What’s that infernal beeping? I stumble into the kitchen, putting the light on, blinding myself temporarily. Giddiness and blindness. I then stubbed my toe on the kitchen tidy.
By then I got a bit Shakespearean, using the odd naughty word or two which I must never utter in front of the grandchildren on pain of glares from the mother and grandmother.
By the time I sorted myself out and noticed my toe was bleeding a bit, I found it was our poor dying fridge calling for help.
I opened the door, pushed all the buttons until the beeping stopped and went back to bed, sore toe and all. Job done.
The next morning, all was not well with the great white monster. We got on the line to the appliance repair shop.
They sent a nice man who fiddled around and decided, yes, the fridge was not well. He charged me for the pleasure and left, saying he’d do some research and get back to us regarding what needed fixing.
When we got the fridge 17 years ago, it all seemed a good idea... it was big, a different style to your run-of-the-mill fridges, all boxy and tall as.
Later, we discovered they’re not that common in New Zealand and parts need to be sourced from mysterious places.
While we were waiting for our fridge guy to get back to us, the alarms continued going off day and night.
The milk didn’t seem as cold; the vegetables took on a limp form. Things were not going well inside the big white beastie. Then it just stopped working. Died. Just like that. The light was still on but no one was home.
Being old campers, this was no problem. We have a garage freezer, of course, where the odd side of lamb or pork resides nicely butchered into two-person packets along with fish, bread, frozen vegetables - all the stuff everyone has in their garage freezer.
We have a chilly bin and heaps of ice pads. No worries.
So all the vegetables got heaved out, the plastic bottles of milk put in the freezer. Milk is fine frozen; just remember to get it out when the open bottle is getting a bit low. All the frozen foodstuffs from the fridge freezer went into the big freezer with other dairy stuff.
After a day or so, we made a decision. It had to go. There’d been no news yet from the fridge guy and time was marching on.
Jen leapt into the red rocket and raced uptown to Harvey Norman, where the nice fridge people live.
James sorted her out. Later that day, Luke, our Woolworths delivery guy, turned up with our new fridge.
That was weird, but apparently Luke has many jobs. He’s a top guy. He installed the new, silver, sparkly Mitsubishi fridge and took our poor old American one away to be dissected for parts by the appliance repair people.
Bits of our old fridge may live on in other Whanganui homes for some time to come. That is sort of nice. It was a good fridge - loyal, friendly, didn’t say much. Always on time and never broke down until its final days.
Luke and I got talking about Mitsubishi. I did not know they made fridges. I know that they made the Zero fighter in World War II and also make good cars, but fridges - who knew?
An upside of the fridge change is the number of sauces, marinades and dressings we threw out.
The use-by dates on some went back to the early years of the century. It’s amazing how time flies. I have a bad habit of latching on to cooking fads, buying all the sauces and stuff, then moving on to another fad that needs different bits and bobs but not disposing of the old ones.
The American appliance was a big fridge, so we did not really notice it slowly being taken over by small bottles and jars.
Now we needed to prune things back a bit. Planned. We just don’t need a big family fridge anymore.
Everything is now so cold, though.
