17 lbs of ice
for a while, and particularly for the past few summers, i have contemplated getting an ice machine (our freezer has a built-in ice maker but there's something funky about the water line so the output is off and we are scared of touching it), especially since our friends have a fancy one with "the good ice" but i am not a diehard fan of pellet ice especially when we like super-carbonated seltzer and cocktails which are best served with very clear, big ice. we have almost no counter space because our kitchen is oddly very tiny so my idea would be to store the ice maker in the basement and just refill the brown paper bag in our freezer as needed, but j has been long resistant to this. last night i realized, due to the heatwave, we are almost out of ice even though we just got a 10 lb bag on sunday, and i have been making daily iced matcha lattes and daily marg slushies and we have both been refilling our waters with heaping ice, and this morning i was mentally preparing myself to go drive to the corner store, an internal tantrum. i considered just ordering an ice machine and was scrolling the lists and realized that the "best" one suited for our preferred beverages requires a water line plugged in to create the clearest, biggest ice, and then of course what about cleaning the machine when it inevitably gets dirty, a $200-500 huge machine sitting in a basement corner and (cut to the first chapter of knausgaard's my struggle: "We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death."), so i just put on a shirt and shorts and socks and shoes and drove in my car to the corner store to buy two big bags of ice for six dollars, so much ice that the worn and weary paper bag finally tore that i had to empty it into a new paper bag and really struggle to cram it into the freezer shelf, every step of the way realizing perhaps this ice thing is a projection of some kind of scarcity fear or deeper anxiety but also this is a very silly problem and i would not survive in europe.