April 27, 2008 (Day 91)

Freezergate 2008

Well, Tim spent some serious quality time in the basement this weekend. At one point he had to go back to our rental place to get his inhaler --- Whew! There is a lot of fine dust down there!

Chris, we hope you don’t mind the fact that Tim rearranged your workspace slightly. We think you’ll still have plenty of room to complete the trim carpentry you’re doing from the basement. But if you get any dust on Tim’s stuff, so help us...

Okay, kidding. We expect a little... how should we say it... overspray?

On a related note, Tim inspected our chest freezer in the back corner and was not too surprised to find that we had a thaw at some point in the remodeling process (Tim suspects it was that weekend that Al, our electrician, was splicing all the circuits in order to move the main panel to the new east wall.) Tim found about a half inch of meat-juice-stained ice in the bottom of the chest freezer and... oh, how should we say it... a somewhat RIPE aroma wafting from the depths of the chamber.

When all was said and done, Tim threw out what felt like 30 pounds of chicken, ground beef, sausage, shrimp, and scallops (although he must admit by the time he got around to this project he was pretty tired so it was probably only about 20 pounds, give or take.) Tim defrosted the ice block with a space heater, chiseled out the ice in chunks, and disposed of the fragrant detritus in the garbage can out back. He then washed the freezer with Mr. Clean and placed some tubs of baking soda in the chamber of horrors.

But don’t fret. Tim has been a vegetarian for over 3 years now so it’s a good bet that most of that meat was ready for the dumpster. In fact, he’s been looking for a valid excuse to dump it for awhile now, but he was worried that Jay would be upset if he just threw it out for no good reason. (We’re both disappointed about the shrimp and scallops however... Tim does eat fish and seafood occasionally in order to get his Omega-3s.)