Frosty Relationship

As I type this, I’m glaring at the upright freezer over in the kitchen. 
Labor Day weekend. It was so simple. Mom and Dad were off to visit with family, and Rusty was at the vet for treatment. That left me to watch Bit in between church and work. Because there was no scheduled movie debut, I could tender a “retro” review of a film I’ve been wanting to highlight. Hardest part of it, aside from praying that the car didn’t break down again, would be keeping up with the chores. 
It was about 11:45 Saturday night. The radio show I normally listen to had finished at 10. The late-night programming I often watch had been pre-empted for a marathon due to it being a holiday weekend, and so I decided to watch a rather campy movie I’d recently found out about so I could do a “retro” review of it. Once I finished the review, I would make one final check on Bit and then be off to bed. 
And then it happened. 
As the saying goes, “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy”. And in my case, the enemy was nothing less than Murphy’s Law. I’m reaching the climax of the movie when an alarm goes off. I look up to see the potential source, and note that a red light is going off on the upright freezer. The freezer is set to sound when the temperature gets past 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and by the time I made it over there it had already gotten to 25. 
Cue 45 minutes of my parents and I trying to trouble-shoot the matter over the phone… much of which was divided between my efforts to maneuver the thing around by myself to check things, my trying to slip index cards through parts of the rubber seal to check how well it was holding, and my trying to keep Bit from the dust bunnies that were unleashed by my moving it. Numerous efforts were made to briefly open it up, yank a certain amount of items out, and then shut the door again to see if something was keeping it from shutting completely. 
Finally, I managed to shut the door enough that the temperature slowly began dropping. At my dad’s instructions, I locked the door and then wrapped a cargo strap around it to ensure that it was tightly shut. The temperature has, indeed, been slowly dropping since. It’s back down to 0, and has been holding for much of the evening. 
…But that left me having to deal with the food I yanked out. The chocolate bars and individually-wrapped oatmeal crème pies could sit out on the counter. I dumped out two water coolers that had ice in them in order to fit what I could in there; the ice had kept the interiors cool enough that the contents could sit until morning. The rest got crammed into the refrigerator; even then, I had to throw away a package of lunch meat (no one remembered how old it was anyway) and choke down a TV dinner & 4 glasses’ worth of milk since there wasn’t room for anything else. 
With my parents’ permission, I let someone from church have a large box of refrigerated dog food, clearing out enough room in the fridge to where I could empty the contents of one of the coolers. The contents of the other are being kept by someone from church until my parents can get back and examine the freezer. 
Until then, guess who’s stuck living on TV dinners and sandwiches…