Sunday, December 28, 2008

Welcome to the Rolling Cooler Diet

OK. It's not really a diet. It's just where we'll be eating from for the next two or three days. Our forty-two month old fridge decided to take a dive. Actually, it started with the freezer. The compressor started making a noise the week before Christmas. I mentioned it to my husband, but he said that was normal. I didn't think so. Then right before Christmas it got louder. Then we noticed that the ice maker had stopped working. Then we noticed that some of the frozen food was getting soft.

On Christmas night, we decided we would call on Monday to schedule a repair visit. We should not have waited.

We came home from dinner last night to a big puddle of water around the fridge. Some of the thawing food had melted into the ice maker door chute. We cleaned it up as best we could, and made an action plan. In the morning we would get a bunch of ice and salvage what we could from the freezer. The fridge itself seemed like it might still be working, but we knew that it was at risk as well. Plus, the repairman might need the whole thing emptied out.

This morning, I purged the freezer. What a scary task that was. It was also depressing. I salvaged some of the food that was pricey and still in good condition. We have a huge rolling cooler. I filled it tight with semi-frozen/still-frozen food. I had a bag of ice and some cold packs that I placed on top. When Goblin got back from his morning class with ice, I put some in Ziploc bags and covered everything pretty well.

He got himself some breakfast, including a glass of milk. He noted that the milk was not as cold as it should have been.

This would happen on a long holiday weekend when our fridge/freezer have never been fuller. Plus, the outside temperature is in the fifties!!! Single digit temperatures would have really been appreciated at this point.

I doubt we can get a repairmen here before Tuesday. If the unit needs replaced we may not have a new one until the weekend.

So it goes. We'll be eating well for the next two days. Duck tonight. Salmon tomorrow night. Welcome to the Rolling Cooler Diet.

3 comments:

RaineS said...

sympathies -- we lost our stand-up freezer last month. Of course it was stocked to the gills, and we didn't discover the freezer was broken until after everything had thawed completely... I figure I pitched out about $300 worth of food. We got a smaller replacement, and I am trying not to overstock it.

Monkeys in Paris said...

Sounds the like the Rolling Cooler Diet may be one of the few that makes you gain weight versus lose it!

Summer said...

Just think of how neat your new freezer will be. No unidentifiable packages of frozen something.