I use ice in my drinks. Like, a lot of ice. And by drinks I mean mainly water, which is what I drink most of the time. I think it was after my pregnancies that water that was anything less than glacial became revolting.
Having a fridge with an ice maker always seemed impossibly luxurious and decadent. Then at some point I read or heard that they tend to break down and cause problems, so I put it out of my mind entirely. We used ice cube trays like normal people, except unlike normal people I tended to go through two trays of ice a day, between my home water glasses and my work water bottles, and cracking the ice cubes out of the trays was really hard on my hands, which pregnancy had done a number on.
When we decided on our new fridge I didn't even realize at first that it came with an ice maker - not the one on the front of the door, but one inside that filled up a bin. Since it was a feature of most of the fridges, I just went with it and felt like I had won a magical lottery. I was giddy with ice. I was Elsa in her frozen kingdom, but less sad and isolated (sometimes). I strew ice like diamonds in my path. Every drink was arctic.
Then the inevitable happened. The fridge stopped making that beautiful clunking noise that meant it was birthing little cubes of joy. The ice level in the bin went down, down, down, until it was empty. We tried a few things to fix it. We found out that it would be really expensive to get someone else to fix it. I resigned myself to going back to ice cube trays like a chump.
A few months later there was a tornado nearby that knocked our power out for sixty hours. We coped well enough. Half a day after the power came back on, my husband came upstairs bearing an oblong sliver of ice like the crown jewels. We were back, baby! For a while, anyway. When it packed up again, I tried defrosting the fridge for a day, but it didn't work. It is, of course, the first worldiest of all first world problems, so I shrugged and resumed the regular routine.
The next Christmas, Matt bought me an ice maker. It lived downstairs in the laundry room, and didn't make a ton of ice at a time, and the ice came out wet, so I would go down, take out the ice and store it in the chest freezer, bring up the frozen chunk ice that was currently in the chest freezer, smash it with a meat tenderizer, and put it in the upstairs freezer. It was fine - better than cracking ice cube trays.
We have theorized that in the winter when everything is cold, somehow the water line freezes, and the fridge can't make ice. But then in the spring, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, my ice comes back, a precious gift that is perhaps more meaningful because of its impermanence.
6 comments:
I also love ice and deeply dislike water without copious ice. Therefore I empathize intensely with your ice maker struggles. I do love the idea of a magical seasonal ice making cycle.
This is going to gross you out but I drink room temperature water. Am I a monster? Maybe!
I'm a cyclical ice person. It's a must in the summer, optional in the winter.
When I moved into my rental house, I was excited to see the in door ice maker and water dispenser, and less so when I discovered how crappy it was. I had mystery puddles of water on the floor, which I discovered were from ice cubes getting stuck in the exit chute and then melting. Then the ice maker stopped working, so no problem, I put in a work order with my landlord and the replacement that they installed overflows the tray so that it makes huge chunks of ice instead of cubes, which of course makes the whole thing useless, and the maintenance guy told me that there is no fix for this. So lol, for now I'm back to making ice manually like a chump.
While reading this post I kept thinking, she needs an ice maker! But then you got one! Now I'm thinking you need a really really good ice maker, that makes tons of ice and works all the time. You need the super deluxe model!
I drink hot drinks in the morning, but my afternoon I want all my drinks ice cold. Why are icy cold drinks so delicious???!!
We have a working ice maker, but Beth doesn't like the taste of the ice it makes, so we also have an ice cube tray in the freezer. Belt and suspenders...
I rarely use ice in my water (or anything else) it’s room temp right out of our RO tank. Our fridge is equipped for water & ice but we had two floods from water links breaking so don’t use it. The first was MAJOR as we were gone all weekend. The second we caught right away.
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