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2011-07-27

A broken refrigerator is a pain in the cooler space

Yeah so the refrigerator's motor went kaputski. Bloody hell.

Luckily for us, our landlord is a cool dude and paid for a repair guy to come over and say it's not worth repairing, and he's buying us a new fridge, and he asked if we had a color preference. Of course I said black.

I dunno if it was the second hot day of this Seattle summer, or what. But the fridge is 11 years old and the motor is old and there are several things broken on it, like the relay and the thermostat. One of the parts needed is currently unavailable, and the repair guy said it would take four weeks of research to even find the goddam thing. How that works is beyond me. I could probably find it in a day, but whatever.

When we realized it had broken, our ice cream had already mostly melted. Megan had made a delicious fruit crisp. We waited until the kids were in bed before digging into it, in order to keep Lucy's sugar intake low. She already eats enough graham crackers in a given day.

I serve up some fruit crisp into our two respective parental bowls. It's lookin sweet. I break out the ice cream. Take off the top. Put the spoon in. There's no resistance. It's like spooning out thick milk. Eww. Fear fills me. I check out the rest of the food in the fridge and freezer. It's all warm. Dread fills me.

After some troubleshooting, we found the fridge wasn't gonna turn back on for nothing. The light was still on inside, so it wasn't an electrical issue. I looked behind the thing, but what do I know about fridge motors? It wasn't running and I wasn't about to take it apart, especially when the food is already getting warm.

I made an emergency run to the store and bought three bags of ice. Not what I wanted to be doing with my evening, when the kids were in bed and it was supposed to be time to relax. We're fortunate to live so close to Whole Foods. I come home, transfer all the food to the cooler that would fit, and dump in the ice. 

We left the freezer full, cause the sheet of ice that had been living on the ceiling in there had dislodged and was sitting on top of the food, keeping it cold enough for the time being. There were still many, many bags of breast milk in there, still frozen, but sweating. I had already informed the landlord about the situation, and I texted him to ask if we could use his freezer for the breast milk.

Well, I think that was a pretty powerful request, throwing in breast milk and all, cause he came home from "grilling in the sun," as he said, to help us out. And he was friendly as all hell. Thanks, Kav. You fucking rule. It's so nice having an understanding landlord. He's not overworked with tenant responsibilities, either, cause we're his first and only tenants. He just bought this house a few years ago, and he's around our age.

We put all the food that wouldn't fit in the cooler in his fridge and freezer downstairs. He even gave me a spare key to his place, so we could get in and get food out of there when we needed.

This all happened two days ago. Yesterday was the first full day of having food in the cooler. It's a pretty big pain in the ass, having to replenish the ice, dump out the water, and basically not have a fridge.

And then guess what happened. Go on, guess. How could our troubles be compounded in a really annoying way?

I lost the key.

GaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAHH!!! Blood spurt out bloody murder!

I don't know if I misplaced it, or if Lucy grabbed it, but now we have no way to get downstairs, cause Kav is a working man and he's not home very often. We looked high and low for it yesterday, to no avail.

But, the new fridge is scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a big black monolith, but at this point I'd take the ugliest taupe fridge available, cause it'd be better than storing all our cold food in a goddam camping cooler.

In other news, my kids are both getting bigger and developing in new and interesting ways every day. It's never boring around here. I took Lucy to the park today for a few hours, and had some great conversations with other parents and grandparents and their kids. I showed a little boy how to brush pebbles and dirt off his hands by wiping them on his shirt and pants. And I almost fell down once.

I've been playing a lot of Stardust HD and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on my PS3. Both cool games that my brother hooked me up with. I don't play Resident Evil 5 when Lucy's awake. I try not to, anyway. When I do, she likes to say, "He fell down," whenever I blow a zombie away. Lord help her when she comes to understand what guns and death are. Maybe she'll like death metal more then ... . Oh, and she loves the Fallout: New Vegas theme song.


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