I Made A Nifty

Our refrigerator has a water and ice dispenser on the front. The dispenser has a little catch-tray (it's way too shallow to be a catch-basin) which is supposed to hold drips. Well, the designers of this catch-tray figured without my kids. One ice cube gets dropped there, and bam, it's full to overflowing with water... which then drips down the front of the fridge. And I don't have time to keep on policing the water dispenser and wiping down the fridge.

So I made myself something nifty: a little absorbent pad to go there in the catch-tray.

I got the idea from the cool-ties we made for our adopted soldier. We put in each of them about a teaspoon of these polyacrylamide crystals. When they get wet, they swell up like fat sausages, and when they slowly dry out, they go back to the way they were before. And they will absorb a heck of a lot of water. So I thought, maybe I should make a little pillow and put a spoonful of those in it. Then instead of flowing down the front of the fridge, the water will get absorbed and then slowly evaporate away.

So I picked out a tasteful cotton print that would blend in unobtrusively with our fridge, and made a little half-moon shaped pillow containing polyacrylamide crystals, and set it in the catch-tray. And lo and behold, it WORKS! You can melt an ice cube on it, and it doesn't let a single drop go! And better yet, it doesn't look like crap like the catch-tray does after our hard water's been evaporating in it for a little while.