Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Refrigeration - The Saga Continues

I don't think I've blogged about our refrigerator woes much, but my friends will tell you that is all I talk about these days. When our house was built, over 100 years ago, it did not have electricity. Thus, no refrigerator (as we know them today). Well, I feel like going back to the "ice box" if only there was someone to deliver the ice to me. I am SURE it would be easier than dealing with the refrigerators I have or don't have now.

Here is some background to why I am wasting a veganmofo post on refrigeration...

1. Our really not old at all (bought approximately seven years ago) refrigerator has been dying a slow painful death over the last year. Not cooling properly in the refrigerator part, but the freezer seemed to be fine. We called the place we bought the refrigerator for service.

2. The service calls were near impossible to set up. We even went into the store once to talk to a real person and they gave us another number to call. They couldn't set anything up for us. We finally have someone come out and long story short...three service calls and two technicians later they think they have fixed our refrigerator. This was over MONTHS. They knew they hadn't fixed it the first time and told us to take the back off and have a fan blow on the back to keep it running.

3. All of this was happening during the drought and heat that will forever be known as the Midwestern US Summer of 2012 or "the summer than convinced people that something really is going on with Earth's climate". We live in a house without A/C so we shove everything in the refrigerator during the summer (I wish I could live in there at times) or it will spoil immediately. For awhile we had several coolers in our dining room holding our perishables. It was not a pretty summer in our house.

4. At some point in all these service calls, we went to another local appliance center to buy a new refrigerator. The one we really liked was not even in stock yet. It would be in stock in October. Just several weeks away at the time so we went ahead and ordered (and paid for) the refrigerator. They offered to have their service people come out and look at our half-working refrigerator or we could have a loaner. We took the loaner since we still hoping the other guys would come through with a fix and if they didn't, we weren't up for spending more on the old piece of compost appliance.

5. The loaner refrigerator is almost my height and I am not tall. It is small. No problem, we'll make due for a few short weeks. Well, not only is it small with non-working produce drawers (we're vegan, we need produce drawers), but it also freezes everything in the refrigerator part. Half frozen tofu, frozen leftovers, frozen relish for the sake of all that is holy! It is a loaner and beggars can't be choosers. We were going on vacation for 10 days and all would be better when we arrived home. The non-loaner refrigerator was supposed to be repaired at this point, but I did take most of the food out of it when we left for vacation.

6. Good call because the refrigerator was pretty much non-working when we arrived back from the beach. No worries, it is almost October. I call to make sure the brand spanking new dream refrigerator is still on schedule since we paid for it a while ago. Well, now it seems that the manufacturer would really like to get this refrigerator right and doesn't want a sub-standard model hit the showroom floors so we are looking at November. Not the salesman's fault. I get that. I was in retail for a good portion of my teens and early twenties. We still have the loaner and the freezer still freezes on the piece of @&*$%  refrigerator that has now cost us several hundred dollars, yet does not really work. No point it calling the repair guy and throwing good money after bad (what the heck does that mean anyway???).

7. I open up the freezer (the only "working" part of this big hulking waste of Earth's resources taking up room in my kitchen) to find everything covered in frost. This, my friends, is not a good sign. So right then and there in my now October weather kitchen (meaning it was about 55 degrees). I decided to kick the refrigerator to the curb and take everything out. This meant cleaning out our little "extra" standalone freezer (yes all these cooling appliances and a washer and dryer plus normal kitchen stuff lives in our kitchen) which was long overdue since I had to chip the ice off the sides (shhh, don't tell Rob...he said I should just let it melt lest I break the freezer).

I feel so much better with some organization to my freezing madness. Everything fits in the freezer in the little refrigerator and our extra little chest freezer with room to fit this month's buying club order. We clearly need to eat through some Indian flat bread from the right top picture and two big bags of shredded coconut in the bottom picture. Now off to search for vegan Indian recipes with coconut. We still don't have a working refrigerator (the loaner still freezes everything), but November is right around the corner...

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