Lettuce hope for a mall-free solution soon

YOU can defrost lettuce.

This culinary breakthrough came about because the fridge broke and the lettuce froze.

The milk freezes, the sarmies made overnight for lunch the next day freeze and the water dispenser is a block of ice. Eggs are cracking. I think the thermostat is broken.

Which raised the question: why the hell can things not just last? Even the stupid Kardashians TV show had a longer lifespan.

The same goes for kettles and toasters. I have a spare kettle because I’m Grumpier Than Eeyore if I can’t have that first cup of coffee.

My parents’ fridge lasted more than 20 years. We kids spent so much time going in and out of it to see if something miraculously appeared to eat it’s frozen in time. I remember its name.

Now, in nearly 20 years in the home of the couch, I’ve had to replace the fridge three times.

The people who came to “fix” them all said the same thing: it’ll cost you just a bit more to replace the broken one than it would to repair. One man performed a small something and that fridge survived. He spoke a foreign language so I don’t know what he did, but I’ve given him a call to come and have another look.

Now that the fridge is giving me the cold shoulder, I’m expecting the washing machine and microwave to down tools. They always break in quick succession, probably because they all had to be replaced when the last ones all collapsed at the same time. It’s like a conspiracy of appliances.

And it can lead to desperate moves.

One Thursday evening, the microwave gave its last wave. The dogs’ food (back in the day when I cooked for two weeks and froze it) was half defrosted. Hungry eyes followed my every move as I did my ballet steps over their bodies in a little kitchen. Much boiled water later, they crunched through their ice-particled dinner.

With so much food left in the freezer, I had to get a new one the next day, before the weekend.

The next day just happened to be Black Friday.

Malls are weapons created by the gods to make you crazy and are to be avoided at all costs. If I can’t get something I want outside a mall, I suddenly never needed or wanted it. I haven’t been to one of the largest malls in the southern hemisphere and some of its large cousins have been visited twice or thrice. I always get lost in mall parking areas. I can’t imagine actually wanting to go to one.

Black Friday is their High Holiday. My lovely supermarket is sort of a strip mall; you don’t have to lift, elevate, pack padkos to get to it.

A Black Friday visit was my special hell. Parking was insane. Once you were lucky enough to find an outer space berth, the trolley was the next challenge. People were actually fighting over them. Hundreds streamed out loaded up with Nasa-sized TVs.

Finally, after doing the Big Walk to the outer edges, joy! I found a trolley. We queued to get into the lift and tarversed the floor, trolley to ankle. Oh, for some pre-Covid social distancing. Down and out (literally, by this stage) I made it to the doors. And was barred entry because this trolley did not belong to the store I was headed into.

If you ever want to see a grown woman cry, do this to her.

I eventually found the right trolley. Straight in to the microwave section, specials all sold out, took 10 minutes to find the cheapest one that met the requirements and joined the madness of the check-out queue.

The whole thing was three hours or so of torture.

When the washing machine and now quite-old microwave pack up, at least there’s an online option.

In the meantime, lettuce hope the fridge can be fixed.