In my salad.

There were two cans, I said.  Now there aren’t any.

I only ate one can, he insisted.  He was starting to get huffy.

I got huffy in return.  There were two cans.  Now there are no cans.  You must have eaten two cans.  No one else has been in this kitchen!  No one else has eaten the beans!

NO, I DIDN’T.

Now here’s where things deteriorated.  I want you all to understand I didn’t care that he ate the beans.  I could buy more beans, even though it was going to mean going to the grocery store during holiday havoc/traffic/bad weather.  Buying beans and/or eating beans was not the issue.  Beans are cheap and plentiful.  Aside from the inconvenience of the grocery store (and yes, I am abnormal in my hatred of going there) I harbor no resentment about the beans having been eaten.

Here’s what made me crazy:  Banjo Man wouldn’t admit that there was even a remote possibility that he ate both cans of beans and didn’t remember it!!!!

Where else could the beans have gone???????

He eats salads the size of small homesteads.  Every day.  How could he remember one can, two cans, three cans of beans?

Just admit it, Banjo Man.

The beans didn’t walk off the counter.  I didn’t eat them.  I didn’t move them.  They are nowhere in the house.

As Sherlock Holmes once said, “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.”