Sunday night, I had a hard time going to bed. I was tossing and turning. I couldn’t get comfortable. I watched a few episodes of a television show on DVD. I finally crawled under the covers and went to sleep around 2am.

About four and a half hours later, my sister runs into my room. “Get up! Get up! Come here now! Help!” My eyes fly open and I sit up straight. My sister was silouetted with the orange backlight glow of the kitchen light. Fire was the first thought that came into my mind. Oh my God, the animals! What were we going to do? We didn’t have a fire extinguisher.

I run into the living room and hear a hissing noise. I rub my red eyes and see that there isn’t a fire. “It won’t stop! I can’t figure out how to get it to stop.” I step into the kitchen and my feet get cold and wet. I look towards the back kitchen wall and see a mist coming from behind the refrigerator. I thought “The freon is pouring out. We’re going to be sick.” I get closer and see that water is spraying from behind the refrigerator.

I walk into the laundry room looking, in vain, for a valve to shut off the water. All I see is the hot water heater. Still, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I open the circuit box and kill the power to the kitchen. The hissing continues.

My sister digs up our lease and pages maintenance. We start moving the rabbits into another, drier room. We get no response from maintenance and the spraying and hissing continues. The fridge is behaving like a wild, metal cobra. After we get the rabbits relocated, we start pulling items off the top of the fridge. The food processor, a blender, empty bottles, a bottle of gin, a bottle of scotch, birthday cards from years past and a nutcracker all find new homes on free cabinet space.

We finally get the fridge clear and begin to pull it from the wall. There was a valve behind the refrigerator with a hose attached to it. The hose has a huge hole in it and is the cause of the deluge. Water’s flying into the outlet behind the appliance as we nervously approach the valve. A few twists and the storm ends. Puddles of water, slowly creeping to the back door, are all that are left of the incident.

My sister and I grab all the towels, sheets and a mop and begin cleaning up the flooded floors. The kitchen is transformed into a patchwork quilt of fabrics and water. The danger’s over, for now.

It’s now 7:00 a.m. We both get changed into dry clothes and walk outside. We’re hit with an arctic wall. The ground crunches beneath our feet as we walk to the car on the frozen mud and grass. As I approach the car, my glasses fog up in rhythm with my breathing. I’m walking into my own warm breath.

We drive to Lowe’s and walk inside with many of the employees coming to work for the day. We wander through the store, looking for the plumbing section hoping to find a hose like the one that was on the back of our fridge. We see several hoses, but none that look like they are the right size. I walk to the appliances section and look at the back of the other fridges. They had a connection similar to the one on ours. Just before we leave the store without finding a replacement part, my sister notices a section that reads “Ice Maker Hoses”. She found the part.

I look through the various hoses and find one that says “fits all major brands and models”. It’s also encased in a steel weave and has a test strength of 2500 psi. I figure this one would be the best.

Fast forward 36 hours. I come home from work and get ready to fit the replacement onto our fridge. We gingerly pull the fridge from the wall. I take a pair of vice grips and begin to carefully remove the broken hose. As I disconnect it and place it on the floor, it spills water all in the floor. I fit the new hose on and tighten it as best as I could. We nervously twist the valve back into the “on” position. A brief hiss and we know that the water is running into the ice maker again.

We’re both still so gunshy from the angry hissing coming from the refrigerator yesterday that we both still wince when we hear the compressor come on, or ice drop into the ice tray. At least we have ice again, right?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 23:20 and is filed under Interesting Things, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.