… much less re-frigerating. Which of course was a direct result of the freezer struggling to, well, freeze.

That sure makes it tough to keep the Thin Mints fresh, I tell you whot. How am I supposed to keep the family stock of the delicious little minty chocolate wafers to a manageable level? We won’t see them again for another year! Y’all are crazy if’n you think I can hold out that long.

Well, it’s a good thing we have a refrigerator/freezer downstairs. Normally it keeps our pizzas frozen (upstairs is a side-by-side model). It got pressed rather abruptly into service as the primary unit as I frantically transferred what I could salvage. I think we saved most of the more expensive things, and the bread that was in the freezer is easy to replace if it can’t survive in the fridge for 10 days.

So, after the emergency part of this had passed, I started to see what I could do about the source of the problem. Immediately I noticed that things just weren’t level like they ought to be. I confirmed in the user’s manual that it would at least be noisy if operated that way – something I had coincidentally noticed recently – and made a few adjustments. However, when I turned it back on, I heard the compressor shut off almost immediately.

That led to a second discovery inside the freezer; the bottom half of the back wall was thick with frost. In scraping it off with my fingers I found what looked like an intake vent below a good thick layer. Completely blocked off, in fact. “That can’t be good,” I said to myself. I inferred from the manual that the automatic defroster must have gotten overwhelmed at some point in the last few months, something that the decided tilt to the rear may have exacerbated. Thus began the nearly 2 hour long quest to defrost the freezer and clean every surface inside the appliance. At least one good thing happened out of all of this, right?

Here I am on the other side of the ordeal, having confirmed that we’re all defrosted and that the compressor seems to be working properly. For the last 30 or 40 minutes the it’s been working to cool things off again. I put some freezer pops in the freezer and some water in the refrigerator just to see if we’re back to normal… here’s hoping.

Yum. Thin Mints. Now there’s an idea. Be right back, okay?