Answer to the previous riddle

[beowabbit]

8½. Turn refrigerator and freezer back on.

If you leave out step 8½, then you have to make sure you perform step 10, which is “come home a few days later to a fridge and freezer full of ruined food.”

Comments

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Oh, no! What a terrible reward for cleaning the freezer!

[addiejd.livejournal.com]

I think that's actually 7 1/2. If you put the food in before you turn it back on it'll still get ruined while the freezer is cooling back down; you need to wait for it to be cold again before you refill it.

[beowabbit]

Well, since I did that Saturday afternoon and everything in the freezer was still frozen on Wednesday when I took something out — it took till yesterday night for most of the contents to have thawed —, I suspect the couple hours it took for the freezer to cool down wouldn’t have made a lot of difference. (Probably because the freezer was very close to full, so all the food acted like ice in a cooler.) But yeah. And if I had turned it back on before refilling the freezer, that might have increased the likelihood that I remembered it.