Rubenerd

There are certain dependencies; if you will; for living and participating in our modern, contemporary society. I don’t like those terms in this context; they feel as politically charged as “civilised” does. How different people live their lives around the world does not make them any more or less valid or precious. For the sake of my otherwise silly blog post, I hope you’ll indulge me.

“I call the big one Bitey”

One such dependency is the usage of certain whitegoods in lieu of physical effort. Those of us lucky enough to have them don't spend hours over a washboard, we have a washing machine. We don't have to smack all our carpets, we have vacuum cleaners. We have tasty, fancy, overpriced, unreliable Italian espresso machines in lieu of physical grinders and plungers. And we certainly don't have to cart huge blocks of ice into our houses to keep our perishables in an edible state.

Ancillary to each of these is the apparent requirement that we take them for granted. They are such critical parts of our lives, and allow us the time to do other things. And yet, as disgustingly cliché as it may sound, we don't realise what we have until they're gone.

Something as simple as refrigerated food, or internet access, or a fan to circulate air to cool us down. As soon as I'm without these things, I instantly feel as though I've been transported to the stone age where I have Buckley's chance of catching a mammoth to feed my future family with. Wait, past family.

Let's cool one. Oh no wait, we can't

Our fridge has been on the veritable fritz for the last few months, but yesterday it finally kicked the bucket for more than 12 hours. We didn’t have ice cubes as much as we had slushy puddles in trays. Our Christmas leg of ham was… shall we say… precariously positioned on Spoilage Cliff.

After rummaging through our de facto basement for a couple of Eskis™, we had the essentials out and wedged between the ice blocks we had the good fortune of not taking out of the freezer before. Armed with some bags of ice from down the road (see paragraph 2!), we had our foodstuffs chilled to a satisfactory state. Or at least, until morning.

What's the point of this post? Did we end up getting a new fridge? What happened to the food? Who was booted off the island? As of tonight, these are all unresolved support tickets in my life system.

What I can say: I'm darn pleased I was able to wash my clothes in the machine this morning, and that I had internet access to post this. If you've got some of these things too, think about your luck for a bit. I think sometimes it really helps to remind ourselves.