Friday, June 09, 2006

Defrosting my freezer and having random thoughts about anything BUT the task at hand

Errrr, hmmmmm, well...

"Huck Finn Day" tomorrow, something sponsored by the local Kiwanis Club in which "fishing safety" lessons are taught by handing out cane-poles to 3-to-14-year olds while cranky old guys walk around with snips to remove hooks from eye-lids and ear-lobes. Of course my brood will be there because I figure they're going to get pierced eventually, and well, we might as well do it on the Kiwanis' dime.

If I can get my hands on a digi-cam, you'll see carnage in full techno-gore. My own digi-cam seems to have evaporated into the ether as if Karma determined it was never mine to begin with but there you have it.

OK, what else? Movies I really want to see. I still haven't seen "The Da Vinci Code," but I'm sort of "so what" on it. I read the book and it was an OK beach read; my problem was that I kept solving the riddles about 10 pages before the so-called "experts" could figure them out and found myself screaming (in my head), "WTF, ya' numbskulls, get a goddamn clue!". To be fair, I'd read Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" several years before, a much superior novel (if a little prolix at times) and so a lot of what Dan Brown was getting at was old news to me (I'd also read Robert Anton Wilson's hilarious "Illuminatus!" trilogy many years before so, yeah, I had both arms filled up with wacky conspiracy crapola).

Not "wacky conspiracy crapola" (despite what the Dunce Confederacy at Faux News says - notice how they attack Gore and not his facts?!?), my dance card is checked when it comes to "An Inconvenient Truth". Unfortunately, I have to wait until June 30 before it opens here and then, judging by per-screen tallies, I'll have to camp out for a ticket but I'll be there. I have to be there beacause, as Roger Ebert said in his review,
In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

"An Inconvenient Truth" opens (here) the same day as "Superman Returns" and although Zeke is HUGE into Superman (I showed him the trailers online which has resulted in daily encores, ad nauseum), he's still only 3 and can wait until well past the madness of opening night. Besides, we can satisfy him and his sisters with a trips to see "Cars" and "Over the Hedge" - heh, wisdom comes with age, dontchaknow.

I'm also dying to see "A Prairie Home Companion", somewhat because I love to listen to it on NPR (which, BTW, GOP scum want to do away with - along with PBS - while they hand BILLIONS back to people who don't need that money, anyway; I tell my kids, "Bush and the Rethugs want to KILL Elmo and Big Bird!") but mostly because I *love* Robert Altman and I'm certain he's done another "Nashville" with this movie.

The Fridge? Came home from a long weekend of playing handyman for The Babe and found the milk spoilt, no cold at all (and I needed that after a long weekend with The Babe!). Tweaking the thermostat a bit didn't help; a can of coke was luke warm and the mayo went into the trash (along with several other items that had turned ugly in the heat). I turned the dial to "freeze? we got yer freeze right here" and that did cool things, somewhat, yet not enough to feel like I'd be safe holding onto milk a couple weeks past its 'sell by' date. At that point, there was nowhere else to turn but to my friends at Google.

Considering that the freezer was still working and I could hear the compressor humming, the site I landed on advised I defrost the fucker and clean the coils beneath the refrigerator. As I type, everything's packed into a couple of Coleman ice-chests while pans of hot water simmer in the freezer compartment. I went out and bought a coil brush (who knew that a brush was invented just for cleaning the dust of your coils?) and cleaned tons of dust from beneath the fridge. I'm not exagerating - TONS. Dust balls bigger than my fist, big-ass grenades of dust. Ugh.

Then again, the pile of magnet-letters, crayons, and kid's artwork that got blown beneath the fridge could have also have been at work at killing the cool. We'll see. The ice is out of the freezer, everything's wiped down, the fridge is plugged back in and hopefully, the big white box in my kitchen is something more than some big stupid, metallic coffin.

That's a sincere hope. My landlady is - oh, Christ, that's a whole other post - in no position to replace my fridge. She's in no position to change a tire but as I said...

But who am I to talk? I'm still not ready to give a "theme" for mixmania! (which should culminate in August) but I'm thinking "Dog Days" or "Beach Music" - any input here? I plan to make the announcement Monday or Tuesday so get busy with the comments. Let me know what you think and hope my fridge gets chill.

3 comments:

KC said...

I'll give you credit for doing the brushing. I think I'd have stuck with a lot of vacuuming. Yea, you want free flow of air through there AND you want a good surface for the heat to be emitted and somehow or other flow away from the fridge. OTOH, you might have a compressor motor dying on you. No way to fix that but replace it.

Kelly said...

The Illuminatus Trilogy! Thanks so much for the reminder- I had forgotten about them and how much I liked them, so I guess its time for a reread!

trusty getto said...

Can't help you with the fridge - I'd just go out and buy a used one from somebody rather than come out behind taking a day off work and having some guy tell me it needs to be "recharged" with freon or something like that.

I must admit that I loved Foucault's Pendulum. I probably should give it another read. What a great premise for a book.