Fridge Day

In the days before CJ and I married, I lived in what we still call “the fungus house”. It came with a broken washing machine, broken oven, and without drinkable water. I supplied my own fridge – a bar fridge I’d bought off a student bulletin board for $50 – that didn’t quite freeze meat all the way through.

CJ and I acquired a new fridge for free when someone in our church community moved interstate. The seal was encrusted with something unidentifiable and black, and the glue holding the seal to the door had failed around the bottom, making it drag on the floor. It was dirty inside and out – so much so that it took me a long time to dare to clean it, and I only tried it once. Some things should not be looked at directly. But it DID safely freeze meat, so that was nice.

We discovered early on that milk stored in the door – or indeed anywhere near the front of the fridge – would go off. I also noticed that cheese stored near the back would go oddly soft. One day, in a fit of annoyance, I cut off the lower segment of the door seal and threw it away. That probably didn’t help.

I had my father-in-law look at the fridge, but it was beyond even his skill to heal.

But it didn’t end there. My parents-in-law had been planning to buy a new fridge for the kitchen renovations they’d done. Images of our dodgy fridge preyed on my OH&S-oriented father-in-law and their fridge-buying schedule suddenly sped up. . . leaving their old fridge free for the taking.

And we took it. Oh yes, my precious. We took their enormous side-by-side father-in-law-modified Westinghouse beauty, and we made it our own.

Last Saturday, as the midwife and Louisette and I discussed breastfeeding in Louisette’s room, various menfolk disposed of our old fridge and brought in THIS:

My mother-in-law even cleaned it for us. After three years of glorious marriage and hideous fridge, it’s enough to make one misty-eyed. I may have hugged the fridge once or twice, and I can’t help saying an affectionate hello every time I open the door.

Look inside! Look at the space! Look at the shiny whiteness of it all! Look at the milk sitting so prettily in the door! Look at the way all the most useful stuff is at the most useful possible height, so I don’t have to kneel and dig around to find it! We’ve set aside the top shelf just for things that I need to remember to eat, or that I plan to use for dinner that night.

And the freezer. . . oh the freezer! There’s so MUCH of it. I can CATEGORISE to my OCD heart’s content! Oh, *swoon*!

Look! We’re at the end of the entry and I didn’t mention Louisette even once!

Oh.