Today is a good day. It is the last day of the lease on our hurricane car.

For three years, this car has mocked me. It is the first new car I’ve ever “owned.” I signed on the dotted line without ever test driving it. It was the product of poor decision making brought on by stress, geographic dislocation, and exhaustion.

We lost three cars during Sandy. It is one of those super boring TL;DR stories but the gist of it is that on the morning of October 29, 2012 we had three perfectly good cars of varying vintage, and inadequate insurance. And when we woke up on the morning of October 30, we had zero cars. Well, we had three dead cars, and no hope of any kind of insurance check. So, you know, roughly $17,000, gone in a couple of hours.

Anyway, we didn’t have a car, nobody we knew had a…