Tony Brewer

Graduation season is here!  I have received seven graduation invitations in the mail from various friends and family members!  So now begins the search for the perfect graduation gift for each of them.  Some of them I am very close to; others I only barely know.One of the things that always stumped me in the past was what to give someone as a graduation present.  I don’t want to be one of those people who just gives the graduates a “really nice” pen and pencil set!  That’s a cop-out!

Only recently did it occur to me that one of the best gifts someone could receive at that age is a high quality luggage, like tumi luggage!  Most graduates are going to be “on the move” in one way or another.  They may be going off to another school, or moving to another city to pursue a career.  Of course, you need to make sure that the graduate IS planning to go somewhere!  A gift of hartmann luggage or briggs and riley luggage to someone who plans to just stay home with the folks forever wouldn’t appreciate a gift like that at all!  But for the up-and-coming graduate with big plans is going to need great luggage to take his (or her) belongings along!

Teri’s old college roomie Sarah called this morning to invite us to join her (and Jackie and Melissa) at a college roomie reunion vacation.  The reunion is to include husbands and significant others, so it won’t just be a “girlie” vacation.  I think that they feel that if the other halves are invited too, there will be less sqawking and more cooperation.  They have picked out an Oceanfront North Myrtle Beach Resort as the vacation destination for the reunion.  They’ve been looking at various North Myrtle Beach Resorts and have narrowed the search down to a few different choices.

They want Teri and I to help them decide which North Myrtle Beach Resort to use.  I told Teri that any one of them is fine, as long as they are condominium type suites so we can double up and share.  It would be good to be able to book a couple of suites and each suite holds two couples.

One of my best friends, Jack, is a huge sports fan. He has a great “man’s room” in his house - with a big screen television, a wet bar, and great reclining seats for us to relax in when we go over. He has a lot of sports trophies lining the walls - he played a lot of sports in high school and college, and he loves to show them off!

It seems that almost every time I talk to him, he is excitedly bragging to me about how he has scored some great tickets to one game or another and he is always inviting Teri and I to join him and his wife Kate to go to the games with them.  I never know when he is going to score great Yankee Stadium Tickets, or Fenway Park Tickets, or even Wrigley Field Tickets.  He sure seems to know how and when to get great deals on them all!  I think it’s great to love sports, and I think that he’s lucky to find such great deals all of the time!

I am never ceased to be amazed when I go out every day how many one way truck rental trucks I see driving down the highways.  There certainly seem to be plenty of people who are moving around every day!  I sometimes wonder what the story is behind the family that is moving.  Are they moving to a better job, or are they maybe moving to be closer to ailing family?

I wonder when I see one of the budget van lines trucks how much money the family saved by going with the budget van lines versus one of the big brand names.  I’ve talked with a few people from time to time about how much money it cost them to move, and the big name moving companies have cost thousands of dollars!  Every time I’ve moved, I’ve been lucky enough to just be able to borrow some friends and their pickups and make a few shuttle runs between places.  I cannot even imagine moving hundreds of miles away!