Still Alive with Black Olives and Missing Tupperware Lids

Yes, I'm still alive, but the busyness of summer has invaded my life. Between graduation parties, weddings and various other weekend commitments along with weeding, planting, weeding, yard cleaning, weeding, shed cleaning and more weeding, it seems I've had little time for anything else. However I'm still alive.... busy, busy, but alive.

Sooo, anyway.... I've developed a bit of an addiction to black olives. For the past few months I have been doing my best to eat well, which means I eat lots of salad. The two luxuries I allow myself are unsalted peanuts and black olives. Tonight I had to open a new can of black olives and it seems it's always the same thing..... I grab a tupperware container to store them in and I can never find a matching lid! How is this possible??? It seems like I clean out the tupperware collection every other week. I throw away containers with no lids and lids with no containers and still I end up with missing pieces!!! While frustratingly pondering the tupperware mystery, another question popped into my head... Why is it that green olives come nicely packaged in jars (allowing them to be stored just as they are), and yet black olives come in cans (requiring tupperware storage... grrr)? I decided it would be best to tackle the tupperware mystery another day and I proceeded to look up the answer to my olive question. Much to my surprise, I found out that I'm not the only one asking this question. I found a great site that gives an interesting and detailed answer. I'll just give you the short of it... apparently all olives start out green, it's just that green olives have been picked before they ripen, if they were left on the tree to fully ripen, they would turn black or purple. However, nobody's making any money sitting around waiting for olives to turn black naturally, so they ripened them artificially. It's the artificial ripening process that requires them to be packed in cans because glass jars could not withstand the process. For anyone who's interested in reading the full story, here's a link to the site I found:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2885/why-is-it-that-green-olives-come-in-glass-jars-but-black-olives-come-in-cans

So there you have it, the answer to that question that's been nagging you for years. Well, at the very least you'll have something to talk about at your next summer function :)