I would like to tell you I haunt the local library and am vastly well-read, but that would be a big fat lie but, while months or even years may pass between visits, I always have a library card, because a library card is so much more than books. As if books weren’t enough.

So, for Three Things Thursday (An Exercise in Gratitude), here are three totally random things I am grateful about having a library card:

Today I learned that if I were a very clever person and designed something, I could take the specifications, or design, or whatever it is one takes to my local library and they will print me a 3-D version of the thingy. I could literally imagine something, and the nice man at the library will make it real for me. Now, I often imagine cake, and I can (and far too often, do) make cake real, but I also imagine the Star Trek Replicator, but I can’t make a Star Trek Replicator. But if I could design a replicator, they could print me the pieces. That is definitely one of the coolest things about my library card.

Here’s another: once I went on a trip to New Jersey for a five-day, work-related class, in mid-February and concurrent with a large ice storm settling over the eastern seaboard and which hung out for most of my trip. Trapped in the hotel where the class was held, Friday dawned clear and bright and Newark International opened for the first time in 36 hours. I had a flight out Friday morning and nothing was stopping me being on it.

Except for maybe the ice sarcophagus encasing my rental car. The hotel was a Hilton Garden or something like, with no covered parking. In New Jersey! And all those days outside resulted in what looked like an economy-car-shaped ice sculpture.

With a key, I chiseled through the ice to the lock, then pried open the door. Once the engine was on and the defrost blasting front and back, I waited for a bead of moisture to appear between the windshield and the ice. Sliding my trusty library card under edge of the sheet of ice, I managed to lift it neatly up and off the windshield in a few large chunks. Repeat on the rear window and I was off, creeping down the road to a long nervous wait at the airport, where I shared a table and commiserated with a fellow traveler. Boarding hours past the original flight time and waiting, once boarded, over an hour while the plane was de-iced twice, a mercifully uneventful flight bestowed upon me the miracle of stepping into a bright, 70 degree Texas evening.

And lastly: consider the possibility that a woman from Southern California (that’s me) only understood how to get into her ice-cave rental car because of stuff she read in books checked out in various libraries throughout her life. I submit that it is not just possible, but probable.

Your library card: don’t leave home without it!