Introducing the Vortex 3000

Everything comes in threes, right?

We finally gave up on our puddle-maker fridge and decided to buy a new one. The old one was literally freezing inside, but if I turned it down it had no coldness whatsoever. The freezer would try to defrost and the water would freeze inside the pipe, causing it to back up into the fridge and make a very unattractive waterfall that splashed onto every shelf and into every drawer, where before it froze it would rot vegetables, stick containers to shelves, etc. We finally got fed up with frostbitten celery and ice-covered leftovers, and so we ordered a new side-by-side fridge from Home Depot. It was bigger than our old fridge, and was black instead of white (see? we're not prejudiced!) but it had one thing our old fridge did not, which was a water and ice dispenser.

Now for those who are not familiar with fridge features, a water and ice dispenser requires that the fridge be hooked up to some sort of water source. This requires pipes, and pipes require a plumber, at least if like FH you're not particularly handy with pipes.

So the fridge arrived Saturday, and on Monday came the plumber to put the water line in. When I was taking all the stuff out from under the kitchen sink, I noticed that there was a not-so-thin layer of, well, crud all over everything. Just nondescript, brownish, gooey crud. The plumber took a quick look around while he was under there hooking up the fridge water line, and he said one of our drain pipes was cracked. It seemed like it'd be pretty easy to replace, so I told FH about it and he said he'd handle it.

Well, FH cut the little flange off the end of the pipe when he was shortening it, and after he got done trying to fix all that, he discovered the source of the crud: the garbage disposal had a big old crack in it. It had been sounding a little funny lately, but I'd never had time to investigate it, because the kitchen during daylight hours is always full of kids eating. They eat breakfast, followed by second breakfast, morning snack, elevensies, lunch, after-lunch snack, afternoon snack, pre-dinner snack, dinner, dessert, second dessert (if they can con the other parent into believing they haven't had dessert yet), and pre-bedtime snack. This is the natural consequence of having boys. And the other natural consequence of having curious boys is that if you open up the Forbidden Cupboard far enough to allow them a glimpse of the wondrous chemicals and poisons stored therein, they will all crowd around you so tightly that any work will be impossible.

So now after getting a new fridge and having the water line installed, here comes a new garbage disposal. FH got up early this morning and went back to Home Depot to get the parts he needed, and installed a new Badger 3/4 horsepower garbage disposal, to replace the 1/3 horsepower one that had cracked. I tried it out today, and this thing sucks. Literally. It sucked the potato soup down into it, right from the sink. I don't think I've ever had a garbage disposal that would do that before. I've always had to push the food down into it. It's nice!

So now I dub the new garbage disposal the Vortex 3000. If you want a garbage disposal that literally sucks, get one!