The Leak

We have an old house and an old refrigerator. Periodically, the refrigerator will spit out a medium sized puddle of cold water onto the floor. The floor, it should be noted consists of about 10 layers of alternating luon and linoleum, going back 100 years to who knows what at the bottom layer. Possibly dinosaurs. So, this floor is not, how shall we say, affected by a medium sized puddle of water. We, however, are. It's especially troubling since we have a puppy and a baby who are both still potty training. When you step in a puddle of water, in this house, you don't automatically think it's innocuous refrigerator drool. You think it's something more toxic. And sometimes you're right.

We just have assumed, lo these many months of puddling, that the cause was something very secret and unknowable. We thought we would finally have to get a new fridge. The problem with that is that the kitchen is old, with weirdly shaped original cabinets, and the fridge just barely barely squeezes into the hole that's there for it, and it's a tiny one. If we get a new one, we'll be replacing a tiny useless fridge when what we really want is a big giant monster fridge or at the very least, one with water in the door. To get that, we have to redo the kitchen. So getting a new fridge will cost about $20,000, and that's not going to happen, at least not this paycheck, know what I mean?

The other night, Dan actually *heard* the water trickling out of the fridge and he was moved to open the freezer and look in. This is something neither of us had ever done (except to get out tortellini, etc) because we just assumed this mysterious leak was deep in the inner private workings of the machine and we couldn't ever see what it is. Which is still partly true. What we DID see was that back in the back of the freezer, there is water dripping down onto a hot metal tube. This water sizzles, falls down onto the floor of the freezer where it then freezes again. I'm assuming that the puddle is formed when periodically a LOT of water falls down onto the hot metal tube, and there is too much to freeze again. The bottom of the freezer is like 2 inches of frozen drippage. Neat.

No one knows what to do about all of this. I just know that when I was making the children's breakfast this morning, a polite trickle of water made its way across each of my toes, one after the other, and I just thought, I've become used to this, which is kind of crazy.

In related news, did you know that it costs the government 1.4 cents to make each penny? Apparently the cost of zinc has gone up, and zinc is inside of pennies. Soon it will be more economical to melt the pennies down and sell them than to use them as legal tender. Don't try this at home, though, because the boiling point of copper is about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot! Woo!

Another tale of workbook subversion. He likes to answer questions with as few words as possible. If a phrase will suffice, don't use a sentence. If a word will suffice, don't use a phrase. Etc. Yesterday he surpassed even himself -- he used a status bar. The page was about making inferences and the question was "Why do you think Jeff made cookies today?" Benny drew a long rectangle with a black triangle in one end of it, then labelled that end MIN and the other end MAX and put the word HUNGER underneath it. This makes tons of sense if you play the Sims. Which Benny does. With relish.