Unintended Consequences

The Newsy Neighbour Magazine

February Issue 112

www.thenewsyneighbour.com

Article Provided By:Peter Tindall

My wife and I were sitting in the living room one -23°C Sunday morning and I had what I thought was a great idea. “Pat,” said I, “since it’s $@*&#% cold outside, let’s defrost the chest freezer in the basement. It’s been a couple of years and we can organize it and make more room.” I really shouldn’t have ideas.

We have a very large chest freezer and worse, we cannot resist a bargain. If 3 chickens are on sale, we buy 3 chickens, eat one, and 2 go into the basement freezer “for later”. Remarkably enough, we always manage to get them in there. Since there’s only 2 of us at home, we really don’t need to buy 3 chickens but what the heck, “they were cheap.”

So, we pull everything out, carry it upstairs, and put it outside. As we get deeper into the freezer, the contents morph from food into archeological artifacts. Who knew we had a round roast from 2006? I think that was a good year for beef (is there ever a bad year for beef?). On the bright side, the Glenbow Museum has expressed an interest in displaying a cut of meat that didn’t cost more than my first car. We also found enough frozen Saskatoon berries to make pie for the entire Russian army. Time to stop picking them, perhaps?

And now the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head. In order to fit all this stuff into the freezer in the first place, we have been shaping the unfrozen food to the shape of the space we’re sticking it into. Have you ever tried to reassemble 300 or so weirdly shaped frozen items into a 22-cubic foot rectangular block? It ain’t happening. 5 hours later, there’s less in the freezer, which is still full to the brim and still disorganized, and we have a couple of coolers worth of food out in the garage. If a chinook hits, we’re going to have to really start eating. Maybe I can lease a couple of teenagers. Not only that, in order to get rid of the saskatoons, there’s going to be some serious pie happening. I’m probably going to gain 10 pounds, plus we’ll need some ice cream. I think it’s on sale. I’m sure we can get it into the freezer.

Peter Tindall