Fanciful Friday: Odds And Ends

“Take a moment, enjoy a moment and be a moment”
― Aiyaz Uddin

Moments Count

Small things each day can add up and surprise you. I subscribed to Kindle Unlimited several years ago. For those who might not know, it’s an Amazon monthly subscription service that lets you read unlimited ebooks for free from authors who have made them available in the Kindle Unlimited collection. This means many independent authors want to get their books seen, along with some well-known mainstream books and authors. It currently includes thousands of books, and new ones are added all the time. I read almost entirely for entertainment across a variety of genres, and I use an Apple iPad Mini and the Kindle app. This makes it easy for me to always have a “book” to enjoy for a few minutes.

As I finished one book and prepared to start another this week, the Kindle app displayed a statistic that shocked me. It seems I’ve unintentionally built a 1,349-day (3.7 years) reading streak. Some days I might have read only a few minutes, but at least enough to turn a page. I knew I read a little almost every day, but I had no idea it had been so long since I missed a day. Heck, now I feel pressured not to ruin my streak! 🙄

Goodness Yet Survives

This week, Bonnie went to assist her brother in Jacksonville, Florida, for a few days while he underwent a minor medical procedure, and I stayed home with Bentley. Our car is still under warranty with an e-monitoring service. So, a couple of hours after she left on Sunday, I got a text message from the monitoring service that one of the tires was losing air pressure. I called Bonnie and walked her through how to bring up the tire pressures on the instrument cluster, and sure enough, one tire was down to about 15 psi. Long story short, she ended up stranded in an empty lot in a very small town in South Carolina on a Sunday. No passerby, of which there were few, stopped to help. AAA gave a time of a little over an hour, and it would just be for a tire change to a donut tire, which wouldn’t get her to Florida. Using the car’s online GPS locator data, I searched the area for a tire dealer that was open on Sunday. After a couple of calls, I found a very small business and an extremely good person who ended up closing his business, driving 12 miles to change the tire. He then had Bonnie follow him back to his business, and he fixed the tire and put it back on. The trip was completed safely. Strangely, it turned out a key (like a padlock key) punctured the tire.

So, goodness survives, and good people still exist who will extend a hand to help someone. Thank you, Chad!

Flashback Moment

I came across an old photo of the first new car I ever purchased and owned: a 1974 Honda Civic. The Civic was first introduced to the U.S. in 1972. In 1974, the Civic’s straight-4 engine grew slightly to 1237 cc, and power rose to 52 hp (38 kW). To meet the new North American 5 mph bumper impact standard, the Civic’s bumpers grew by 7.1 inches, increasing overall length to 146.9 inches. It had 12-inch wheels and a four-speed manual transmission and would get 40mpg on the road. I loved that little thing, and the engine would rev quickly like a motorcycle engine. I put a lot of miles on it with repeat trips from upper Vermont to Western North Carolina. I even took it to Miami, Florida, and forged through a 12-inch snow blizzard in Vermont. Good moments turned into wonderful memories.