disaster averted

On Saturday evening, I noticed a bit of ice pulling away from the "ceiling" of our upright freezer, but didn't think much of it because we had been in and out of it a bit that day. First thing Sunday morning, however, it was clearly apparent that the freezer had died - ice on the shelves was melting and the freezer was making no sounds at all. With only a few things we could check ourselves, we called around looking for someone to come out but failed to find anyone available. Chris moved things around to pack in the dog/cat food together to retain temperature, moved as much as would fit into the garage fridge's freezer, and moved the human food upstairs into our main fridge freezer, but there was still four full crates of dog food (160lbs total) and at least 12 bags of cat food (72lbs total) left in the freezer. Oh, if I had only "gotten a round tuit" and bought the temperature sensor for the freezer like I had meant to since we brought it home in October - we might've known early on Saturday of its demise!

With nothing more to do yesterday but wait, we put the worry aside and enjoyed our last evening together with my mother and sister, including flyball practice and a trip to Burgermaster. This morning we took them to the airport at 8:30am, and on our way home we were called Seattle Home Appliance (Bothell) and they had a technician who could come out later this morning to look at the unit. After a quick stop at both Home Depot and the SHA store itself, both to scope out replacement options, we picked up some dry ice at QFC to help hold over the meat in the freezer and returned home. Interestingly, you must be 18 or older to purchase dry ice, which greatly amused both of us.

The wonderful technician from SHA showed up before lunchtime, and was able to repair our freezer! There was an issue with a bit of wiring, and he was able to patch it out and get the freezer running again for just a moment - the dry ice had done its job all too well, causing the temperature to drop to -10 inside the unit itself, so that the freezer immediately turned back off due to the cold. We are monitoring it, and expect it to be running on its own power sometime late tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on how quickly the dry ice burns off. Most importantly, we are out far less than the cost of replacing the freezer or replacing the compressor, and of course the expense of replacing 240lbs of meat without a bulk purchase group. That is a relief!

A much smaller failure occured early last week when I killed our small Cuisinart rice cooker, as it has always had trouble cooking rice for more than two people and I overdid it with rice for four. In its place we now have a shiny new Zojirushi fuzzy logic rice cooker, which can make several kinds of rice, has a pressure-cooker seal to keep it from boiling over (huge messes were the signature of the old one), and can even cook via timer. I'm excited to use it for the first time later this week, and if the quality of our Zojirushi water kettle is any indication we will be happily using it for years to come.

And now, I'd like a quiet day with no drama.....although in a way, the house is almost -too- quiet with only us and our own critters here now.....