Two days ago, I was polishing off a pint of that luscious coconut milk ice cream.  It seemed a little soft to me, which I pointed out to Dean, but Per has been a bad fridge citizen (not closing doors fully, playing with the temperature controls), so we thought there was a simple explanation.

There WAS a simple explanation, only it wasn't the one we wanted to hear.  As we quickly determined yesterday when we discovered much of the freezer defrosted and thawing, the fridge had stopped working.  I wielded my impressive Google-fu and quickly determined that it most likely is the "Start Relay", which is essentially a fuse that helps protect the compressor.  The start relay is a $20 part, and is one of the easiest problems to fix with a fridge, only we couldn't track one down yesterday.  We can order one online, and get it Wednesday, or pay an extra $20 to get it shipped expedited for Tuesday, which hardly seems worth the extra cost.  So this morning we have to make a bunch of phone calls and try to find a repairman or appliance shop that has one in stock.  Of greater concern is that *if* the relay was shot two nights ago, we may have inadvertently fried our compressor.  (When the relay goes, the compressor keeps trying to start, but can't finish off the connection, so it builds up a lot of heat because of the repeated attempts at starting).  If that's shot, we'll pretty much have to buy a new fridge.  (Replacement costs being equal to labor/parts costs)

In the meantime, we had to take stock of the "carnage".  Maggie & Carl were kind enough to lend us their ginormous cooler, and we were able to get most of the meat from the freezer into there.  An untouched pint of my ice cream was not so lucky--it had already melted, and was beyond salvage.  The self-restraint I had exhibited Thursday night in not ripping into the new pint no longer gave me satisfaction.  Instead it was cruel irony as we tossed the still-sealed container into the trash.  If I'd only been a little weaker, we either might have recognized the problem a day earlier, or at least I might have gotten to enjoy *some* of the ice cream.  Because of the ice in the cooler, we only had room for a few more things from the fridge--the milk, my good wine, the brand new packages of cheese.  Everything else spent the night in the fridge, which was cool enough to preserve it until today, but if we can't find the part locally this morning, it'll all have to go.

The cruelest part of all of this is that I've been aiming to clean out the fridge, but having to do it under duress (and under the fear of a potentially large outlay of cash) is NOT how I envisioned tackling it.