John Carpenter's "The Thing" makes a lot more sense now...

I'll never question why they had flamethrowers at an Antarctic research station anymore. I know why we'd need one here.

I just got home from the shore, and there wasn't a lot of food in the upstairs fridge, so I went to get some chicken wings out of the basement freezer. This proved to be a problem. The freezer door was frozen shut. I had to keep jerking at the handle until the door popped open, spilling ice everywhere, and I don't mean ice cubes. I mean the freezer was lined with a sheet of dripped ice. Somehow a lot of water had gotten into the freezer interior and covered everything inside. The bags of frozen vegetables had globs of ice clinging to them, and the boxes of wings and potato skins had been encased in ice. Thankfully the wings were at the bottom and didn't get a lot of the ice on the box itself, but that meant having to chisel my way through the rest of the boxes on top. And I did not want to cut myself on a sheet of ice.

That explains the flamethrowers. This is what I have to deal with here, indoors, in New Jersey, during the summer. Imagine what they'd have to deal with at the bottom of the fucking planet.

Well the wings and potato skins are in a better freezer now, so they should be good for later. I have to keep this scenario in mind when I'm getting a mini-fridge for my dorm room. Last year our fridge was really more of a freezer, and we could never get the dial at the right temperature. That meant any ice cream that was put in there would either turn into what looked like freezer-burned pineapples (it was actually cookie dough), or it would melt instantly and seep through the container. And ice cream soup is not as good as some would claim it is. So I'll be sure to get something more suitable for lots of Stewart's root beer and, on occasion, ice cream.

Or I could get a flamethrower.

"Dammit, Childs, torch it!"