When Things Go Wrong...

So, last night the girls got to go do their "girl night" with Aunt Kenna (and had a fabulous time). While they were gone, I let the boys play outside and I took on the project of defrosting my outside freezer (it's an old one and is not frost-free, so it builds up ice on the shelves and has to be defrosted about once a year). I wanted to get it cleaned up before Scott comes home with a bunch of halibut to put in it. I got it all done and put the food back in and then went on with other things. Then when I went to wash my face just before bed (about 11:30), I noticed that I didn't have instant hot water in my sink. Our house is big enough that it takes forever for the hot water to get from the hot water heater to the sinks (it takes about two minutes running the water before it starts to get warm). So, a few year ago we paid to have our water heater turned into a recirculating one so we would always have instant hot water. So, when I went to wash my face, I didn't have instant hot water. I remembered that one time when that happened, it was because the gfci outlet in the garage had been tripped and needed reset, causing the recirculating part of the water heater to not have power to work.

So, I headed outside to check if that was the case. Sure enough, the reset button on the outlet was popped out. So, I pushed it to reset it. It did a blue spark inside the outlet, then popped right back out. I tried it several more times and each time it did the same thing. At this point I started to panic. I thought of all the food that I had put back into a warm freezer that wasn't working because it was on the same outlet system. I called Scott (who had landed in Anchorage just a half hour before and was headed to a restaurant for dinner). He didn't answer. I called him two more times before he answered. I told him the situation and asked him what I should do. He couldn't figure out why the outlet wouldn't just reset. He suggested I run extension cords from the house out to the garage so I could plug in the freezer and the fridge.

So I went to work on that. I got the fridge plugged in just inside in the bathroom (which is also a gfci outlet), and the fridge started working. Next I did the freezer. When I plugged it in, the outlet in the bathroom tripped. MYSTERY SOLVED--the freezer was tripping the outlet. I went back out to the garage and tried to reset the outlet, and because the freezer was no longer plugged in, it reset just fine. So, I knew what the problem was (although I couldn't figure out why the freezer would be tripping the outlet--I've defrosted it many times before and it's always worked just fine), but now I had a new problem. I had a freezer full of food that wasn't working and it was too late at night to do anything about it. So, I went to work trying to find a place for all the food in our other two feezers (a side by side inside our house, which was already pretty full--and a little freezer/fridge combo in the garage that was full of Otter Pops). The Otter Pops got moved out of the freezer (they can be refrozen at any time) and every square inch of both freezers got filled with the meat and homemade bread that had filled the deep freeze. I found a place for most of it. I ended up having to throw away the frozen peppers from last year's garden (we'll have more peppers in another month anyway), but everything else is safely frozen. I finally got to bed at 1 am last night.

So now I find myself asking why a 20+ year old freezer would pick this week to quit working. Why do things go wrong when Scott's not around to help? Two years ago it was the element on our stove that went out the day Scott left for a big trip, and now it's the freezer! And when Scott gets home from this trip, he's going to have a whole bunch of frozen fish that will need to go into our non-working freezer. I guess we'll be doing some appliance shopping as soon as he gets home.