I am exhausted and it is only 4:30 in the afternoon!  We woke up to a refrigerator that wasn't working.  We had noticed that it was building up frost in the freezer lately, and that is not normal.  This morning you could see that the frozen stuff wasn't frozen, the fridge was merely cool, and the temperature controls were reading "error."  Not good.

So after crying my eyeballs out, I set about to getting things in order.  (just a little stress as I can imagine all our grocery money for the month being spent on repairing or replacing the fridge)  I went and bought two bags of ice - one for the freezer and one for the fridge, to hopefully stave off losing all our food.  I did a search on craigslist and found some possible substitute fridges that were $200 or less and appeared in good shape.  I also found a small upright freezer for $25 which we are picking up tonight.  I am excited about that find (the silver lining) since now I can freeze up a bunch of excess produce from the garden and the five chickens after processing - yeah!

I finally found a repairman who could come out today, and not next Tuesday.  At first he was telling me I was going to have to empty the whole fridge and defrost the freezer and then he would be able to see what was going on.  I sat down with Trinity and prayed while he continued to check the fridge.  I prayed that he would be able to fix it today and that it wouldn't cost us a lot of money.

The final verdict was that we had a freon leak - we were half empty of freon.  He said it would be $125 total if we wanted him to go ahead and fill it and it should last us a year before we might need to refill it again.  So we could at least have time to decide if we just want to keep pumping it with freon or if we want to save up for a new fridge.  We decided to go for it and fill it up.

As it turned out, he said it filled up really quickly - had him a little stupefied and worried actually, because it should have taken longer, but it was reading over full at this point.  So he only charged us $95 total.  I keep a fund which I call "over/under" since David's check is never regular.  I budget out all the known items and the rest goes into the over/under fund for misc expenses or short paychecks.  Guess how much we had in our fund - $94.  Coincidence?  I think not!  Thank you God for your provision!

Some pics from our day: