Minutiae, btw, is a DYNAMITE Scrabble Brand Crossword game word, especially if you have five vowels on your rack.

I just realized that this month is the first month in perhaps five or eight I have had more than a day of a zero balance on my credit card. I usually (97.5% of the time) pay my statement in full, but have some sort of balance. My big expenditures of semiannual car insurance and utilities eclipsed the post-holiday credit card payoff activity.

Also, it just occurred that the Canadian dollar is below ninety American cents, so the toll bridge charges, even with the obnoxious "invoice processing fees" no British Columbians warned me about, will be less than expected. Yay!

This year, when something unusually terrific happens like meeting fun people, or receiving a compliment, or succeeding at something, or enjoying a new activity, I write it down with the date on a slip of paper and put it in a jar. So when maybe I am feeling like I am wasting time on this planet in this body, I go to the jar and read things. Today I entered a slip of getting to speak my second language with both a native speaker and someone struggling to learn the language. Seattle's notorious for freezingly polite and very withdrawn people, it's hard to make friends here if one isn't gregarious, so this was a brilliant moment for shy, withdrawn me, happening upon this couple. We did not speak entirely in the second language, we were all aware someone in our group wasn't multilingual, but sprinkling a phrase here and there was so glorious and exhilarating. I don't mean to give the impression that communicating in my first language all the time here is a drag, it definitely is not and is a superb convenience, but the serendipity of starting a surprising conversation with strangers in an unlikely area in a language one is rusty in... oh, so sweet, so miraculous, so rare.