More anxiety-causing than trying on a bikini – seeing if your fridge fits.

My fridge has been limping along in questionable health for nearly two years now. At least, that’s when I first started hearing it rev itself up like Herbie the Love Bug at odd hours of the night. And that’s right around the same time I’d periodically open the freezer to find my tray of ice cubes liquified. Probably not a great sign for refrigeration health.

While I tend to me meticulous in keeping  my place clean, I have somewhat loose standards when it comes to what I’ll test with my gut. I regularly eat products that are well past their expiration date (that’s a marketing ploy, people!), like the package of refrigerator biscuits I ate last week that allegedly went bad back in January 2013. (For the record: They were about as bad as Michael Jackson.)

[Also for the record, I just deleted a horrible pedophile joke. See – I do know how to self-censor!]

I tell you this by way of explaining how I’ve managed to rely on an unreliable refrigerator for two years. I cultivated a taste for freezer burn and began to think it was normal to scrape an inch of ice off anything before cooking it. I came to think of the sticks in popsicle bags as “stirrers” since the contents of the bag were always malformed and sometimes still liquified.

But today is a new dawn for fridge health in my house. Sometime between 10-2, the kind people from Home Depot will bring me a new appliance.

Until then, I will slowly be forming an ulcer as I check and re-check the measurements, noting that my current fridge is wedged into place so tightly that there’s literally no room to pass a piece of paper between it and the wall or the counter that serve as its boundaries. I now notice that even the baseboard has been pried from that section of the fall to slide it into place.

If my fridge were a vehicle.

Oh, I’ve long known it was going to be a tight squeeze. In fact, that’s what prevented me from replacing it years ago. I’ve sat at my laptop multiple times, scrutinizing the dimensions of products, comparing them to the fridge in my kitchen and – like the vote counters in Florida – have walked away repeatedly, deciding it too close to call.

But finally, blindly, about three weeks ago I decided to work up my courage and just pull the trigger. So here I sit, armed with a shoehorn, a crowbar, a vat of grease and stack of twenties (for bribing/tipping the delivery guys), hoping the appliance gods are on my side today.

Tags: anxiety, Home Depot, humor, refrigerator