Posted 4/09/2007 05:35:00 PM by Douglas

A bit of background. I'm a tea drinker, and since I've lived in my humble abode, I've brewed up 1.5 gallons at a time and refrigerated it in recycled Jim Beam bottles that I've acquired through the years from a generous and nurturing individual, let's just for the sake of argument call him "me." Anyhoo, let's just say for many years this paradigm has worked out quite well, and being the thermal engineer that I am, I'm more than aware of the thermal shock involved in introducing near boiling liquids into room temperature glass. Safety precautions have been made and no glass has been lost due to poor thermal conditioning.

Until today.

Since I normally make three one-half gallon jugs at a time, I have a fourth, spare bottle to tide me over when I get lazy. So I don't really know when I made this last batch, but let's just say it was sitting in the back of my fridge for a while. Sitting, waiting, and getting cold.

Well, apparently the back of my fridge is colder than the front of my fridge. In my defense, I've never had any problems with the fridge freezing other liquids, and I really don't think it's set too cold, so when I looked at the neck of one of the bottles in the back of the top shelf of the fridge this morning, full of frozen tea, I kinda thought, "hmm, that's odd," and went to work.

I got home from work and didn't really feel like tea, so I get on with my day. About an hour later after The Baroness comes home she comes running in from the other room, "Did you hear that?!?" I thought it was the ice maker dumping another load in the freezer, so I didn't think much of it. Thirty minutes later, she walks in the kitchen and finds a puddle in the middle of the floor the size of Shamu with a bladder problem and yells "you better come see this." This is what we saw on the top shelf of the fridge:

So of course, I spend the next hour cleaning out the fridge from what has now become known as "Tea-splosion, '07." But just in case the event couldn't humble me any more, as I'm bent over a pile of cold, tea-sogged groceries and expired bacon and bleeding from cut glass, this is the perfect time for the spouse to point out that I'm not only in charge of brewing and chilling tea, household environmental and temperature control, but I'm also a thermal engineer for the space program. Something about the mixture of tea and blood makes that a really sore point to bring up at that particular moment.

Also, and I don't know if this is related, but we got the fridge only six months ago, and we got the "Six Months, no Interest" deal from The Home Despot after the old one crapped out in October. Well, I mailed the check to close out the account today. To-Freakin'day!! I can't help but think that this isn't a coincidence, by a vast, maytag conspiracy.

So here's what I learned from this experience today:

• 1.75 Liters doesn't look like a lot. In a bottle. But cascading down all your chilled food and onto your kitchen floor, it's quite impressive.
• As Dr. Rodin, my professor of Mechanics of Materials once told me during a mid-term exam, "never underestimate the power of thermal expansion."
• Never overestimate the patience of The Baroness when I screw up in ways that I've assured her, I won't screw up.
• If you purchase meat or fruit, place it in your refrigerator, yet don't recall eating it, look for it!! I had no idea my fridge had such good hiding places for expired bacon and string-cheese.
• Never underestimate the force of irony.