cracked

The dealership we bought our car from fixed a cracked window for free. Now there’s something you don’t expect to happen.

Our car has a sunroof. I have mixed feelings about sunroofs. I owned a VW bug with a sunroof, which gave the car a wide-open feel I liked, but I also had a Mitsubishi van with a sunroof that leaked like a seive when it rained, and I never want to have that happen again. But in the top ten list of things I hate to do, shopping for a car is way up there, so when we found a car that had just about everything we liked, the sunroof wasn’t a deal-breaker.
And then the sunroof cracked. I’m not sure how. I noticed the crack about a week after I put a kayak on the roof, but the kayak weighs just sixty pounds or so, and it was sitting on a couple of foam pads, only one of which rested on the sunroof, so only half the weight of the kayak was on it, cradled in foam.

The guy at the dealership said the crack looked like something heavy fell on it, and that it wouldn’t be covered by the warranty. I figured as much, but it never hurts to ask, you know? Then he said he’d take some photos and see what he could do, and a couple days later he called me and said they would replace it free of charge, what they called a “goodwill repair.”

I’ve never heard of a “goodwill repair” before, but I was all for that instead of the $500 deductable we would have to pay if we got our insurance to fix it. So I took the day off from work yesterday and waited in the lobby of Don Miller Subaru while they fixed our sunroof. Good as new! So if you’re thinking of buying a car, I can recommend a good dealership.

After they fixed the sunroof, I had to stop at Half-Price Books to patrol the shelves because I was in the neighborhood. Picked up a collection of short stories by James Tiptree Jr. and a three-volume set called The History of Physics or something like that.

Then, back at the ranch with the rest of the day all to myself, I did a little light cleaning, because we mammals are messy animals, especially in the kitchen and bathroom. Mostly all I did was sweep, vacuum, and take out the trash, but the bathroom needed a bit more attention and I needed a hot shower afterwards.

The weather was cold and blustery with lots of dark clouds overhead, so I curled up on the sofa with my books and read about molecules and the electromagnetic spectrum and stuff. And I had a short nap, because I could.

At the end of the day I had to venture out again across town to pick up My Darling B from work, and we stopped halfway home in a neighborhood called Schenck’s Corners to grab a bite to eat and wash it down with some sudsy stuff at the Alchemy Cafe. The weather still wasn’t quite nice enough for us to consider eating outside.