I warned you!

You can't say that I didn't warn you that there would be problems when I went to the conference. Ok, maybe you live in a part of the world that didn't have issues, but anyone in the my neck of the woods was hit by at least one, if not two of the biggest snow storms of the year. As usual though, I got off lightly; my flight back home was delayed a couple of hours. Compared to the rest of the research group that was supposed to arrive in Chicago Saturday afternoon, but only managed to arrive at the hotel at around 1:00 am Monday. Or my boss who was to leave Chicago Thursday at about 6:00 pm, but didn't get out until about 9:00 pm Friday. So all in all I'd say I'm lucky, but very unlucky for others. The only thing I can suggest, travel with me to and from any conference.

So now that life is back to normal, or at least things are less hectic, I'm going to try and post a bit more frequently (yet again). One thing I've been meaning to post about lately is my fridge. I know, like you I'm wondering how I held off on this for so long too.

Now, being an apartment dweller I have the benefit of not owning any real appliances. No stove, fridge, dishwasher or anything larger than a coffee maker or blender. I get the appliances that come with the apartment and live with them. Well, when I got this place I didn't get a dishwasher, I did get a nice digitally controlled gas stove and of course a fridge. Now there wasn't anything outwardly spectacular about the fridge, it was big, white, had two doors and kept things at two different levels of cold and sounded like a Volkswagen minibus stalling out whenever the compressor shut off.

Now being an experienced apartment dweller I took the usual approach to this problem, I didn't care. It kept my food sufficiently cold to prevent spoiling and to be fair the compressor didn't always "stall-out". And since I didn't sleep in the living room it didn't keep me up at night, though I can't say the same for my brother when he came to visit. But a little while back the situation got worse. Not only did the compressor seem to "stall-out" more frequently but the damn thing was running for about 1/3 of the time. And like any good apartment dweller that's when I started to care, after all I'm the one paying the electric bill.

So I called up the building management to have the fridge checked out, sure enough they were willing to replace it. On top of all that they would do it, and transfer all the food for me while I was at work. How could I complain? Oh right, I never had a say in what fridge I got. The new one is about 6 inches shorter than the old one. On top of that the freezer portion is probably about 4 inches taller than the last one. Add these factors together and you get my mini-fridge. The thing is so small that when I open the door I cannot see what's on the top shelf of the fridge, which is the only shelf big enough to hold the gallon size milk container. So now I have a fridge that is quieter, though it sounds disturbingly similar to a microwave oven, but was clearly designed to give my stomach a perfect view of what it's about to ingest.