Thursday, September 13, 2007

Out of the Deep Freeze

When we were preparing to take our daughter Katie to college about a month ago, I was panicked with the thought all through preparations that I also desperately needed to defrost the freezer--it was already way overdue and if we left it, we were afraid it would frost to the point where it wouldn't stay shut. The freezer would freeze at the top first and there was always a patch of ice that would increasingly protrude across the top where it met with the door, sometimes hindering its closing ability.
So after almost everything else was done, I resignedly started the horrible process of removing everything (it's a huge freezer and I had it packed full) and then trying to get all the ice to melt. Well, finally we ran out of time and really had to get going on our trip. I stuffed everything back in even though only about half of the ice was removed. I thought this would get us through the week and I could deal with the rest of it later.
Well, it was not to be. When we got back, it had frosted back up, all the way to the point where the door had propped itself open and could not be shut. I'm not sure exactly how this happened, unless I actually didn't shut the door as well as I thought. We even had some boxes that I was in the habit of propping against it as a safeguard, but they weren't sufficient. I think there's some principle of having all that wet ice cooling down and refreezing that may have made it so bad.
Anyway, we had to throw almost all of the food out. I did salvage some blueberries that were still embedded in ice, and not much else. It was a big loss but also almost a freeing relief when we decided not to continue using the freezer. It's one less thing to be bad at managing! The bigger the freezer, the better the steward you must be in order not to lose half of the food at the back, less-reachable and less-visible areas. I was not very good at this.
Now I'm finding I buy less groceries. I can only fill our fridge and limited freezer at the side of it, and for the three of us, I think it may be nearly perfect. The biggest I might go is that when we replace this refrigerator (soon; there are signs of wear), we might put it in the garage for some light-duty beverage holding etc. and the freezer would turn into my surplus freezer for fruit and whatnot. Still, it would be such a lot better than trying to manage that huge box freezer! So less is more, or more is less, or something like that.