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It's nice to have enough blessings to make it worthwhile to stop and count them sometimes. Among the luxuries I've got are time, money, confidence, and enough skill to make some sort of difference in my quality of life. And a neighborhood with competent, friendly businesses.
See, we have a refrigerator that Lis bought in 1993. So it's 22 years old. And it's never given us a lick of trouble until a couple months ago.
That's our first piece of luck: when Lis was barely out of college, she was able to research, find, and afford a fridge which wasn't fancy, but which was rock-solid reliable.
A couple months ago, the frost-free freezer started developing frost, and, at the same time, the freezer started only going down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of the 0 that one really wants for long-term storage.
That's the second piece of good fortune: even when things break, it only broke to the level that it was sub-par, not unusable.
And a third piece of good fortune is that, because we have a first-floor apartment that we are now using for ourselves, we have a second fridge, which we were able to plug in and leave some of the things we wanted to keep really, really frozen.
Today, I used a fourth blessing: there is a competent and family-owned appliance and parts and service store across the street from us, so I was able to go into the service department, and tell them what was happening and ask how hard it would be to fix. He said that it sounded like the frost-free mechanism was failing to frost-free, which would mean that the mechanism which actually cools stuff would have gotten frozen in a solid block of ice, which would mean that it really wouldn't be able to get stuff much colder than 32 degrees. And that it was really doing a bang-up job keeping things as cold as it WAS. But the particular model and manufacturer that Lis had bought 22 years ago had a frost-free mechanism in which the expensive bits are known to be very reliable, meaning that the part which broke on it was probably the part which is least expensive.
So, I've moved our food to the downstairs fridge, and have taken apart the inside of the fridge the way the technician suggested, and found the sensors and chilling unit frozen in a block of ice, just as suggested. I probably won't do the repair myself, but even calling one of those guys out to fix it for me, I'm looking at $200 instead of a new fridge.
See, we have a refrigerator that Lis bought in 1993. So it's 22 years old. And it's never given us a lick of trouble until a couple months ago.
That's our first piece of luck: when Lis was barely out of college, she was able to research, find, and afford a fridge which wasn't fancy, but which was rock-solid reliable.
A couple months ago, the frost-free freezer started developing frost, and, at the same time, the freezer started only going down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of the 0 that one really wants for long-term storage.
That's the second piece of good fortune: even when things break, it only broke to the level that it was sub-par, not unusable.
And a third piece of good fortune is that, because we have a first-floor apartment that we are now using for ourselves, we have a second fridge, which we were able to plug in and leave some of the things we wanted to keep really, really frozen.
Today, I used a fourth blessing: there is a competent and family-owned appliance and parts and service store across the street from us, so I was able to go into the service department, and tell them what was happening and ask how hard it would be to fix. He said that it sounded like the frost-free mechanism was failing to frost-free, which would mean that the mechanism which actually cools stuff would have gotten frozen in a solid block of ice, which would mean that it really wouldn't be able to get stuff much colder than 32 degrees. And that it was really doing a bang-up job keeping things as cold as it WAS. But the particular model and manufacturer that Lis had bought 22 years ago had a frost-free mechanism in which the expensive bits are known to be very reliable, meaning that the part which broke on it was probably the part which is least expensive.
So, I've moved our food to the downstairs fridge, and have taken apart the inside of the fridge the way the technician suggested, and found the sensors and chilling unit frozen in a block of ice, just as suggested. I probably won't do the repair myself, but even calling one of those guys out to fix it for me, I'm looking at $200 instead of a new fridge.