No fridge, no shirt, no service

 We have moved into the new house. There is a mountain of cardboard boxes behind me as I type and I still haven't found my comb. You can imagine what my hair looks like.

 When we arrived on Thursday in the U-Haul, we jumped out of the truck with the new house keys and excitedly unlocked the door. Everything was clean, spacious, lovely!--then we looked at the kitchen and realized there was no refrigerator. Say what? Now, we have a fridge at our old place and technically could have shrugged and said, "Oh well. Let's go get our old one," but here's the real story:

 When we moved into that house, it came furnished. At first we were thrilled, not having much furniture and not having money for new appliances. Months later, we realized the fridge was making a sound a little like a garbage truck and was leaking enough water to support a small family of ducks. Still, we limped along until we had the money to buy a new one. Armed with a limited amount of cash, we set out for the Big 3 (Sears, Lowe's and Home Depot) and found a modest unit on sale and set up delivery. We went home, measured, and realized it wouldn't even fit through the front door. We measured again. It wouldn't even fit through the front door even if we removed the door as well as the doors of the refrigerator! So back to the store we went, to buy a smaller utilitarian unit that boasted the following bells and whistles: a shelf, a lightbulb, and enough cubic feet to properly store and chill a gallon of milk, a week's worth of yogurt and enough produce to rot by the end of the week, reminding me that I'm a terrible household manager who doesn't feed her family enough salad.

 Not wanting to go through the whole removal of house and appliance doors again, plus navigating up and down a set of stairs to get the fridge out of the old house and into the new, we now have to wait a week for the landlord to deliver his old fridge (which he didn't think we'd need) to this house. In the meantime, I have a cooler which holds a head of lettuce for my bearded dragon, 3 Coke Zero's, a fistful of cheese slices, and a tub of Earth Balance butter. I can say with a new-found authority that no, you cannot feed your family without a fridge. Don't even try to convince me that pasta and canned soup is adequate or that plenty of people in the world live without refrigeration. I miss Greek yogurt, chilled almond milk and Morningstar Farms veggie sausage! 5 days and counting...