Freezer life
It's like a fairy godmother waved her wand, only I'm the fairy godmother and it was just me cleaning my danged garage.
An update on tackling the messy, messy garage to make way for a new freezer:
We did it!
We got the garage cleared out for the freezer with time to spare. She's a beauty! It's a GE 14.1ft3 upright frost-free freezer, and I love her. I have named her Freezey, and sometimes I poke my head into the garage just to look at her. When I open her, she chirps and lights up, like she's happy to see me, too.
I sang this song over and over on the day Freezey arrived. My Freezey spells her name differently, but it still works.
I was a little worried that I might feel an urge to fill up all that free space, and load up on frozen foods that would just... sit in there forgotten, forever. But that hasn't been the case. The new freezer is such a pleasure to use, we're actually eating what's in there.
Something that's surely helped integrate Freezey into our family life: I created an inventory system. I cut three sheets of cardstock in half and laminated them, making six little dry-erase boards to hang on the front of Freezey, for six categories: Meals & Snacks, Breads & Pastry, Meats, Ingredients, Desserts, and Miscellaneous. Each item in the freezer has tally marks to keep track of the quantity. I found a magnetic tray to hold ultra-fine dry erase markers and a teeny little sponge for an eraser.
Whenever one of us takes something from the freezer, we wipe off a tally mark, snap a picture of the lists, and add it to a shared photo album. That way, the whole family can see what's in the freezer without going down to the basement. I honestly expected the inventory system to fall apart after about a week of use, but so far it's been working quite well, knock wood.
The freezer has already leveled up my baking. I have the room to stock up on different kinds of bread, and I was able to tackle two big baking projects with back-to-back due dates by doing one in advance and freezing it. Turbo baking. [A low rumble, as fire blasts out of thrusters behind me, or however turbo works, I guess.]
A side effect of clearing the garage for the freezer: we also cleared out enough space to add another huge set of shelves in the garage. That gave us a logical spot for all the bottles of cleaning solutions and whatnot that have been scattered under sinks and in weird corners of the garage. (We had five bottles and jugs of Windex, that's just silly, and three giant jugs of antifreeze, all unopened???). It's freeing up all kinds of usable space around the house.
One of my favorite YouTube channels, Technology Connections, has a whole series of videos about heat pumps. This one gives a good summary of why I'm excited to have one.
Cleaning the garage also let us cross off something that's been sitting on our adulting to-do list for years—and it's a biggie. Last week, we swapped out our natural gas furnace for a new electric heat pump system. It's far more energy efficient, it's better for the environment, and we get air conditioning. Whaaaat?? Air conditioning! I've never had air conditioning before! (Unless you count the crappy in-window AC I had in my Los Angeles apartment, and I do not, because it didn't do anything but make noise.)
The whole enterprise—clearing the garage, clearing the freezer, clearing other parts of the house, clearing off the to-do list—it feels like breathing deeply when you didn't even realize you'd been struggling to take breaths. It's nice.
I'll end with some important news: I found out about these churro-flavored ice cream mochis, they're Bubbies brand, I've only seen this flavor at Sprouts. You need these, they're unearthly good.
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