No Power

By Lynna Clark

Our power went out one morning and was off about three hours. I don’t know why. Praise God our little house is pretty air tight because this is no time to get overheated. The day after it came back on I realized the milk in the refrigerator was mostly frozen. I shook it up and had a glass. Mmm. Not bad. But I wondered what was up with that. Later as I went to get water from the container with the filter, also in the fridge, it was frozen too. The little spout thing where you push the button for water to come out was frozen shut. Then I remembered.

Last time the power went out, our refrigerator automatically resent to a colder temperature. David figured out how to fix it and since I, being the helpless little woman that I am, except for the little part, never checked to see how he fixed it. So I summoned my hidden inner DIY-ness and investigated. It took me a minute but I found the command center for our cute little fridge. [Side story: it is a retro looking red which I found on sale a few years ago when our old one died. I love it but it is not house broken; thus the need to sop up the space under the lower storage drawer every week or so. That may also explain the great deal I got. But that’s a riveting story for another day.]

Annyyywayyy… The temperature control panel is digital with numbers one through five. Hmmm… I wonder which way is colder? As I pondered this before my cute red fridge, it dawned on me to get my readers. Being able to see is always a plus. Ah HA! Above the number one, it said ‘colder.’ So naturally I punched the five and hit SET, because I didn’t want colder. I wanted something maintain-ish… like don’t-freeze-my-celery; Just-keep-things-from-spoiling-mode. Later, as I checked once more on the water pitcher situation, things were worse…. as in frozen-er. More frozen. What the what? So I set a few things out to thaw at room temperature and fetched my readers again. They are never with me when I need them. I don’t know why. But with them on I could see that above the five was the word COLDEST. So apparently I went from COLDER to COLDEST with one punch of a tiny button. The question is, WHO WOULD LABEL A PANEL THAT WAY?

So there’s actually no moral to this story. I just thought it was funny. Well, until a glass bottle of ginger ale which was buried in the back froze and busted. But I’m learning. David handled so many things around the house that I took for granted. Just makes me miss him more. Because somebody needs to come clean this mess up.