My New Fridge

Ooh, a fridge with nothing on it

I unloaded my old side-by-side refrigerator after Roommate Smurf moved out.  The ice maker didn't work, who knows what was lurking in the water tube, it was old and energy-sucking, and platters don't fit in a side-by-side.  Plus, I do not need two refrigerators, even when throwing a party.  Technically, I had three, but usually turned off the mini-fridge in the bar.  Yes, my parents bought a party house all those years ago.  The family room even has an overhead light in an odd place which is for a poker table when you think about it.  Gotta love the 50s.

A month later, just as I was celebrating how much my electric bill had gone down, the other one started to go.  I turned on the mini-fridge and went online to get an idea of what I wanted before driving all over creation.

Ok, wow, I had a very unrealistic view of how much refrigerators cost.  That's what happens when you hang onto a fridge for 20 years.  It was also the first time I had bought a brand-new major kitchen appliance.  One side effect of a generation that lives in apartments is that we have no idea what it costs to keep up a house.  Something breaks and you call management.  I reviewed my finances and started visiting showrooms.

My parents built a cabinet for the fridge when they remodeled in the 90's.  It was a good idea then, but made it very hard to buy a refrigerator now.  I went shopping for several days with the dimensions and a tape measure.  At long last, I found a salesman who really knew his product and helped me to find something that fit my needs, cabinet, and budget.  He even did some online comparison shopping to price-match before ringing it up.  This guy was a great salesman and I would probably go back to him the next time I need an appliance (please, washer & dryer, just hang on until the fridge is paid off). I'm not mentioning where I got the fridge because I want to stress that it wasn't the company that sold it, but this salesman.

My new French-door fridge arrived last Monday.  I couldn't hook up the water right away because the valve needed to be replaced.  Again, 20 years old.  The wallpaper behind the fridge is even from the last kitchen remodel, before the 1990s fridge.  For one thing, the new fridge completely obscures the wall and it doesn't matter, and the other thing is that the pattern is so similar to the current wallpaper that you have to look twice to realize it is different.  Replacing the valve happened the next day, and I was in business.

Note that the exterior has no water/ice dispenser.  I don't use them a lot, and they tend to rust the exterior of a fridge.  The ice maker is in the lower freezer compartment, and the water dispenser is inside the left side of the door.  How cool is that?

Side note, because it happened yet again.  When I gave the salesman my house phone number, up came my parents's names and the address.  This happens a lot, even with a random plumber I picked out of the phone book.  I guess it's a good reason to keep the land-line.  Initially, I was keeping it for friends of my parents who didn't know they had passed away, then later as an emergency phone if the power went out and my cell's battery died, which did happen when a transformer on my block blew last year and the power was out for almost 24 hours.  (Also why I hang onto the actual phone book.)

Anyway, that's why this post isn't about something I cooked.  When you're only keeping as much refrigerated food as fits in a mini-fridge for two weeks, not a whole lot of cooking happens.