My family decided to ring out 2009 with a bang. Two bangs, actually. But I'll get to that.

My dad, Laura, Sarah and I got up early and headed out to pick up Gamps, then drove to Missouri for our annual pre-New Years cheap booze buying run. There's a big, like, discount alcohol emporium we go to a handful of times a year, but always around the Fourth of July and before New Years Eve at the very least. We were thinking that for the first time in a week, the roads were pretty good. Most had finally seen a plow, a few sunny days meant that the places that had been scraped were mostly melted off, the huge drifts and piles were avoidable.

We pull into the parking lot, head inside, and Laura slips on some black ice and falls. Instead of going straight down, she tried, mostly on instinct, to brace herself, and in so doing threw her leg out to the side, so when she did fall down, she ended up wrenching the shit out of her knee. Bang number one.

She tried to walk the stiffness out of it, so we went ahead and picked up some drinky-drinks, then drove Grandpa to the store while we were out, then dropped him off at his house. Then we prepared for leg two of our annual pre-New Years outing: Chinese buffet and Half-Price Books. We've been doing this at least since I was at USC, and it's nice to take a break from the usual holiday food, as well as get out and spend some of that Christmas money. We usually go a few days after Christmas, but waited this year because of the weather, so everyone was a little bit more excited about it than usual.

As we took the on-ramp to get on I-70, we came around a turn and drove right into a pothole about two feet in diameter, right in the middle of the road, that my dad couldn't see until he was already on top of it. Bang number two.

It didn't take much more than a half-mile for the front tire to blow out. My dad pulled over to the shoulder, which was almost completely covered with ice. The snow had been plowed to the side, obviously, so there was nowhere to stand except in the snow. Laura and I got out, my dad got the jack and spare, and proceeded to try to jack up the car. The jack broke. My dad thought that maybe he had the car up high enough to switch the tire out anyway, so he pulled it off. The car was not high enough and was still resting a bit on that damaged rim, so when he pulled it off, the car settled back down, and far enough this time that he couldn't get another jack underneath. So he had to call for a tow.

This makes it sound more orderly and quick than it actually was. We were on the side of the highway for over an hour. It was just over twenty degrees outside, we were standing in the snow trying to change a tire. In that time, not a single person stopped to see if we needed help, not a single cop or state trooper drove by. There were four city trucks patching cracks in the asphalt literally twenty feet away from us, and no one even looked our way, let alone asked if we had a cell phone or needed a hand.

My dad won't get his car back till Wednesday; the suspension has to be adjusted, and he needs new rims on both tires on that side, as well as tires, as he found out the back tire had been damaged, as well. The bill for just the suspension and rims is over five hundred dollars.

Happy new year!

Well, Laura and I did it. We got up, sat in line, and charged through a store like crazy people. We weren't planning to, and then last night around 7pm my dad looked up from the paper.

"Nebraska Furniture Mart has laptops for $229."

I bought my laptop in 2005. Laura bought her computer in 2004. Both are slow, cumbersome, and basically falling apart. Her DVD drive quit working over a year ago, and I don't trust mine any more. And it's been a while since I could run more than one program at a time. Make icons AND listen to music? Ha! So we talked and talked and talked, and finally decided to go for it.

We got everything out the night before, went to bed at 9pm, and woke up at 3am this morning. It was barely above freezing, and the store didn't open till 7am, so we knew we were looking at almost 4 hours outside. I put on: two pairs of socks, a pair of comfortable exercise pants underneath a pair of jeans; a thermal undershirt, a t-shirt, one of my dad's insulated work shirts, and a jacket; a scarf, a knit hat, gloves; my woolen cloak.

Waiting in line wasn't too bad. Aside from my face, I was actually quite warm; in fact, my face being a little cold ended up being good, because my core was almost too warm. The last half hour was a little bad, because my toes, as well as Laura's toes, got a little too cold - tennis shoes are so porous, no matter how many socks you have underneath.

They were giving out vouchers in the form of wristbands for the eight big-ticket items: two HDTVs, a Blu-Ray player, a Dyson, a netbook, a computer tower, a computer package with monitor and printer, and the laptop. Laura and I were a bit overwhelmed when we saw how many people had camped out with tents, but the first half of the line just didn't look that packed, so we tried to stay optimistic. Then, as the time for the vouchers to be handed out drew near, and people started packing up their lawn chairs and their tents and the propane tanks hooked up to God knows what (no lie), and everyone stood up, we realized we had around 250-300 people in front of us. It was going to be close.

The Blu-Ray player came first. Laura went ahead and got a voucher for it just in case nothing else made it back to us. Then the 32 inch HDTV came by, and I got that one. The man in front of us, who'd driven an hour in the hopes of picking up a Dyson, got one and was so happy, it was a pleasure to just be in the company of someone radiating undiluted contentment. And then, tragedy!

"We are all out of laptops! The laptops are gone!"

So shouted the man no more than thirty people ahead of us. We'd waited in the freezing cold for hours what was essentially the middle of the night, and it was all for naught. As we walked to the line forming in front of the doors, a young woman asked if we wanted a voucher for the computer tower. Whatever. Fine.

Another forty-five minutes, and then the doors opened! I have never. It was I don't even. Like, literal thousands and thousands of people running, pushing, shoving, yelling, grabbing, blocking. I saw people knocked over. I saw someone climb on top of a pallet and start throwing digital picture frames to their family behind them. I had a cart run into the back of my legs so hard that I had visions of the Pamplona bulls. But Laura and I ended up getting all of the smaller items that were on our list: two $10 DVD players, a personal DVD player for Sarah for $40, $9 wireless headphones for Marshall, four pairs of earbuds for 97 cents, a rice cooker for $12, and an LED flashlight for a dollar. Then we stood in the voucher line.

Three and a half hours in line outside, now another hour in line inside. We called our parents, we talked. Mom and Dad wanted the HDTV, but didn't care about the Blu-Ray player, and neither Laura nor I wanted to get it, either, so she took off that wristband. We went back and forth, and decided that the tower was a really good deal. 6 gigs of memory. My laptop has 256mb, so that's 24 times as much. 640 gigs of hard drive space. My computer? Has 40. We had planned to pick up 1tb external hard drives to go with the new laptops, for $90, but 640 would be plenty. Plus, Laura already had a monitor, and we have two other extras floating around the house, so that wouldn't be a problem.

So we both got the desktops. $299, which was about $50 of retail. The more we talked about it, the more we convinced ourselves that this was a better deal both financially and in the long run than getting the laptops. By the time we were ready to check out, we were pretty psyched.

And then we saw the line to check out.