Saturday, February 26, 2011

"Alex, I'll take 'Frigidaire Sucks' for the win."

We're going on Day 6 of not having a refrigerator.

Yes, you read it right.  DAY 6.

I've been keeping it together pretty good I think considering I'm home with my kids 24/7 feeding them 3 meals a day plus snacks WITH NO FRIDGE.  Oh, and did I mention my husband was working all week from 7 am til about midnight?  Therein lies one of the reasons why we've been so long without a refrigerator.  That and John was waiting on a call back from Frigidaire (which was returned in a speedy TWO days) to try and find out what could be wrong with it, (probably the compressor or condenser or con-WHATEVER) what the cost was going to be to have someone come out and look at it ($85), how much it would cost to repair with parts and labour (pretty much the same amount if we were to buy a brand new fridge).

Needless to say my husband was pissed off.  And rightly so.  But he wanted REVENGE people!  You see, my husband has many, many wonderful qualities but his stubbornness sometimes gets the best of him.  (Sorry babe, but I've let the world know about my weird eccentricities and neurosis, sometimes the truth must come out)

Today, I didn't keep it together all that well.  I'd had enough of living without a fridge.

In fact I had a full out texting argument with my husband while I was at the grocery store.

Yes, you read that right too.

I was grocery shopping.

Even though...I have NO FRIDGE.  I was just picking up the essentials of-course.  Bread, cheese, milk. Oh wait.  Scratch the cheese and milk. Bread, bananas and .... canned beans.

We have literally eaten all the perishables such as fruit, vegetables, bread and cheese.  Apparently my kids are going through a growth spurt.  How convenient.  On top of that I had to cook up every last piece of meat the other night with a meal in mind.  You just can't cook up a pork tenderloin and ground turkey with no spice or marinade.  Well, I suppose you could but .... would you eat it?

So now we only have 1 meal left.  I might be able to stretch it to two if I get really creative.

This morning our pantry (and by pantry I actually mean cupboard) was looking as paltry as I've every seen it.  My husband actually said while looking at the 1 jar of tomato sauce, 2 cans of mushroom soup, box of Kraft dinner, bag of rice and half a jar of almond butter "Wow, you can actually see the back of the cupboard.  It's good to purge once in a while!"

I'm sorry.  Pardon?

While he's been having steak dinners in restaurants and going out for Pho at lunch, I've been scouring the cupboards feeding my children leftover bits of crackers, raisins and a dwindling box of cheerios.

Okay, okay.  I might be exagerrating a little bit.  We do have a cooler sitting outside our back door that I have to dust snow off of every time I needed something from it.  It has a couple of yogurt drinks, 3 cheese strings, milk, half a carton of juice and a green pepper.

It could be a lot worse.  There are children starving in Africa and sadly right here in the very city I reside in.  I'm being completely serious when I say that.  It's that thought has kept me from really losing it.

Back to my (short) grocery excursion.  My husband lets me know (by text of-course) as I'm queuing up in line that a repair guy is coming to look at our fridge.  I'm a little confused by this because I'm pretty sure there's nothing for them to repair being that the fridge is clearly dead.  However.  I let it go.

I get home and unload the 3 very sad looking bags of groceries while chatting to my neighbours.  I see a blue truck pull up in front of our house as I walk into my home, greeted by my adorable nappy headed boys, and assume correctly that it's the repair guy.

This is when the day takes an odd turn.

Does seeing me walk into my house (even though they were still in their truck) make it okay for them to mosey on into our house without so much as a knock?

Okay, so I let that go as they did take their shoes off.

They (father and son - independent company) proceed to tell us that our fridge stinks (literally and figuratively) which offends me terribly as I take pride in having a pretty clean, tidy and organized home.  Then the son (the most "forward") of the two starts to open our dishwasher (which is full of clean dishes, not "stinky" dirty ones, thankfully) and basically tells my husband that he better do some damage control as he leans in to pick up a metal piece from the bottom of it (just a glued on logo from an apparently cheaply made cutting board) because "you know, sometimes it's not just the appliances problem" implying that WE were partly at fault for a 2 year old appliance to simply stop doing it's job.  Well, that's what I got from that sweet remark.

It doesn't stop there folks.

He starts to jiggle our stove elements and peer into our oven while ever so slightly (actually quite violently) pulling on the stove handle to show us how cheaply it's made.  Well, when you start grabbing and shaking anything with a bit of aggression it's going to move around a little bit .... right?

I'm thinking to myself....aren't these REFRIGERATOR repair guys???  Am I missing something here?

Okay, so I guess they were helpful in the end...if you call telling us what we already know helpful.   On the bright side it didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Now, I think I know why.

Strange, strange experience.

But tonight, I think we may have found ourselves a fridge.  After my husband has researched for about 8.5 hours and has gone through countless websites and search engines...I believe we found "the one."

Please keep your fingers crossed for me that by next week I will be a proud owner of a brand new refrigerator.

And life, as I once knew it, can get back to normal.


***By the way, does ANYONE else find it annoying that the full word refrigerator is spelled without a "D" but the short form IS???  Am I just crazy?***


Actually...don't answer that last question.  

3 comments:

Tanya said...

DRAMA!!!

Shannon Brockman said...

After all that I hope your new fridge comes with someone who cooks for you every night! LOL

Ellen said...

Well GG, I think you've held it together pretty well actually. Very funny story...loved it. My fridge handle fell off. It's the one that pulls out the freezer drawer on the bottom. By the way I hate freezer drawers on the bottom because things make their way to the bottom of the drawer and only resurface once they're completely freezer burned. I've mended the handle with Goop glue which is the most amazing product on the planet. It even glued my broken vacuum cleaner handle and it's held up through numerous hours of vacuuming. I'm sorry...I digress. It just proves everyone has an appliance story. Yours has been a little more stressful than most though.