It's not exactly self-cleaning, but I guess it will do.

My friend Henry called me this afternoon and said he was coming over to switch around the hinges on our refrigerator door. I love having friends who will notice that you never got around to doing something and have been going to extra trouble every day because of it and will just do it for you. I have no idea why I never switched the hinges. I've done it before (to a different fridge) and the current one even came with instructions for that very task, but here it is a year after we bought the machine and the doors still opened the wrong way.

While Henry was doing the "manly" part of the job - you know, with tools and everything - I obsessively cleaned the outside of the fridge. Surprise! It's actually white. I had no idea. OK, it wasn't really that bad, but living next to the stove it gets a lot of grease splattered on it. Also, the top was covered in that lovely layer of greasy dust that seems to settle on anything in the kitchen if you let it go for more than a week. I do wipe the top down rather frequently, but since I am shorter than the refrigerator it can go a while without my noticing.

Then Henry left and I set about the task I had actually been procrastinating at the very time that he called: cleaning out the inside of the fridge. There was some old food that had to go, and I wanted to clean out the compartments on the door and the shelves and everything. I noticed when I took out the shelves, which are made of glass or a reasonable facsimile, that they say "spill-proof" on them. Now, I am no expert, but they were covered in what looked very much like spills to me. Also, they were fogged up, which made me laugh like a lunatic and then laugh even harder when I realized that of course they'd fogged up once I removed them from the colder climate and put them in the sink. And I know that they probably mean that the shelves won't allow spills to leak down onto the other shelves, but really. When it says spill-proof I expect no spills.

I didn't bother cleaning out the drawers. That would have meant admitting to myself that I have once again let produce go bad, which makes me rather depressed.