January 16, 2008

• Fridge Trouble

  Geez, I am GLAD it has warmed up.  After only two days with temps down in the mid-twenties below zero F, it gradually warmed up over the past two days, to the mid-teens above zero.  Of course, we’ve had a bunch of snow dumped on us, as always whenever warmer air moves in.  Tonight, Greyfox was telling us on the phone that they’d had over a foot of new snow down at his end of the valley.  I said I hadn’t been out, didn’t know how much snow we’d gotten, and Doug spoke up, saying, “Too much.”

  We now have one of the perennial problems that generally go along with really cold weather… I mean besides having the water jugs and buckets on the floor freeze; the water in the cats’ and dog’s dishes freezing solid despite being elevated on a double layer of two-inch foam insulation; having to sleep in shifts so that one of us is awake and alert to tend the woodstove every couple of hours, and having to suit up in arctic wear just to sit around in the house in relative comfort.

  And I do mean RELATIVE comfort.  Despite wearing multiple layers of polar fleece and bulky sweaters (my winter pajamas), my silly-looking double layer of hats with the floppy polar fleece (picture a boreal version of an Ozzie bush hat) over the little knitted skullcap, and several layers of socks and fleece booties, I’ve been reading in bed with the covers up over my legs, a hot water bottle on my lap to help warm my hands, and a sleeping bag around my shoulders like a shawl.  After a day of that, I resorted to my old yeti-feet booties (over-the-calf white shag pile slippers with felt insoles) in place of the usual down-filled camp booties for when I got out of bed, and after a few times of slipping my relatively warm stockinged feet into the cold booties, I just started wearing them in bed, too.

  The other problem is the refrigerator.  A couple of nights ago, I checked the indoor-outdoor thermometer in the kitchen:  minus 28 out and 36 in.  That’s just marginal for my tropical houseplants, but fortunately the living room where they and the woodstove are, was a few degrees warmer.  I was heating water for tea, waiting for the kettle to boil, and warming my hands on it while the rest of my body was getting chilled.  I reflected on the fact that our fridge usually maintains a temperature of about 40, and for an insane moment thought about opening the fridge for a little shot of warmer air.

  Sometime after that, Doug was preparing to bake a frozen pizza when he noticed that it had partially thawed.  That’s the trouble with our fridge in cold weather.  When the ambient temp is below the fridge’s target temp, it doesn’t run and the freezer up top doesn’t maintain its target of zero.  We are familiar with the phenomenon of ice cream, for example, being soft in winter and rock hard in summer.  Even after the weather warmed up outdoors (and it warmed more slowly and not quite as much indoors), the fridge is balky.  Twice, I have had to turn its dial all the way up near the coldest setting to get the compressor to kick on.  Once it starts running, I can turn it back to its usual setting and it completes the cycle, but won’t come back on again on its own.

  I was telling Greyfox about this, and he said it threw a new light on the old problem of trying to sell refrigerators to Eskimos.  Still, it beats the old routine we had to go through when we lived off the grid.  It was a constant effort to monitor temps indoors and out.  When it was too warm outside, we’d have to hurry up and eat the perishable frozen stuff from the ice chest out there.  If it was too cold indoors, we’d have to put the indoor ice chest up higher to keep milk and produce from freezing.  Electric refrigeration is a wonderful thing, one I’d not want to go back to doing without. 

  BTW, several people commented on Greyfox’s expressed and demonstrated concern for my wellbeing.  I think it deserves comment.  He’s not really “gruff,” as one comment suggested.  He can be a crotchety old curmudgeon, and often has the pathological narcissistic tendency to exaggerate all his little difficulties and ills while remaining totally cold to anyone else’s feelings, but he’s more likely to be whiny than gruff.  There’s a lot of history involved in his attitude toward me.  In particular, for many years he was unhappy and blamed me for his trouble.  He acknowledged the error of that attitude several years ago, around the time he got clean and sober and started working his way out of NPD.  But that did not bring an instantaneous change in his behavior.  He rises to the new attitude occasionally in his more lucid moments, and manages to maintain it for longer and longer periods of time with practice.  I enjoy associating with him more and more as time goes by, too, but don’t love him more because he treats me more humanely.  I’ve always loved him not for what he did, had or was, but just because I choose to love.

  

  • 5:24 am
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