Le congel’

The SuperU store in Saint-Aignan is a supermarché. There are SuperU supermarchés in the nearby towns of Selles-sur-Cher and Montrichard too. But the really big SuperU —what is called « un hypermarché » in France — is 10 miles north in the town of Contres. I drove up there last week to look around and a couple of days later Walt drove up there to see the freezer I had found — we are not yet leaving the puppy alone in the house or car.

That's where we ended up buying the new freezer. The Contres "superstore" or "hypermarket" has a much larger selection of appliances, computers, clothes, gardening supplies, etc., than a regular supermarket. I didn't go there last week with the idea of buying anything, but just to shop around and see what different freezers looked and felt like. I think that these armoire-style freezers with compartments and drawers that close have one great advantage over the refrigerator-style open shelves in U.S. upright freezers that I've seen on Amazon.com. That is, when you open the freezer door all the cold air doesn't "fall out" but stays contained inside the unit.

And there was this Hotpoint upright freezer. It was attractive, and seemed more practical in several ways than the slightly more expensive and slightly smaller Whirlpool freezer I had found on the Darty appliance and electronics store's web site. In the Whirlpool, for example, the doors on the upper compartments opened upward, and there was no "catch" to hold them open. In other words, you would have to hold the door open with one hand while you used the other hand to find and extract the frozen item you were looking for.

In the Hotpoint, the upper compartment doors open downward, so you can just let the door hang there and, having both hands free, you can more easily move things around. Another Whirlpool model that I saw at our local But appliance and furniture store that same day was just too tall to be practical — about 7 feet, I think. And one of that unit's drawers had come off its tracks. I tried but couldn't figure out how to get it back on the tracks. Ix-nay on that.

The new freezer was delivered yesterday morning, as scheduled. Today we'll start pulling things out of the old freezer, organizing them, and putting them in the drawers and upper compartments of the Hotpoint. It's installed in the utility room, near the boiler and lean-to greenhouse.