Sunday, July 6, 2008

Cleaning out the fridge

When I first got to Pucallpa, I lived in this small two room house with another SAM missionary. During the day the house was hotter than a pistol as there were no shade trees and at night the steady hum of machinery from a saw mill and the wiff of acrid black smoke gently put me to sleep. I lived here for two months until my roommate moved back to the USA.


I have a number of stories from that house, the roach that I killed the first night by stepping on it in the dark, the frog staring back at me from the shower head 3 inches away from my nose, and of course our refrigerator. REFRIGERATOR? Yes, the fridge. Our wonderful ice making machine. The problem was that it made ice where it was not supposed to. The top freezer portion, if left unchecked, would continue to build up more and more ice, encapsulating anything that was left in the freezer for more than a week.


One saturday I decided to clean out the ice build up. Dethawing would take to long and leave a wet mess all over the kitchen, so I used the one solution that I knew of. Mr. Estwing. A 20 ounce Estwing hammer would make quick work of all that ice! Just five short minutes later, the kitchen floor was full of ice but the freezer was empty! Mission accomplished.

6 comments:

Hannah Murray said...

Hey! We have your fridge's cousin in our house! Tim just de-iced ours with a screwdriver last week!

Christi said...

I didn't know you cleaned out the freezer with your hammer...that would have been fun to see!

Kerri said...

good thinking cuz...well done.

Anonymous said...

That's great..>laugh< Way to go Dave!

Ed said...

That's why Dad said you needed to get an Estwing! Ya never know what you're gonna need it for. I didn't have "thawing out a freezer" as one of the options, but hey, it works, right? I bought my 22 oz. Estwing back in 1971 and still own it. What's not to like about it?

The Salvatierras said...

That sure works faster than my methodology in Arequipa - replacing pans of boiling water in the freezer while letting it sit on the patio in the sun - usually after about an hour of this I would break down and use our kitchen knives. Wish I had had an Estwing! I convinced Michael to never buy me a frosty freezer!! Thank you for reminding me again of the joys of automatically defrosting freezers.