Summer has arrived in earnest here, and with it, the antiquated air conditioner which comes with my furnished apartment. Fortunately, it has not been super-hot (yet) with the exception of one or two days, so I have not (yet) had to use the air conditioner on a regular basis. I’m grateful for this, as it is a bit… well, let’s just say loud – and only partially effective.
The view from the windows of my studio apartment is drastically different than it was a year ago; my landlords had a couple of the pine trees that once sheltered the front porch taken down a few weeks ago, so there is much more light – and much less privacy. On the up side, I do get a nice breeze through the front window now, in front of which I can usually be found working at the small kitchen table that doubles as my desk, with a small fan clipped to the windowsill to help usher in the fresh air. On the down side, the extra light tends to wake me up earlier than I’d like most days, and (as the window does not have a screen) it sometimes feels like every insect in New York City has stopped by at least once for a visit. (The number of mosquito bites I’ve been sporting so far this summer rivals the number I’d expect from a deep woods camping trip.)
I will say, however, that I am delighted by the number of fireflies that inhabit this city. I’m sure I learned about fireflies watching Sesame Street, or maybe I read about them in a book, but I grew up wondering what it would be like to live in the country and catch fireflies in a jar. I have absolutely no desire to catch them now (they are much prettier when you cannot see them up close) – but it is lovely to watch them in the evenings; they make the experience of walking home at dusk almost magical.
Cooking remains a challenge in my tiny kitchen as temperatures rise, but I am working hard towards a healthier diet and eating out less, so I’ve invested in some nice pans and utensils, and have started making a point of cooking more on the weekends, so I can have healthy leftovers to take to work all week long. This has led to a lot of stir-fry and salad experiments, most of which have turned out fairly well (I liked this one a lot). I plan to ditch the antiquated microwave in favor of a nice convection/toaster oven so I can up my game a bit more, but I am waiting for cooler temps and a good sale, and am planning to window-shop for a nice cart to put it on, so I can free up some more counter space. In the meantime, I’ve been having tiny-kitchen-in-Brooklyn adventures of another sort.
The refrigerator in my apartment is quite small; it’s not exactly a mini-fridge of the dorm room variety, but it’s pretty much the next step up. It has a freezer of sorts – a small shelf at the top with a door that closes over it – but the one time I bought a frozen burrito and put it in the freezer, the burrito was thawed the next day – so the freezer isn’t quite useful as an actual freezer. (I am both heartened and saddened by the drastic effect this has had on my ice cream consumption since moving to New York.)
However, the one thing said “freezer” is very good at is building up frost. I put a freezer pack in it late last summer, and by December, so much frost had built up around the freezer pack that it was clear that pack was not coming out again until I defrosted the freezer.
The thing is, I had never actually defrosted a freezer on my own or on purpose. The closest experience I have is a memory of the time our refrigerator died when I was a kid, and all I remember is that there was a lot of food to relocate into coolers – the actual accidental defrosting of the freezer isn’t a prevalent memory. So I didn’t know how to do it, and between the vague notion that it would likely be a fair bit of work and the fact that it was probably going to involve melting ice in a tiny kitchen with antique wood flooring, I kept putting it off – until last Friday.
And let’s be honest – I did not suddenly decide to be industrious and responsible and defrost the freezer because it needed doing. The only reason I defrosted the freezer on Friday is because while I was sleeping on Thursday night, the amount of frost in the freezer had built up so much that it actually pushed the refrigerator door open. And the door refused to shut again.
So I unplugged the refrigerator, packed as much food as I could into my tiny insulated lunch bag, stuck a towel on the top shelf of the refrigerator, and hoped for the best. (It is worth noting that as I am typing, auto-correct just tried to change “towel” into “bowl,” and this might be the only time I’ve ever considered auto-correct to be smarter than I am.)
The melting frost soaked through 1.5 large beach towels and a couple of smaller towels before I was able to break the rest of the ice into chunks I could toss into the sink to finish melting. It took exactly eight hours from the point of my refrigeration disaster discovery to the relocation of some very wet towels to my shower, and at the end of those eight hours, I experienced a blend of feelings ranging from victory to sadness. I have now successfully defrosted a freezer by myself (victory!) but I do not have in-house laundry, and wet towels are very heavy (sadness!).
Thank goodness for my dad’s luggage cart, and a laundromat with wifi. I was able to schlep my wet laundry up the street (along with the rest of the laundry that needed doing anyway) with less effort than carrying a laundry bag full of soaking wet towels would have otherwise entailed – and I was able to wrap up my task list for the day while waiting for everything to dry. So at least all’s well that ends well.
Lessons learned?
So how do these minor life events qualify as “adventures” in Brooklyn? Well – they happened here, obviously. And while “adventure” could be considered a stretch – I think it really depends on your perspective. As Rob Bell asked once: “Is life an adventure you get to go on every day, or a collection of trials you have to get through?”
The adventures we have on a day-to-day basis may not always be epic, but hey, I’d far rather go on an adventure than view the events of my day as a collection of trials. Life is far too short to look at it that pessimistically.
Find the funny, look for joy, and view everything you can as an adventure. There’s no telling what might happen next.
More to come,
Happy
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