The One About the Ice Maker

Whenever my eye catches the oil splatter stain on the ceiling of my kitchen, I wish I’d documented the sesame seed story. It involved a hot explosion in a pan, a few burns on my skin and a kitchen entirely covered in grease and miniscule seeds. After a different kind of incident a couple of weeks ago, our kitchen now has multiple new stains. This is the story of the ice maker.

It was late in the evening and we’d just gotten home. Jon was away at church meetings and after pulling into the garage, I told the kids to get inside and get their pajamas on. I was involved in a fairly intense phone conversation with my employer so I remained in the car for some privacy. A few minutes later, the kids came to the garage wildly waving their arms above their heads to get my attention. I shooed them away with a wave of my own.

When my phone call ended, I came into the house physically exhausted from work and emotionally drained by life in general. Before I could order the kids to bed, they all at once started telling me about our dirty ice and water. They showed me their collection of water-filled cups, each with floating black specks. I could tell that it wasn’t dirt but couldn’t identify the substance. I went to the refrigerator and found the same black stains on the water and ice dispensers. It was ink.

I have long kept my pens/pencils/scissors container on top of the frig. The intent was to keep them out of the reach of children but with our children being the monkeys that they are, the location has never been what one could consider “out of reach.” Our pen-holding container has small holes on all sides. It appeared a black ballpoint pen must have slipped out of the holder and made its way into our ice maker. When the pen got caught in the metal ice-crushing mechanism, its ink was spilled into our ice.

After discovering the mess, I wanted to leave it be and pretend it wasn’t there. I still needed to get the kids into bed and really just wanted to fall into bed myself. But I knew I needed to tend to it. I mean, we probably shouldn’t drink little ink specks, right?

I removed the ice bin from the freezer and dumped the ice into the sink. The cap of the pen was the only foreign object I found. I then bleached the bin as best I could but had very little luck with the large ink splotches. I deemed it as good as it was going to get and fell on the couch to put my feet up.

This was as clean as I could get it with the bleach.

The next day, I told Jon of our ink pen mess. He did some research and discovered that nail polish remover can be used on ink stains. It did remove some of the splotches but in other cases, it only spread the mess around. And the fumes of all that acetone made breathing a chore.

It never did come completely clean. So is drinking ink-stained ice hazardous to your health? I’m kidding, really, because the ice seems to be coming out clear.

But this story isn’t over.

Sometime after we gave up on restoring the ice bin to its original white, Jon turned the garbage disposal on. It made that terrible grinding noise that lets you know something’s stuck inside. I reached my hand in the disposal (always freaks me out) and felt an object resembling the shape of a ballpoint pen. It was jammed vertically and could not be removed. Jon had to get out some pliers and muscle it out. It must have ended up in the disposal after I dumped the whole ice bin in the sink. And looking at the color, you can see why it wasn’t easily detected among the ice cubes.

What a headache—all because of a silly pen!