The Curse of the Deep Freezer

Speaking of deep freezers, we sure have had bad luck with ours...

A lovely picture of the rotting juices at the bottom of our deep freezer after it broke back 

in September

We actually never had any intention of getting one.  We were just two people, after all.  How much frozen food did we need?

Well, last summer, we went to see Jason's brother in his new office.  The person who rented out the place before him had left an ugly but functioning (we thought) deep freezer, and John didn't want it.  We reasoned that we might want it when our family got bigger.  He needed the space, our apartment had a patio, and we couldn't just let it go to waste...

 It pretty much changed our lives.  We could stock up on frozen foods when it went on sale!  We could freeze other stuff, too!  We were amazed at how fast that freezer filled up.  Suddenly the idea of living with only the tiny freezer attached to our fridge was absurd.  Who could do that?

Then there was the carnage of The Deep Freezer Disaster of 2012.  (see previous post).  The night that I found our food was rotting, I sent Jason a frantic text.  At the time, he was helping a family from our ward move.  By his side was another member of our ward who had an extra deep freezer he was looking to get rid of(!)  I'm still not exactly sure how that conversation happened, but we were thrilled for this small (free!) little miracle.  We were quickly back in business freezing all that we desired.

We sure were thinking that that would be the end of our freezer drama.  

Fast forward a month or two.  I have a sweet little baby that I am up nursing in the middle of the night.  I hear voices outside of our apartment.  This is pretty normal.  We are on the ground floor right by the front door, so people are often passing by.  I watch the shadows walk back and forth through the blinds.  Suddenly, though, one of the shadows seems way too close to our window.  Then I see the shadow of our freezer door opening!!  In terror, I call out to Jason.  He bangs on the window and the thief runs away, slipping on the ice and dropping some otter pops (or freezies depending on which country you're from) along the way.  This scares the whatever out of me, so we start looking into some way to secure our precious frozen food.  Jason and I learn the word "hasp" (we've obviously never been homeowners or repairmen)  and Jason sets out to secure our freezer with a hasp and lock.

Unfortunately, he used a drill and unfortunately we didn't know that he needed to be careful where to put those holes.  He heard an ugly hiss of air as he punctured one of the tubey things that keeps stuff frozen and that was the end of our second freezer.  For the 2nd time in 6 months we were loading up frozen food to store in the homes of various family members.  By the way, we hadn't yet gotten rid of the first freezer on our patio, so we then had TWO BROKEN deep freezers in a not a very big space.  Yeah, we're kind of white trash. 

We tried, but we couldn't go back to living without a deep freezer.  Jason's brother got us some "freezer money" for Christmas and we went to a thrift store to buy another used deep freezer- our third.  At this point, we did get rid of the other two, so that's good.

You'd think that at this point my story would be over wouldn't you?  What additional drama could we possibly have with deep freezers?

We were afraid to try the hasp and lock again.  A few months later, Claire and I went down to Arizona to visit my family for Spring Break.  Jason stayed behind, but he works, and was sleeping through the night and stuff.  At some point, someone got into our freezer.  This time, we didn't catch them.  They took EVERY. LAST. THING. in that freezer.  I'm talking homemade mystery bags of raw meat.  Who does that?  And we had just taken advantage of a big sale on ice cream.
 ICE CREAM.

I wouldn't let Jason buy any more food until he bought industrial strength glue to secure a new hasp and lock.  Our working freezer is now a fortress requiring two hands to open, which is kind of annoying when Claire is being needy and needs to be carried out to the freezer with me to grab whatever to thaw for dinner.  But it's worth it.  We are hoping that our deep freezer curse has been broken.