Day 57 / 365 - refrigerator
Originally uploaded by JasonRogers and used under Creative Commons licensing.
I got my power back on on Thursday, around 7:30. Today (Saturday) was the first day I bothered to clean out the fridge, when I realized I had too many containers of milk and only one of them was good. It's never good to play Russian roulette with dairy products. My refrigerator is now cleaner than it's been, oh, since I moved in (with a pleasant bleachy scent!) and I realize it looks like I'm a single guy in college. The contents of my freezer and refrigerator are as follows:
Freezer: empty. Nada. Nothing. I wish I could turn it off, because I have nothing to freeze. I lost mostly vegetables, chicken stock, and veal and chicken bones that I was planning to use to make into stock.
Refrigerator: soda (diet Mountain Dew Code Red, diet Coke, diet Sprite), beer (Corona), soy sauce, Power Ade Zero (Strawberry, Terry's).
I haven't really bothered to do any grocery shopping, aside from a little shopping at Findlay today. We have pork butt for smoking tomorrow after Oktoberfest, and bacon for BLT, but that's it. It's sparse in there!
Did you guys have problems with food storage during the blackout? What did you lose? Heck, do you still not have power? Let me know!
(Photo originally uploaded by JasonRogers and used under Creative Commons licensing.)
8 comments:
i was lucky to have not lost much at all. my parents are not too far away and they had only a short power outage so i was able to use their storage. but believe me, i was worried. i can honestly say if i didn't have a freezer (and a deep freeze) full of food i might have handled this entire situation far better. i threw out all dairy products and perishables everything else went to mom's. it was hard, but small in comparison to others.
also nice meeting you last week. :)
we got our power back finally last night (friday). like you, my refrigerator has never been cleaner. and my husband took care of it while i was work today. good for me. i told him to save the butter, the wine, and the lemon juice. everything else was pitched. luckily, we were able to take a bunch of our expensive meat and shrimp freezer stuff to brian's sister's and stash it there. but our deep freeze finally defrosted completely thursday...i could tell by the trail of water across the basement floor.
glad things are returning to (relative) normal.
seriously, beth just left my house. i guess we see our priorities.
As soon as the power went out, I took duct tape and taped all around the freezer, to seal it better. And also, to keep J from just ambling around and opening it up.
Worked like a charm. Over a day later, you couldn't even tell the fridge was off.
Julie, glad to hear your power is back, we never lost power but it made me think, the next time we have some electric work done I am going to have Kelly look into the possibility of installing a transfer switch so I can hook up a generator. My concern is losing power for any period of time beyond a few hours in dead winter. It does not take a very big gen to handle the basics, 3000 or so watt to do the furnace, hot water (gas) and a few lights and chargers, the problem is justifying the cost for something you hopefully may never use. I think I could do it for around $800, 3 to 4 for the switch and install and $600 for a gen, another thought is to put in the transfer and then buying the gen the first time you need it, if you can find one!
My first concern was the BEER. By time I finished that and realized that we weren't losing power it was all good.
I'm a little disappointed now after reading about everyone else's accounts, it would have been nice to throw everything out all at once and start over fresh.
Didn't lose power at home in Hyde Park. My office near St Rita's is still down though.
Three 5lb venison roasts on the freezer door at the office thawed and dripped blood. They're in the dumpster now. Another 60lbs of venison steaks and tenderloins were quadruple wrapped and dense-packed in the main body of the freezer. They remained frozen at their cores, with minor thawing around the edges. They've all gone to my deep-freeze at home. I'll wind up trimming and wasting the thawed parts and grinding the rest for jerky.
Thankfully deer season opens in a few weeks. It will be nice to fill the freezer again.
Luckily I was out of town for a full week before Ike, so most of the perishable items were already removed from my fridge.
We also were returned to power within 30 hours on my street, so by not opening the freezer, I was able to salvage my left-over tofu stirfry.
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