About 10 days ago, Simon Bennett (my well-belovéd MINI) developed a small crack in his windshield – a crack that spread alarmingly fast so that now it stretches horizontally almost all the way across the glass. Today I took a deep breath and called my insurance company, expecting to have to shell out a fistful of cash and take my car in to a shop where I’d have to wait for hours, trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable in one of those sagging-but-somehow-still-hard chairs and tune out the intellectual vortex that is daytime TV.

However:

It turns out that in Massachusetts, there’s no windshield replacement deductible. Moreover, the auto glass people come to your home or work and fix your windshield while you do things that you want to do – there’s no uncomfortable chair or daytime TV noise, unless you will it so.

I was absolutely incredulous at first, thinking in wide-eyed bedazzled wonder about my glorious insurance company, until a friend told me that that’s just how it is in Massachusetts. Nobody has to pay a windshield replacement deductible, and everybody receives this same at-home or at-work service. So now instead of wondering at my glorious insurance company I’m wondering at this glorious commonwealth.

Yet another potentially unpleasant situation has turned out remarkably well. This seems to be happening a lot lately.

I like it.

So I was pretty worried about getting all my luggage home on the T today – I amassed quite a bit of new stuff in Denver, so I had one (heavy) rolling suitcase full of shoes, jeans, and cinnamon bears, plus a non-rolling duffel bag, plus my (freaking HEAVY) computer (it’s more a stunted desktop, really).

Fortunately, Delta solved the problem for me. Since my luggage didn’t make the tight connection at JFK, instead of trucking heavy shtuff through the labyrinth of transfers and crowded vehicles that is the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, I just have to wait for Delta to deliver my personal belongings right to my door.

YEAH.

Props to God for this fantastic display of small-but-very-beneficial detail-arranging.

Look at me with my own domain name! Someday this will be a real website, but for now it just hosts my online journal. I feel so grown up and sophisticated. I’ll never be a true computer geek, but at least I’m not feeling quite so technologically declined as I normally do.

So I’m chilling today in Silverthorne, Colorado, watching tiny snowflakes blow past and looking toward a mountain that’s at the moment obscured by a thick white sky, and I thought I’d list a few things I’m thankful for:

Cross-country skiing.

Fantastic friends and their relatives who have beautiful condos (complete with some heavenly sleeping quarters and thick, soft, fluffy towels) in the Colorado mountains.

That mouth injuries heal amazingly quickly (the huge mass of ugly I acquired yesterday when I bit down really really hard on the inside of my cheek is mostly gone now).

Effective anti-itch creams that have helped alleviate symptoms of a heretofore unsuspected allergy to dogs (I’m staying with LATD, who has two of them).

Dental floss.

Hot chocolate, Jelly Belly beans, and other not exactly healthy but entirely delicious forms of refined sugar.

Relatives of friends who wear the same size shoe I do.

Gas-lit fireplaces.

Trader Joe’s (though they don’t have stores in Colorado).

Lotion (this East Coast girl’s skin is somewhat unaccustomed to dry Colorado air).

Spanakopita and other dishes whose principal ingredients include spinach.

A very good doctor friend who makes me drink enough not-particularly-tasty Colorado water to offset the effects of the dry Colorado air and high altitude, and who brings me spanakopita as I type away on her computer.

So I’ve already admitted that I don’t like dark chocolate, which I consider pretty brave of me, given that it means I can never feel superior in a chocolate-centered conversation unless I can say that I’ve eaten exotic chocolate with weird stuff like bacon or olives in it (as yet I cannot – the weirdest things I’ve tried so far in chocolate are chili pepper and curry), and, as I pointed out in the earlier post, it means that no self-respecting European will ever love me.

Now another shocking revelation:

I don’t like herbal tea.

To me, it tastes like dirty water. If you add sugar or honey, it tastes like dirty water with sugar or honey.

I know that as a Boston/Cambridge-area resident I am required to like herbal tea. I am also required to have a large supply of herbal tea on hand should anyone ever visit my house and want some. By failing to comply with these regulations I run the risk of being denied admission to any respectable Harvard Square establishment and eternal shunning by the Intelligentsia.

Ah, well. Such are the gauntlets I’m willing to run to avoid imbibing dishwater.

So my roommates and I inherited some laundry detergent that my roommate’s sister’s husband was allergic to.

Turns out I’m allergic to it too.

(pitiful face with hound-dog eyes and poked-out bottom lip)

On the bright side, at least I know why my body has developed so many random red and itchy blotches over the past few days – I was starting to feel beset by some kind of pestilential dermatological affliction. And solving the problem is as easy as washing my clothes with non-toxic soap. Would that all my challenges were so easily vanquished!