The Freezer Wars

The setting:  A 95 degree day in Northeast Wisconsin.  The house was at a comfortable 73 degrees with the air conditioning.

The people involved: K, the neighbor girl, and me (the "littles" were outside - and that was a good place for them)

The situation: It was snack time.  A normal time in this quiet, rural Wisconsin home.  Something that happens at least twice a day during the summer, while this mom tries to keep the ravaging hordes settled.

K headed to the upright freezer to get the last five popsicles, which I considered almost perfect timing - only one day left of all five kids being here for summer vacation.

This is when we went from having a normal day to having the intensity ramp up A LOT!

"Mom, the popsicles are melted!" 

She showed me this popsicle that was liquid. I raced to the freezer (yes, this fat lady can move when she needs to.)  Extension cord still turned on. Freezer lights come on, but things definitely starting to thaw and melt.

Oh, Crap!  We just bought a pig and ALL that meat (to the tune of 200+ lbs) was in this freezer!

Thus started the frantic afternoon. 

I rushed to the phone to call Dad to see if he could run over his big coolers (and maybe take some meat home to his house).  While we were waiting for Dad, it was the mad dash to put as much into the chest freezer as could possibly fit.  Then, race to the refrigerator's freezer and clear out as much stuff from in there as possible.  All the cheese and hotdogs in the house are now in the fridge.  All the buns from the freezer are on the counter. The myster containers of frozen soup and extra sloppy joe meat came flying out of the freezer, so as much meat as possible could go in that freezer. 

There was still a bunch of stuff left in upright freezer.

Brain goes into overdrive.  If Dad can't come over, I need to call the neighbors to get in to there house and hope they have room in their freezer.  If they don't have room, I'm going to have to fire up the grill and the smoker and cook this meat, because there IS NO WAY that I'm losing any of this meat.

Luckily, it didn't come to that.  Dad came over with a truck full of coolers.  We loaded the meat into the big one.  The rest of the veggies and oddball stuff went into another cooler, along with the ice packs from the fridge's freezer.

It was our fault that this happened.  The frost had really built up, but when you have 200 lbs of meat coming home from the butcher, you need a place to put it.  The thermostat wire was completely coated in ice and didn't register that it wasn't cooling.

Lessons learned:  If you have meat coming home, YOU have the time to defrost the freezer.  YOU have the responsibility to defrost the freezer.  Plus, Dads are still there when you call them, even when you are an adult, even in 95 degree weather when he gets heat exhaustion very easily.

Freezer thoroughly defrosted. Ice cubes froze overnight. Put cooler of veggies and oddball stuff back in there this morning and heading over to make sure those are solidly frozen again.

Before I have Dad bring anything back over to put in the freezer, I think I'm going to rearrange things from the chest freezer and work on defrosting that one, too. Plus, as a bonus, I might find things at the bottom of the pit of despair that I forgot we had.