The fridge is finally acting up to the point that we are giving up and replacing it this month. I ordered it a couple weeks ago, but the earliest delivery date was the end of the month. We're pretty excited, because this one is a little bigger and has a dedicated drawer for cheese, which is nifty for those of us who have just dedicated one of the crispers to that for the last decade and a half. Cheese is pretty important to us, apparently, between slices for sandwiches, cubes for Tiny, shreds for quesadillas and burritos, and sticks for snacks. That page of the enchantment book that explains how to entice women using cheese? They can get all of us in a package deal.
My original plan for the transition to the new fridge and freezer was to borrow Fuzzy's mother's big catering coolers and just set everything in there. If you've never seen the coolers caterers use for transporting food, suffice it to say that you need two people or one really tall person (that would be Fuzzy's father) who just wants to get the damn thing done to pick it up. You could store a body in one, if you choose to murder the short and the flexible.
Fuzzy did not have that plan. He thinks we should just eat as much as we can out of the freezer ahead of time, so that the coolers we have will do the job. Plus, we will have less stuff to jam into the freezer to start. He totally had a point, so we are going with his plan.
I have eaten so much won ton soup in the last two weeks--I might think very hard the next time I see a bag of them at the Costco. We've also been enjoying the stuff that had gotten a bit forgotten in the back of the freezer, and we are likely to have two tator tot nights next week. I'm also going to have to make a big chicken vegetable soup, because I clearly bought vegetables having forgotten that I had already bought vegetables. My personal menu may consist entirely of chicken, carrots, peas, and corn the last week of January. It's not the worst thing that could happen.
Everyone has their quirks. One of mine is panic buying food. I tend to buy more food when I'm nervous or worried about the future. It's a side product of spending my formative years in a place where it sometimes snows in amounts that can be measured in feet. In our last year in Cincinnati, Fuzzy once convinced me that we didn't need to go to the store the night before a snow storm, mostly because he was tired and didn't want to deal with the crowd. His parents made it through the storm before we made it to the store, and I got to field a lot of "Is there any..." questions while he was at work. His father and I ended up going to the little convenience store, though I can't remember if it was the one with the homeless guy out front who loved me because I always apologized for not having cigarettes to give him or the one that had the shooting out front that one time but had a better selection and actual lighting. Fuzzy has not fully lived it down, but he now lets me do what I like when it comes to preparation. After the stores restocked this spring, I slowly built up a supply of non-perishables and frozen items, just in case. I'm still nervous eating all this stuff now, but I'm hopeful for the next few weeks and, by extension, the next few months.
I'm looking forward to the new fridge. The setup gives us a better chance of keeping it organized, and the process of switching will probably save me from my stubborn habit of hanging onto condiments that are "perfectly reasonable" (translation: expired but not really expired). Hot tip: If you sound like a crazy hoarder explaining why your decade-old mustard is still okay, it's time to spring the buck and a half for a new mustard.
Happy new year--may your future be as thrilling as discovering your fridge has a separate cheese drawer.
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