Ice, ice baby

No automatic ice makers here. At this point, I’ve gotten used to not having them, but I really do miss iced tea, as opposed to cold tea.

At home, I have a little ice tray. It’s nothing much, just a cute little silicone mold that makes little hearts. They’re maybe a third the size of a real ice cube, and about three times the trouble.

Silicone ice trays are fun little novelty things, but they’re very bendy, and it’s hard to get them from the counter to the freezer without them spilling all over. I need some kind of plastic flat surface to put it on while I transfer it, but that’s not happening right now.

Plus, my freezer is really too small for such things. I went on a housing board tour to all the properties where we have people and have solidified the fact that I have the worst kitchen of everyone I work with. Not that it’s bad, just that it’s small, has a door on it (which knocks down on the space even more), the tiniest amount of counter space and the smallest fridge/freezer.

It’s perfectly fine for me, even though the kitchen does smell like swamp gas sometimes due to some big vent thing that’s outside the window. But during the tour, I mentioned it to the person here and they were all appalled and as soon as it happens again I can call them and they can come up and take a whiff so they know what I’m talking about. Some pipe somewhere is backed up.

My place does, however, have the best pool of the bunch, the coolest movie room and the only mini-gold course so I am not complaining whatsoever.

In general, the freezers here are a bit smaller and weirder than they are in the States. They don’t have shelves. They simply have drawers. You can’t just open up the door and toss something in; it’s a rigmarole to open the door all the way in order to be able to pull out a drawer, then you tend to find that that particular drawer is a bit shallow for whatever it was, so you have to try again.

My entire freezer is really small, but large enough because I don’t exactly have a hurricane’s worth of food in there. One drawer, the largest, has two things you put in ice chests to keep things cold (they came with the place) and a bunch of little boxes of Junior Mints. That’s also the only drawer deep enough to keep the sandwich bread.

The one at work is larger, and one day I noticed one of the temporary workers playing in a drawer. She said she was refilling the ice trays.

I had NO idea there were ice trays in the freezer at work, so this was good news for my tea. (Every night, I make about two quarts of tea. One comes to work with me and eventually gets a bit warm, and the other lives at home and I drink it at night. No wonder I cannot sleep through the night.)

When I refilled the trays and got a closer look, I discovered they were “semi-automatic.” For purpose here, that mean they were two little ice trays, the kind you fill up with water, arranged in a little compartment that slides outside the door of this little freezer. It slides out to refill them both at once.

When they freeze, there is a little mechanism on the handle of the compartment that you twist. The two trays then rotate, dropping the ice into a second shallow drawer, which can be pulled out to retrieve the ice cubs.

It’s just absolutely brilliant in its simplicity, and it’s opened the world of late-morning/early-afternoon tea drinking. That’s how long it takes for my Nalgene of tea to get warm, so now I have iced tea – with actual ice cubes – late in the day.