As it turns out, my previous recap wasn’t entirely right, but there were certainly some accurate parts. Here’s a piece-by-piece deconstruction of the predictions.
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Rather than waiting until Sunday to post a recap of what happened at Coon Dog’s party, I figured it would be easiest to do that now.

So we all showed up and quickly realized we don’t know 90% of the people at the party. This is not unusual, since we’re a bunch of losers, so the first thing we do is head straight for the keg (which is, of course, surrounded expertly by Coon Dog’s ice).

We make a “safe haven” in Coon Dog’s room, which he has haphazardly cleaned in anticipation of our arrival. There are still areas of the floor we can’t walk on, but he has pushed all his crap to the corners of the room to make it a little more liveable.

Because we’re not out greeting people, and we already know the people in the room, we need a way to keep ourselves entertained before everyone is fully drunk. We tell old stories from high school, before Schulte finds something from Coon Dog’s room he can destroy and entertain us all. Eventually Coon wants to keep everyone distracted from his personal possessions, and brings out the computer so we can play videos / surf the web and find more things to make fun of when we’re not busy making fun of ourselves and destroying Coon’s property.

Throughout this time, other people from the party casually walk in and out of Coon Dog’s room, but most of them leave quickly because they feel awkward – like they’ve walked in on some other party. The only new people we meet the whole night are the most outgoing partygoers, who are usually drunk, and looking for anyone to talk to. We manage to make even some of them uncomfortable. Schulte in his semi-drunken state manages to say something so offensive to one of them that we fear we’ve actually caused some attendees to leave the party.

As we get progressively more intoxicated, some of us brave the “outside world” and talk to some new people. We will never remember these new people, nor will we talk to them again. We’re all counting on Tom to take sufficient pictures so we can remember that we even conversed with a stranger the entire evening.

As the evening winds down, Schulte decides to destroy something on his way out for good measure. That leaves us all on a high note. As we all leave we talk about what a great party it was, high-five, say “boo-yeah” and take off. The next day we wake up, check out the pictures from the night before, and think “wow, what a bunch of losers we are.”

Sad as it may be, I may have to move out of my apartment at the end of the year. The luxorious Royal Crest Estates is trying to increase my rent. When I originally signed my lease, I was given a “discount” so that my rent was only $879 a month. Now that it’s a new year, they’re simply removing the discount and trying to charge me $1,179. A little steep in my opinion.

If you look at that homestore.com listing though, you’ll see it listed at $1,019 a month for the same apartment. I asked about that, and apparently again that’s a “move-in discount.” So they basically just offer sweet deals to people to get them in there, and then promptly raise the price to the “fair market price” after a tenant’s first year.

This makes very little sense to me for a few reasons. I think the ultimate problem is that tenants find moving too much of a pain and choose instead to suffer through this nonsense (I surely won’t be one of them) rather than move out when they raise the rent. If tenants were more price-sensitive and didn’t mind moving so much, I think we could finally convince apartment complexes that the way it works is like this…
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