Have a spare

Editor's note: Official Blogger statistics inform me that this entry will be my 5,000th entry in a series I began a long time ago...like 2006. I still write it five times a week, and add a Saturday picture show with 10 pictures I enjoyed, and a rerun of an old blog on Sundays. I still love it and get a lot of fun from writing it and hearing your feedback. So please keep feeding me back and I will write another 5,000 blogs! Thanks - Mark

 We moved into this current iteration of the "Lazy 'C' Ranch" in summer 1999, and my mother thought that a refrigerator for the basement would be a nice gift that Christmas.

It was a great idea and I recommend it to anyone with a little extra room. I mean, when Giant marks down the price of hams right after Christmas and Easter, I can pick up a couple of semi-boneless specials, all the while wondering how anything can be "semi" boneless. Either something is boneless, or it is not boneless, am I wrong? 

It's been good to have an extra icebox. There are some things that it's good to have in duplicate, such as eyeglasses, tea pots, and, of course, refrigerators.

The refrigerator had two jobs: keeping frozen things frozen, and cold things cold. And until recently, it did both jobs perfectly. Broccoli florets, a couple of bagels, and homemade tomato sauce kept company in the freezer with Stouffer's Entrees and ice cream, and down below there was lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and celery and milk and OJ and cheese and life was great until the night I went to get some ice cream, grabbed the carton of Breyer's, and it was...squishy. 

Funny, some things in the freezer were still rock hard, and everything in the refrigerator part was cold. But we had a repairman come out and add some freon, and by that night it was 40° in the freezer and the broccoli florets were complaining it was too hot.

A couple of days later, another repairman came out and took us aside, like a doctor in a sad movie. He said he was trying one last transfusion of freon, but we had to understand, if there was an internal freon leak, the prognosis was dim.

And sure enough, that night, it was almost warm enough inside there to toast the bagels. We removed the food, threw some out, and moved the rest upstairs to the kitchen icebox, where they got acquainted with some new neighbors and chilled right out.

NO! This is not our old refrigerator and if it were, you know I could never
post a picture of it! Rust is forbidden in our house!

It's hard to find a basic refrigerator these days, one without French doors and crushed ice coming out of the door and all that, but we found one and it will be here today, if you want to come and see it begin what should be another 22-year run.

In 22 years, I will be 93 years of age, and I won't want my ice cream to be too cold, so let's hope for the best.