Gratitude and a Little Bit of Housekeeping
On Saturday morning, I was making some sandwiches for a picnic with friends. I pulled some sandwich meat from my deep freeze, and thought to myself, "Self, this meat seems just a tad less frozen than I would have expected it to be". Thinking it was probably just that it had been in a spot in the freezer where was not quite as cold, I ignored it (mostly).
Later that evening, we had guests over for dinner. I had offered to make ice cream in the Vitamix and one of our guests selected blackberry as the flavor of choice. Having no blackberries in my upstairs freezer, I trotted downstairs to fetch a bag from the deep freeze. As I carried my bag of blackberries back upstairs, I turned the bag over and over in my hands. Something was not. quite. right. These berries were not frozen, but merely a bit cold.
I rushed back downstairs, and peered into my freezer. Not so cold. I unplugged it. Plugged it back in. Tried a different outlet. Put my ear up to it for sounds of life. Nothing. Rushed back upstairs to ask my husband and his buddy to do the same. They reached the conclusion I had already reached: the freezer was indeed dead and our stash of food was quickly thawing. We needed to act fast.
And so we did. We crammed our upstairs freezer with everything it would hold, got the last of our meat crammed into the remaining space in our tenant's small freezer, and then the men took two overflowing boxes to a nearby friends house, to borrow some of their freezer space as well. Within an hour, everything was back to it's sub-zero temperature and I could breathe easy once again.
What about this scenario causes such a sense of gratitude to well up in me? God graciously allowed me to go down to the freezer at just the right time (thanks for choosing blackberry, Cam!) in order to discover our dilemma. Due to that and our quick action and ability to locate enough freezer space, we did not lose any food. Not a bit. I do have a fridge crammed with a few items we decided were not quite as high priority, and those need to be used up pronto, but nonetheless, nothing was lost.
Secondly, hopefully next weekend, we will be getting a new (to us- it's well used) large, upright freezer in it's place. Tonight my husband and brother-in-law went out and got us a similarly sized chest freezer from Craigslist, only to have friends call immediately after and offer to trade us the chest freezer for their larger upright freezer. Though the Craigslist freezer would have sufficed, I'm so grateful for a freezer that I think will meet our food storage needs even better, and in a more organized manner. Praise God!
And let's not forget the obvious… I didn't have to defrost or spring clean my freezer! How great is that??? 🙂
There's my piece of gratitude…
Now here's the housekeeping:
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Secondly, if you missed it this morning, my eBook, Healthy Homemaking: One Step at a Time, is finally available!!!
For the remainer of the week, I will be posting one baby step from the book each day, just to give you a little taste of what it's all about, starting with the first one tomorrow morning. You know you don't want to miss it. 🙂
That's it! You're all great! Now what are you grateful for today? And do you have any fun freezer stories to share with me?
Fewf! So glad you were able to save all of the food.
WOW – what a close call. So glad you were able to get everything put back into deep freezes – and wonderful news on the new ones as well.
I’m so thankful you were able to save everything! The Lord was watching out for you all. You got to live out this scripture!
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28
Bravo for no thawing out! lol 🙂
http://lovingheartdesigns.blogspot.com/2009/04/gratituesday-what-are-you-thankful-for.html
We have been there before and I have had to borrow other peoples freezers to put my food in. Thank God you were able to make do
I almost had to use other’s space once do to a very long power outage but power was restored just as I was going to start emptying it!
This summer we bought a freezer (new, we couldn’t find any good deals where we live) and got a much larger one for a much cheaper price simply because they didn’t have the size we wanted in stock when they said they did. We actually wanted the bigger one anyways but didn’t have enough money. I am so thankful for the extra space.
You were luckier than I was recently, but I was still lucky.
A friend brought over two roasts and a bag of other meat to put in our spare freezer. I just happened to go to get something out as the roasts were completely defrosted, but still cold (lucky!) I then had to call my friend to tell her (very sad). She came to collect them, cooked them, and her family ate roast meat every meal for a week!
This post was highlighted in the April 21 edition of “Gratitude Watch.”
http://www.danielbrenton.com/2009/04-21/gratitude-watch-2009-04-21/
Thank YOU for promoting the value of gratitude.
Stephanie, I would love to hear if you like the upright freezer better than the chest freezer. We have a HUGE chest freezer that is old as the hills and it eats up electricity. I’ve considered replacing it with an energy efficient model that is an upright. I have heard that the upright does not hold as much and that it is harder to keep the temperature consistent with the door opening and closing. With the chest freezer, the cold air stays at the bottom when you open it. BUT, I am so very tired of being on my head in the freezer and digging for stuff. So…let me know what you think! I’ll wait to make my purchase!
And I’m so glad you were blessed to catch that dead freezer just in time!
Oh I’m glad you caught it before the meat defrosted. The day I went into labor with the second daughter we found out that our garage freezer had died and the meat was mostly thawed. So we spent the majority of my labor cooking all the meat I had bought on sale while pregnant (it was suppose to be for meals after having the baby). Thankfully we had a planned home birth so we cooked meat up until I couldn’t focus anymore then shortly thereafter Emma was born and we had lots of meat to eat. : )