Fridge
I had planned to post over the weekend, but things got in the way. I have some music I want to post but unfortunately you’ll all have to wait for that (and I should probably holler at someone on this site about what kind of alternate attachment arrangements I can make on this site) — it’s much harder to create a post and music than it is to just create a post.
Before we get into it, I’ve registered the RSS on [sortition](https://suricrasia.online/sortition/), an ersatz RSS feed aggregator focused on the sorts of long-term posting seen on cohost, with a lot of names people who used cohost are likely to recognize. Who knows if/when any posts from this blog will actually show up, but given it was all of 2 steps to actually submit this blog and costs me nothing, submitting was an easy decision.
FRIDGE
So, one thing that wound up taking up a lot of my time and attention over the weekend was a major refrigerator upgrade. Our home came with all the essential appliances (clothes washer and dryer, dishwasher, electric range) but the fridge in particular was terribly basic. To wit: a Kenmore model that may as well be the first image result for the words “basic fridge”. It does what you need a fridge and freezer to do: store food, keep it cold. It’s perfectly fine, and a testament to the quality of fridge manufacture that it’s still working today about as well as it would have any other time in its history. It’s also basically indistinguishable from [a current model](https://www.kenmore.com/products/kenmore-61332-20-5-cu-ft-top-freezer-refrigerator-8211-white/) except for the fact that they no longer sell models in its cream color. It’s probably a decade old, but since a quick perusal of the Kenmore site shows they sell models so basic they identify only by capacity, color, and shape, that it’s hard to identify it precisely.
And it is a fucking pain to actually use.
Like, the thing with the fridge is that we kept it damn well near completely full of stuff. And that basic fridge design, the one with two compartments and the freezer on top? It works reasonably well but if, like I presume most people do, you use the fridge more often than the freezer, then most of the time it is extremely not ergonomic. Gotta bend down and reach in, and god help you if the thing you need is near the back of the fridge, which it often was because of how full it was.
The thing is, I was not remotely planning on getting a fridge this weekend. I had spent a lot of Saturday watching soccer, planning on some follow-up posting ideas based on the games I’d seen, when I got a message from my wife about a store going out of business and having a good deal on an LG [LRFXS3106S](https://www.lg.com/us/refrigerators/lg-lrfxs3106s-french-door-refrigerator). I take some measurements, meet up with my wife at the store, file some financing information, and they tell us we can expect the fridge in like four hours. Considering this was a spur-of-the-moment decision, our old fridge was not prepared to get moved out, and so we spent the weekend with two fridges in our kitchen, the new one moved into its permanent position and our older one (which, I should note, is a couple inches thinner and shallower) just hanging out in the middle of the kitchen, taking up most of the available space.
I should note that we got this fridge in an appliance lease-to-own store (Conn’s Home Plus) in a going-out-of-business sale. The deal was in fact very good on the fridge (we just need to pay it off in 3 months, which we can afford) and probably accounts for why they wanted to and were able to deliver it so quickly.
One thing that’s a bit odd about the old fridge: the house had a copper tube installed to feed water into the fridge for a filtered dispenser/icemaker, but while there’s a spot where the ice maker in the freezer would get connected, the hookup appears to be sealed off, and the freezer doesn’t have any such contents in it. Presumably there used to be a nicer fridge there, that was taken with the owners at some point in the process of moving, though this was the direct evidence of that. All we could tell was that the line was plumbed and it wasn’t connected to the current fridge, because it had no hookup.
But the new fridge? Of course it does. Water and ice. Why, two ice makers, in fact; of course the fridge’s water dispenser also has an ice maker and dispenser, but there’s another one in the freezer compartment! This strikes me as a silly amount of ice. I am not sure we will ever need that much ice, even if we make an entire house party’s worth of blended margaritas. The tray used to hold the freezer ice cubes takes up space that could probably be better used for other things, but for now we’re keeping it in.
Considering that we already had a line going out to the fridge, you’d think actually getting fridge water would be a nearly one-step process. It was not. As I alluded to earlier, this was a liquidation sale floor model. As is common with floor models, not everything was included; hooking up the line required a ferrule (for keeping the connection from tube to fridge pressurized to prevent leaking) and a threaded compression fitting (to keep the tube connected to the fridge). You can probably guess from context neither was included, so we had to trek to the hardware stores for this.
And if we were going to do that, we may as well get some vinyl tubing so we don’t have to bend the copper tubing, per my wife. Since the copper tubing is rigid and probably didn’t connect to the previous fridge in the same way, we also picked up some plastic tubing to connect to the fridge — and so we may as well get another set of couplings to connect the two tubes together.
I am very thankful that my wife, whose father worked in construction and taught her a bunch of stuff, is much handier than me. Without her I would probably not have gotten everything connected — it turns out there was a leak at the shut-off valve by the sink, and my general belief when doing anything that actually requires fixing a plumbing leak is to get the professional to do it to limit the potential damage from making a mistake. I do not want to screw something the wrong way and turn into one of those hackneyed sitcom husbands, struggling to splutter out profanity as the valve sprays a pressurized stream of water into my face. Anyway, she fixed that leak without too much trouble.
While this is not the first fridge I’ve used or lived with that had an in-door water dispenser, this is the first one that I am primarily responsible for. And when you’ve been living without a fridge water line for about 6 years (before moving here, I spent a couple years in an apartment that did have a fridge water line, but it was on the inside of the fridge for some nearly-incomprehensible reason), the change in habit brought about by installing a water line into a fridge with a dispenser is massive.
No longer do I have to sit at the faucet and wait for the water from the sink to fill it, and then pour it into the filtered pitcher and wait for it to fill up, and then have good water to drink. No, now I can simply bring my glass up to the door of the fridge and have (at a very nice temperature, too, if I do say so myself) fresh water to drink any time I want. I am no longer beholden to the volume of a pitcher to supply me with drinks. I am now a wizard, and my magic is in creating infinite water where there previously was none.