It's always good to be home after a long trip, and Monday was no exception. Jaron had fallen asleep in his car seat on the way home, so even though I was drooping with exhaustion myself, I took the opportunity to do a few things, like check our animals and bring the suitcases inside (G arrived home about an hour after me).
I went into the laundry room to turn on the water- due to a leaky outdoor faucet we had shut off the water to the whole house while we were gone (our chore people turned it on and off every time they came). I noticed a strange smell in the laundry room, kind of like rotten eggs. That didn't make any sense because the diapers had all been washed and hung to dry before we left, and all of the eggs had been cleaned out of the incubator. Nothing should have been stinky in there.
Uh oh, water on the floor. It was near our upright freezer, not close to anything that could be leaking.
My first thought was that one of us had left the freezer door open a tiny bit (it happened once before 🤦♀️). But the freezer opened normally. I shut it without registering the puddle of water at the bottom. Oh no!
It's a pretty old freezer, so I thought it had died. What actually happened: it was plugged into the same breaker as our water softener. Because we had shut the water off to the whole house, when the water softener went to run, it blew the breaker because there wasn't any water to run through it. The breaker obviously shut off power to the freezer. So our entire vacation, everything in the freezer was melting.
Thankfully, it wasn't packed full. I threw a lot of vegetables on the compost pile, which the chickens appreciated. The last of my stored breastmilk was also dumped on the compost pile. It was expired, and I wasn't planning to feed it to Jaron, but I had plans to try making soap / lotion with it. Bummer.
The meat was the worst loss. Thankfully, some of the meat still had ice on it, and we separated that from the totally thawed items. Our dog Jip will feast like a king! We actually refroze some of the completely thawed meat to be labeled and fed to Jip another time.
G and I were both so exhausted, we only took the time to move the items into the fridge or compost pile. The cleaning had to wait for another day. Our basement isn't baby-proofed, which made cleaning it out quite tricky with Jaron underfoot. Finally I brought the baby tower to the laundry room and forced him to hang out in there. Not his favorite thing in the world.
I tried magna tiles on the drier (worked for a while), soapy water and bath toys in the utility sink (he ate the bubbles), and finally snacks on the drier. Between all of those, I got the job done. 🥳
What do you mean I can't eat soap?
Did one wipe down with soapy water, then a second wipe down with vinegar/vodka as a disinfectant.
Hopefully good as new!
No comments:
Post a Comment