Is that a pencil or a shank?

<-----What is this picture trying to portray exactly? "I'm a poor prisoner trying to learn, and better myself and I'm gonna use this pencil to do it" or "Why don't you go ahead and open this cell so I can shank you with this sharpened pencil"? Regardless, check out this pretty interesting post over on Marginal Revolution. For you lazy slackers who won't click on the link, the basic point is that people living in prison are dying at a slower rate than people living outside of prison. If you read the comments on this post, you'll see a ton of people actually suggesting that this is proof that government provided health care would work better than privately provided health care. I can understand how somebody would make that mistake by just looking at the raw statistics. Prisoners have state-provided health care, and they're dying at a slower rate than those of us on the "outside" who have to worry about providing our own health care. One plus one must equal two, right?
The post and subsequent comments on Marginal Revolution reminded me of a quote by Milton Friedman (surprised aren't you?) that I will paraphrase here:

The general public is uninformed about economics, and that causes them to make poor decisions.

And I generally believe this to be true. I mean, how many of us have the time to get a PhD in economics or statistics? Well I hate to tell you folks, but that's nearly what it takes to truly understand a lot of the stuff that get thrown at you in the paper and on the news these days. Take this prison data for instance. Economists learn to ask the important questions about data. What is the average age of a prison inmate, as compared to the average age of somebody not in prison? When a person has a terminal illness, do they actually die in prison or in a hospital, and if they die in a hospital outside of prison how do they count that? What about death row inmates? How are their deaths counted? There are many questions to be answered, but what you should realize if you look critically at these statistics is that there is something called "selection bias" going on. We all know that the average inmate is much younger than the average person not in jail. Prison is a young man's game, as one commenter said. So we would expect the rate at which prisoners die to be less than that of the general population!
I say all of this as a very long-winded way of saying the following:
Learn to think critically about everything.

Addendum:
Um, the shelf in our walk-in closet collapsed. Pretty hilarious.

Lazy Sunday

And I'm back. I just can't stay away. Even if nobody is out there, I guess it makes me feel better to get things out of my head and on to the screen. And there are a lot of things in my head, so this could take a while.
<----Here is my new home office, in its natural state of disarray. I love it. There is nothing better than waking up early on a Sunday and getting a paper and plopping down for hours at the desk. And herein lies my first thought. Any relatively long-time reader of IHNJ, or anyone who even just reads the previous post, knows that I have a very heavy bend towards the free market and individual liberty in general. I am a Wall Street Journal-reading, entrepreneurial, card-carrying Libertarian. But my favorite Sunday activity is reading the Sunday Edition of The New York Times, which is unabashedly "liberal" on economic freedoms. Meaning that they don't like economic freedom for the most part. Especially the opinion pages, which espouse the benefits of a socialist society on a daily basis. So why do I love the Sunday Times so much? Well, the whole paper isn't that way, I guess. I mean, it's hard to put a spin on the travel section, or the style section, or the arts & leisure section. The Book Review is always great. And the business section isn't particularly bad I guess. The real estate section is always a lot of fun to browse. But I also read the front section (news) and the opinion pages and the Week In Review section even though I really disagree with a lot of the sentiment. Why torture yourself, right? But I've discovered something about myself:
I am an information junkie.
I want to know everything. I need to know everything. About everything! If I had my way, I'd have time to read about 3 papers a day, along with countless websites, and still have time for some personal reading later in the day. I just can't get enough. I want to know all sides, understand all sides of a debate, then think logically about it and give an informed opinion. I guess that's another reason why I keep coming back to this blog; I also want to put some information out there.
My current obsession: Google Reader. If any of you don't have an RSS reader set up yet, do it. All I do is log in, and Reader sends its feelers out to the websites that I scour on a daily basis, and brings their updates to me and organizes them. It's like having an inbox for the internet. I don't have to go searching for new posts and articles. They show up in my "inbox" when I log in. James does an update about John Mayer? It shows up on my Google Reader feed immediately. Slate posts a new article? I'm on it. Trust me, this is a good thing for information junkies. It's like I've been a recreational information user all this time, and now I'm freebasing. And it's a high like I've never experienced. You should totally try it. C'mon. I'll give you this first link for free: Google Reader.

So, In Other News
I know that this blog has a slight political lean towards it, and for a while I fought that. But no longer. Not only am I an information junkie, it also turns out that I'm a policy dork. I like discussion and debate and opinions, especially ones that are different than mine. And I do feel it is the responsibility of the citizens of this country to talk about stuff. So, in that vein, be prepared. Maybe you'll find out that this stuff isn't that boring after all, and it certainly effects your life.

Uncle Milty and The Free Market

The flag flies at half-mast here at IHNJ, and it has since 11/16/2006, when Milton Friedman passed away at the age of 94.

A quick check of political/economics/policy blogs will tell you how he has been at once hated and loved. It's been very popular among bloggers over the last few days to do a RIP Milton Friedman post, deifying the man and his ideas. I want all of you to know that I've been working on a post since Friday morning when I heard the news, and I have filled nearly an entire legal pad with my thoughts and drafts and ideas for a post. I have read old journal articles and excerpts from his books and I have poured over this stuff in a way that I haven't since I left grad school. I've been trying to find a way to put down on paper what MF means to me. My wife thinks I'm crazy. I mean, I never even met this man. I never heard him speak in person. But I don't know how to explain the loss that I feel over this, except to say that by studying his work over the years he has had the largest impact on the framework I've developed to think about everything that goes on in this world.
And one of the reasons that I'm so sad is that he spent his entire career advocating ideas that were and are correct, and when I look at the newspaper today, I see the world disregarding those ideas, much in the same way that they always have, and to their own detriment.
The most common misconception made by his critics was that Milton Friedman hated poor people. Why? He opposed the following ideas:

1. The welfare system
2. The minimum wage, or wage controls of any kind
3. Organized labor unions who keep wages higher than they would be otherwise
4. The military draft

These are ideas and policies that are easy to get behind and support. They sound great. We should raise the minimum wage. Of course! Help the poor! The only one that is counterintuitive is the 4th one: Milton Friedman supported an all volunteer army. His critics said that a volunteer army would be composed mostly of low income soldiers, because the rich would never choose to put themselves in harms way, and the only ones who would be attracted to the army's relatively low wages were poor people. So, MF must hate the poor and downtrodden citizens of the world. He wants to change the welfare system, he wants to abolish the minimum wage, he wants to get rid of labor unions, and he wants to send all of our poor off to die in times of war.
If the reader gets sick of all my babbling and only gets one point out of this entire piece, let it be this one:
Milton Friedman understood that you cannot judge a policy based on its intentions. On the contrary, a policy should be judged based on its results.
After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. What do I mean by this? Well, each of the policies above is only meant to help the group that it is aimed at. It has only the best interest of the poor in mind. However, the group that winds up getting hurt the most by these policies is the very group that were supposed to be helped! MF believed that the welfare system had to be overhauled in a big way. He believed that we were paying people too much to be poor, and were actually encouraging them to stay that way. One of his solutions was a sort of reverse income tax. This is one of the few MF innovations that we see actually working today in the real world: The Earned Income Tax Credit. In effect, this tax credit reduces the payroll taxes of low income people and actually acts as an income supplement. As the amount of money earned by a low income person increases, so does the credit. This goes on up to a certain plateau level, and then begins to phase itself out as the person continues to make more money. The plan rewards the low income worker for working. It does not pay the person who sits and home hoping to collect a check from the government. As well as this program has worked, none of his other ideas for welfare reform were implemented. He realized that people respond to incentives, and as long as we keep lowering the cost of being poor with government subsidies like welfare, we would continue to see an awful lot of poor people.
Probably the most frequently debated and most controversial topic has always been the minimum wage. This is something that is on the front page of the WSJ even today, and it was one of the hot button topics of the most recent Democratic victory in the House and Senate. It is a gimme. We can make low income citizens better off by raising the minimum wage! And if you oppose such a thing, you must hate the poor and you must be insensitive. This could not be farther from the truth. Dr. Friedman has (and many others have) explained many times over that by raising the minimum wage (or forcing higher wages in any way) you are actually hurting the low income worker. When you raise the minimum wage, you raise unemployment. The worker who was being paid $6/hour will now likely be out of a job if his employer is forced to pay him $7/hour, because he isn't worth that to the employer! Why would the employer keep him on? Charity? Proponents of wage controls simply don't believe this fact. They believe that an evil capitalist sits atop the company holding workers as wage slaves and reaping all the benefits, but this idea is silly. If i own a business, I have to hire workers in order for the business to run. I want the best employees I can have, so I have to attract them with wages and benefits, but I will only pay them what they are worth to me. I can hire a worker for $5/hour and he provides me with $10/hour of labor. This is great! I get to keep the leftover $5! However, my competitor also wants employees and he sees that I have this good one. He offers my worker $6/hour to do the $10/hour worth of work that the employee can do, and he keeps the $4. It is still worth it to me to offer $7/hour for the $10/hour worth of labor, so I do it. Do you see where this is going? If a worker is being underpaid, he can always go somewhere else and make more money. A worker will get paid what he is worth based on his skill level. If I am hiring somebody at todays minimum wage of $5.15/hour or whatever it is, and then I am forced to pay him more by law, I won't do it. If they raise the minimum wage to a level of $7/hour, I will only keep on those employees that are worth $7/hour and I will fire all of those who are worth less. By simply existing, the minimum wage is discriminating against low skilled laborers. I don't know how much more simply to explain this.
Another interesting debate involves the military draft and the all volunteer army. Critics say that the poor will be "forced" to go and die, while the rich stay home and enjoy being rich. The defense of the all volunteer army stands on the foundation that individuals should be allowed to self-select into an occupation, and they will choose the option that is best for them. The critics are correct that the army would be made up mostly of lower income individuals, but what they fail to recognize is that these individuals are better off in the army and would be worse off if they could not volunteer. Nobody is forced into wages that they don't deserve. If the army pays $15k/year, and I can only make $10k/year because I have few skills, then I am better off by choosing to go into the army. However, if I am highly skilled and I make a good wage for myself, I am made much worse off by being made to join the army. I lose my high wages, and society loses my high output because of my skills. And if I am a low skilled individual and I'm not selected by the draft, I am being denied the opportunity to better myself and my situation. It's just rational.

You can see that the ideas of Dr. Friedman are based on a few ideas:
1. Individual freedom to choose is paramount because,
2. Individuals can better choose for themselves what is best for themselves, and
3. The government cannot choose it better for me.

I could almost cry when I look at the news lately and see how so many of MF's ideas are horribly misunderstood at best, and completely disregarded at worst. Look at the campaign platform of the democrats who just came into power! Raise the minimum wage! Let's make this economy more "fair"! What does that even mean, "fair"? That sounds like the rantings of a child that doesn't have a toy that his friend has. The fact that some people are rich and others are poor has nothing to do with fairness, and you can't make it "more fair" by taking what the rich have and spreading it around so that we are all equal. That isn't what fair is. Fair is everyone having an opportunity to succeed. Being created equal doesn't guarantee equal outcomes, just equal opportunities. The fallacy believed by so many in this country is that we can solve the problem of poverty and wage inequality. There will always be people who are less able than others. We can't make our society better off by punishing its most productive members (the highly skilled) and rewarding its least productive members (the low skilled). What we can do is to have policies in place that actually work to make life better for the least of our population, not just policies that sound like they should work. Artificially increasing wages won't do this. At best you get higher prices to cover the new higher costs of wages, and this is just redistributing wealth by taking it from the rest of the world in the form of higher costs and giving it to the workers in the form of higher wages. At worst, you get increased unemployment.
I could go on for days here. I haven't even touched 25% of my notes, and what I have written so far is scatterbrained enough as it is. But I will close with a positive takeaway that really just came to me this morning:
I think that politicians and the general population might finally be understanding the fact that we have an economy that works from the bottom up. The consumer makes demands of producers for goods that they want and at what prices and quality, and the producers then produce those goods as best they can. The most recent attack on Walmart has been a consumer driven one: a boycott. Barack Obama said in the teleconference supporting the movement that if you disagree with Walmart's wage practices, you should shop at Costco like he does. There they pay a much higher wage and much better benefits. He isn't recommending a new law requiring Walmart to raise its wages; Obama is recommending letting market forces regulate wages. I hope this means that he realizes that you can't tell the American people what they should want or what is best for them. In the same vein, I recently saw a commercial for Gateway that was highlighting their policy of 100% North American based tech support. Basically what they are saying is, if you hate all this outsourced tech support, if you hate talking to some guy in India every time your computer messes up, then buy a Gateway. Presumably you will pay more because an American tech support worker costs more than an Indian one, but if you buy the computer it means that this is something that is important to you. So, you are keeping some tech support jobs here in North America. This isn't because of some protectionist law requiring Gateway to hire only locals; it is because there is demand from consumers for this job to stay in the United States! And if these kinds of things go well, you will see more of this from other companies. How long will it take for governments to realize that they can't tell their citizens what they should want? When governments try to legislate choices on the people, they only cause inefficiencies and loss of both jobs and money. Look at what happened with trans fats. The government won't have a chance to outlaw them because companies will stop using them first because of consumer choice! In all of these situations, people are better off because they have chosen for themselves what is best, and not because of politicians in DC choosing for them. So maybe there is a silver lining. Maybe these ideas aren't so radical after all. Maybe, as Milton Friedman so often suggested, things aren't always as they first appear.

This will likely be my last post for a good long while. I am currently studying for the CFA (just google it) and that is taking up all of my free time. However, I am completely open to discussion of anything I've written here. I actually think it would make me feel better. Free market ideas are always better when discussed rather than when presented. I want to leave you with the following link. This is Milton Friedman saying most of the stuff I've been struggling to get out, and doing it in the style in which he always did it: one that is easy to understand, and astoundingly brilliant. It is shocking how applicable everything he says in this video is today.

Milton Friedman on Everything

Thank you for indulging me this post. Milton Friedman is an idol of mine and I will miss him.

I don't wear jerseys, I'm 30 plus. Give me a crisp pair of jeans nigga, button ups.

This picture is monumental for a couple of reasons:

1. This came from today's Wall Street Journal article about Rocawear's new clothing line called "Custom Fit". This, in itself, is funny because it is a WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE ABOUT ROCAWEAR. It may be the first time that a black person has ever been pictured in The Journal. There is some crusty old white dude sitting in his office at Goldman Sachs saying something like "Well that fella has been spending a little too much time in Boca."

2. This is the first time in history that black culture has stolen something from white culture. It is always the other way around. Invariably. We steal phrases and styles of dress and we kinda stole (and castrated) rap music. But now look. They are trying to steal our hipster stylings! Jay-Z better watch out. James Yeh is gonna come kick his ass.


Wait a minute........James Yeh isn't white!

H to tha izz-O, V to tha izz-A. Fo shizzle my nizzle used to play pickle with James Yeh.

I said James Yeh a bunch in this post. That should help his Google rankings. 

A Celebration of Justin/Jay/J

Ladies and Gentlefolk, I'd like you to meet Justin Hockenbury. Hockenberry. Hock.......his name is Jayberry Hockenstuff. Otherwise known as Tall Jay. He is recently married and was unfortunate enough to have me as a reader in his wedding ceremony (First Corinthians bitch!).
What can I say about Jay? That dude is tall. He can dance on a pole like nobody's business. When he gets drunk, he runs around and flails his arms about in a such a way that he looks like some kind of lanky pole-dancing octopus. Also, he is currently tied with Josh for the title of Greatest Cower Player Of All Time.
Side Story #1: I looked for a link to show you guys what Cower is, but there isn't one. When playing Cower, you stand approximately 20 feet apart from your opponent, facing each other. You take a disc and hurl it straight into the air, as high as you can. Your opponent must catch the falling disc with one hand. NO TRAPPING THE DISC AGAINST YOUR BODY, bitch. One night, after many many Joint Chief's had been drunk, Jay and Josh decided to go out to the parking lot at around 2am and play some Cower. What ensued was the most amazing display of drunken athletic ability ever witnessed. They were throwing the disc so high that it went so far above the limits of the parking lot lights that it actually disappeared into the darkness. Then it came screaming out of the night sky and speeds that would chop off the hands of mortal men.
Josh and Jay played for something like 30 minutes without the disc ever touching the ground. I still have dreams about it to this day.
*Footnote to Side Story #1: If you are the one to drop a throw, you have to lay down on the ground in a COWERING position (hence the name o' the game) and let the other person throw the disc up into the air and try to hit you with it. It hurts, and it is scary.
Jay got married last weekend in his hometown of Just Outside Of Washington, DC. "Then why the hell are you posting a bunch of old pictures?" you might ask. "Where are the wedding pictures?"
Well, we kinda forgot our camera. So we had to buy a disposable one and I haven't gotten the pictures developed yet.
So anyways, I figured I'd post some old pictures I have.
These first three pictures are from Senior Walk, 2004. Jay and I were founding members of The Senior Mafia, shown to the left here. Long story short, we were drunk and eating pizza at 3am in Clemson when, by divine providence, the idea developed:
1. Send out a massive email
2. Design a t-shirt
3. Talk to bars in downtown and arrange deals
4. Pass out t-shirts to like 300 participants
5. Drink your face off
Sounds simple enough, right? Well, yeah it kinda was. The first picture on this post is Jay attacking me while passing out shirts. The second picture is Jay and me picking up the shirts with a whole lot of other peoples money. Again, the third picture is one of the founding fathers of Senior Walk, about 1/3rd of the way through the walk.
This last picture.....well I guess it needs some explanation. It was taken during the wee hours of the morning after my bachelor party. I don't think I'm even in the picture, but I can't be sure. My best guess is that two idiots tried to attack Jay in his sleep, and he quickly put them into submission while cheesing for the camera.
Jay is a great guy.
I'll take this post down if he ever wants to run for public office. 

My own personal civil war

Ok, so it only took me a little over a week to get the gumption to update again. Gumption is running at an all time low. I blame the heat. I also blame the people who keep saying "Hey, you're from South Carolina. I bet all this heat feels just like home!". Well yeah, idiot, it does kind of feel like home. But that doesn't mean that it feels good. If I wanted to sweat through my suit everyday, I wouldn't have moved. Gosh!
So ok, let's finish up some things from Robert's wedding weekend. The picture you see on the left is the classic "morning after" picture. From the left: my brother Jake, his girlfriend Lindsay, my wife Libby, ROBB, my brother-in-law and Libby's real brother Brad. We are standing on the back deck of my uncle's house in Aiken, SC. I'm not sure if I already said this (and I'm not going to actually go back and read my last post), but we stayed at my Aunt Colleen and Uncle Charlie's house/farm/heaven during the weekend. And I have to be honest, I wish we could have had another week just to stay there and relax. Don't get me wrong; I love New Jersey (actually I Heart New Jersey!!!!!!! Website plug!!!!!!!111) and I love living close to NYC. But my uncle lives on something like 10o acres.



He has horses and land.













Lots of land. And a lake. And a barn and a 4-wheeler and a golf cart and a pool and a ton of stuff. There is something about sitting on the back porch and looking out over the pasture and........I don't even know how to put it exactly. When you are in the middle of Midtown and you are looking up at buildings, you feel small. When you stand in the middle of 100 acres, you feel small. When an uppity French waiter turns up his nose at your wine order in a restaurant in New York, you feel small. When you are in front of a horse that stands over 7 feet tall and you feed him an apple treat and rub his nose, you feel small. How do you compare the two?
Speed? How to define that? How fast people drive or talk?
Maybe heart rate?
Cost of living? I hate that. It costs less down south, but you make less. So how do you quantify?
I don't know, they're just different. You can't quantify.
I just know that I was supremely relaxed while I was at my uncle's. I have to be honest: I can't relax like that here. I can relax here, but it's different. It's tough to describe, but let me try.
I like to imagine that I'm on a long never-ending run. A Sunday afternoon with the New York Times and a cup of coffee in my big leather chair here in my townhouse in New Jersey is like taking a break from the run and walking. It's a lot easier to walk than to run, and it feels really good to walk when you're tired of running. But when I was in Aiken, I stopped moving. I wasn't even walking. The rest of the runners were passing me by, and I was standing still. Then somebody brought me a chair. And a lemonade. And a book.
Does that make sense at all?
I hope so.

My name is Robb, and I'm an......
So I have had a lot to drink this summer. Loads of wine. I'm really into Barossa Valley (Australian) reds. They are big and dark with lots of dark cherry and dark chocolate and plenty of earth. And California Zinfadels are great with a big steak on the grill. Then it got hot and I started drinking some Italian whites: Falanghina and Trebbiano (those are grape varietals). I'm not grape-dropping here to make myself look good. I'm trying to inform. After all, I didn't know about these before a few months ago when my awesome wine shop folks starting bringing them in. So seriously, go get you some Falanghina and drink it outside in the sun.
But when it comes down to it, I'm a beer guy. My current beer of choice is Victory Brewing Company's Golden Monkey. But my all-time favorite brewer is Rogue. A few weeks ago, brother Brad told me about a Rogue tasting that was going down a few towns over at a bar called The Shephard And The Knucklehead (underneath the sign out front is the phrase: Celebrating The Duality Of Man). Eight Rogues on tap. Needless to say, I made a long night of it. I actually remembered to bring a small notebook with me to record whatever tasting notes I could come up with for the beers I'd never tried before. Luckily, I took notes on them all. They are hilarious. They started out clever and coherent:
"Altbeir - Easy to drink, complex. When Sierra Nevada dreams, it is a Rogue Altbeir"

Later:
"Hazelnut - Pure hazelnut flavor. Smooth, actually on the lighter side. Getting some vanilla, might be good with dessert."

And after that it went quickly downhill:
"Chocolate Stout - you know, CHOCOLATE. like a flourless cake. starting to get heavy. nah."
"Shakespeare Stout - like the chocolate, but no chocolate."

Obviously there were several beers between all of those, but those were the highlights. The next day, I was going over my notes and I flipped the page and it turns out that I tasted another beer that I don't really remember:
"Smuttynose IPA - nice, but strong. wheaty and hoppy, but NOT citrusy. YEASTY."

I mean, what? What does half of that mean? I don't know, but it sounds like a damn good IPA to me. 

Blogging: Who has the time?

So, obviously I took an unscheduled sabbatical. Part of me feels like I should be apoligizing now, but I won't. It was awesome. I remain happily unapologetic. But still, I do feel slightly guilty for bailing on IHNJ. Blogging is funny that way; you want to believe that you're doing this thing for yourself and only because it makes you happy, but then you don't write for a month and you get 13 comments from your entire neglected readership. Let me explain my absence, with the help of some pretty pictures!
In late June, I went for Chicago for about 4 days for the Morningstar Investment Conference, and Libby tagged along just for fun. Of course, we forgot the camera. No picture evidence. It was my first time in Chicago (which I will not refer to as The Windy City ever, since every person who hears that I went there says something to the effect of "Hey, the Windy City!"). It turns out that I a huge fan of Chicago! We stayed right in the middle of downtown, on Wacker and only a few blocks from the water. So while I listened to mutual fund managers talk about the market and why their fund is, like, the best ever, Libby was galavanting all over the city and sending me picture text messages of all the cool architecture, famous pantings, and beautiful parks in the city. Luckily, I was done every day by around 4pm, which left plenty of time for hanging out. We dropped over $200 on dinner at Crofton On Wells. Yup. I'll go into detail about the meal later if provoked. One night we went to Quartino. We sat outside and drank the 1/4 liter bottles of wine that give the restaurant its name, snacked on marinated olives, house-cured meats, bread dips, tiny plates of pasta, and a small pizza. We found out that the aquarium was staying open late one night for an event called Jazz at the Shedd, so we went and listened to live jazz and had a few drinks while we walked around and looked at fish and aquatic mammals. I had a brief glimpse of a brilliant idea for a bar, but then I thought that I'd probably have to pay somebody to feed all those fish, as well as buy the food and that all started to seem like a hassle.
Chicago was great, but on July 1st we left. You can't stay forever I guess. Unless you live there, which is a possiblility. It really is a great city.
Almost as soon as we got back, we drove down to Ocean City, NJ for the week of July 4th. Libby's folks have a place down there, and the entire family came: Mama & Papa Casanova, me & Libby, Jamie & Brian, and Brad even flew in from Asheville. The first picture you see above came from that week: Brad on the left with Carly the dog, then me and Cooper, and then Brian and Vance The Donkey. The week was relaxing and the weather was beautiful. I finished Gideon, which was a little heavy for summer reading, but brilliant nonetheless. I am sure I'll read that book about once every 5 or 10 years until I die. I also read Fluke, which was perfect summer reading. I don't care what anyone says, I'll never be too good for Christopher Moore books. We ate good food, we drank good drink. After that we were home for about 5 days and then we hit the road again.
Next we drove down to Garden City, SC to vacation with my family. We brought the camera, but didn't take one picture while we were there. Too bad for you guys, but it just goes to show you what life is like with my family at the beach. We stayed in a house right on the beach, with a screened back porch looking over the ocean and a weathered wooden walkway down to the sand. My parents were there, along with my brother and his girlfriend (who we met for the first time, and was pretty great). Here is what a typical day looked like:
1. Wake up around 9, fix coffee, sit on porch and watch the ocean.
2. Around 11am, change into swimsuits, pack a cooler full of beer (don't forget to cut limes for the Modelo), and head down to the beach.
3. Drink. Tan. Swim. Throw a disc around. Play some wiffle ball. Take a walk. Drink.
4. 6pm: Either cook dinner or go out to eat.
5. Play cards and drink until around 1 or 2am. Phase 10 is a favorite. That 7th phase is a bastard.
So we all hung out until Friday, when we drove to Aiken, SC for Robert and Polly's wedding. Robert, for those who don't know, is a former Clemson roomate/helpdesk coworker/ultimate teammate/partner in various crimes including but not limited to the following: my bachelor party, Senior Walk, and drinking a metric crap-ton of Red Hook Blond at some ultimate tournament in Tennessee with LJ.
The pictures you see here are from the post reception debauchery. Long story short, Tall Jay found like 8 bottles of opened wine that was going to be thrown away if it wasn't consumed immediately. The leftover partiers stood outside in a circle and passed the bottles until they were gone. Very few survived, and none made it out completely unscathed. For example, Brad had to crawl to his room from the car, and Jake proposed to his girlfriend in the bar and then cried and then tried to steal some guy's cigarettes. Tall Jay never made it back down to the bar after going up to his room to change. Miraculously, I just got semi-drunk.
I think this last picture of Jake and I is funny, but I have no idea what we're doing. Maybe we're showing how fat we're going to be. I have no idea.
I just ran out of steam. I have more to say, but I don't want to force it out. More to come!