Sputnik

Hopefully, within the next few weeks, we will be getting a new fridge. This sounds nice under any circumstances but especially if you know the background on the one at our flat. I call it Sputnik. Sputnik is a fridge in the academic sense. It is a white box that opens (no light on the inside though), the freezer area has ice in it (not the kind that you would want to put in a beverage but it is solid water) and we generally put our food in there. It is only a few degrees colder than the temperature of our kitchen so it really doesn't have any practical purpose. Think Mitch Hedberg's negative name for the smoke detector (the 9-volt battery slowly-drainer) only instead of a small battery at a leisurely pace, this bad boy sucks up energy like no one's business without yielding any useful result. Did I mention that it happens to be in Russian? Not only that, but it is Stalin era circa 1957 technology. Yeah, this reminds me every day that I am in a former Communist country. We actually had Artem, one of our friends from Russia, look at it to decipher the knob and turn it to make it colder so it's maybe light jacket weather on the inside. Note the amount of ice that has built up on the outside of the "freezer." This is maybe two weeks after Melanie went all candles and hair dryers on it to completely defrost it. Ice started forming the very same day. Oddly enough, I think I'll miss it a bit. It was one of the little idiosyncrasies that made our flat special and different. Don't worry, even without Sputnik, our flat will not be cookie cutter. I don't think that will ever be a risk of that.