Fridge of Death

The first month after Sydney was born, I crashed at my parents' house. They have cable. And people to talk to. I went back to my house a few times to get mail and such. One time when I went home after being gone about two weeks, the house had a strange smell. I thought maybe something in the trash or refrigerator had gone nasty. I opened the fridge and the smell hit me like the plague. I put my hand in and it was warm. Not cool. Actually warm. Every piece of everything was warm and moldy and smelly and putrid and there were bugs flying around. Then I opened the freezer and briefly lost consciousness after dry heaving in the family room. The freezer was 1000 times worse than anything I've ever smelled since it was full of various meat. My fridge had somehow completely died while I was gone.

I lack any sort of cleaning gloves so my de-grossing of the fridge consisted of one hand plugging my nose while the other hand was stuck inside a plastic grocery bag shoveling food into the trash as quickly as possible. My outside trash can was so heavy I almost couldn't roll it to the curb. Luckily I went home on trash day and the carnage was promptly removed from the premises. After cleaning everything out, the house still smelled like death so I plugged in my B&BW wallflowers and burned some candles and left the fan running on high. Later that day, I could still smell the food death in my nostrils. During the cleaning process, I kept Sydney upstairs with the fear that somehow e-coli could be airborn and she'd get sick from all the bacteria in the air. Jericho insisted that those types of food-born bacterium don't transfer through the air. But it still freaked me out.

I would have liked to take a picture of what it looked like inside the coffin of decaying food but there was no way I could keep the freezer open while plugging my nose and taking a picture.

Instead, I have pictures of what has come of my fridge self-destructing. 

Note the fluid residue in the freezer. There was a pool of blended ooze in that bottom drawer. The powder is baking soda. I think it helped some. Gun powder probably would have been better.

My borrowed mini-fridge. I felt like there should be beer in there instead of Diet Pepsi. The maple syrup and Hershey's products were the only survivors from the old fridge. Mainly because I didn't think they'd actually go bad from not being refrigerated. And because that's real maple syrup and costs more than a barrel of oil.

Behold, the new member of the kitchen family. Why didn't I just fix the old one? Well, since you asked. Friendly serviceman came out and determined the compressor busted and would be about an $800 fix. It's only about a $1000 refrigerator so we figured there wasn't much of a point since we knew we'd be getting a bigger better fridge at some point anyway. The sales lady at Best Buy couldn't believe that Whirlpool only had a one year warranty on the compressor. Finally she believed me when she pulled an owner's manual from one in the store. She then told me I should highly consider getting a better quality refrigerator. So lesson to you all out there, don't buy Whirlpool. Not merely for the fact that they don't warranty their compressors but because this fridge was only 14 MONTHS OLD! and it died. But the silver lining is that now I have this beautiful huge fridge and I got a really great deal. Take that Whirlpool!

Land of Enchantment

Have you ever seen the license plate for New Mexico? It says it's the "Land of Enchantment". For many years, I have wondered why in the world a desert state of the Southwest could be enchanting. I was there for one week and thought this was my chance to explain this mystery. Turns out, I didn't try too hard. I ended up spending most of my week taking pictures of this:

It was truly enchanting to spend a few days with Jericho after being apart for five weeks. I thought for sure this goodbye would have leveled me but it was much easier than the first goodbye when Sydney was only three days old. It helps that my life has balanced out a lot more since then. I cried tears of joy when I saw Jericho last week and managed not to cry at all when he left. I think we are both anxious for him to get going and start ticking off the days that he'll be back again. As for now, his two-week leave is scheduled for January sometime. My secret hope is that the government decides that they don't need their 300-soldier unit to stay in Kuwait come the new year and they'll decide to save money [imagine that!!] and send them all home for good in January. Wouldn't that be stellar? Let's all hope and pray for that one, shall we?

I'm grateful every day for Jericho and how much I love him. I love our relationship and feel so secure about everything even though we'll be apart for so long. And despite how this picture looks, Jericho really does love me too. He's been in Army mode for a month.