I can only receive

My parents finally had the chance to get the car repaired, after the unfortunate trunk smashing a couple of months ago. I can't say precisely why it took so long to get started on the repairing business, except that maybe it's been a relatively low priority for them as it isn't like the car was undrivable with the damage. It didn't even have an annoying rattle. What did stand out about the process was my parents getting a lot of mails from the insurance company, addressed to my father, which my mother would separate out and hand to me because she expects her name to be on letters from the insurers, and then I'd open them and track my parents down.

It's not for mysterious reasons that my parents found a repair shop about an hour north of home. They --- my father, particularly --- really don't believe they don't live in Middlesex County, so, that adds to the start and end of all the stuff like this they have to deal with. The garage said they'd need four, possibly five, working days for it too, which don't ask me why. I'd have expected the amount of time needed, once parts were on-hand, to be pretty predictable, and they had seen the damage while preparing estimates.

Insurance provided for a rental car, nicely enough. It came from Enterprise and I wonder but never got clear just which Enterprise agency they got it from. There is, and I say this with neither exaggeration nor absurdity, an Enterprise agency barely one and a half miles from the house, just past the nearest Wawa. I know this because I rented a car from there once, before I bought my Scion, and I could not convince my father of the existence of this agency. He could identify almost all the landmarks on that stretch of road before and after it, but not the precise spot, and even after I told him about it he drove past and didn't see it. So I'm going to go ahead and suppose they didn't use that agency, because there's probably some in Middlesex County they could use instead.

The rental car was a Fiat something or other, one of those little ones that looks like a game board piece. I thought it was ugly, but in that way that could maybe grow on you given time. We didn't have time, though: after two days the auto shop called to report it was done, and the Toyota Something was back the next day. The new-repaired car drives quite well; you wouldn't know from it that the trunk had been smashed in. Of course, you wouldn't know that from before either.

Trivia: The container cargo shipping route between Japan and the United States Atlantic Coast opened only in 1970. It was served by thirty ships in 1973. Source: The Box: How The Shipping Container Made The World Smaller And The World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Changing Channels: America In TV Guide, Glenn C Altschuler, David I Grossvogel.

PS: Fibonacci multiples --- this is a reblog of a fascinating point about Fibonacci numbers that I didn't know before.