Alec

As I mentioned on Sunday, Andrew and I are gratified that Andrew’s older brother took care of our housing situation for Boston.

This relieved us of a lot of stress, as well as a trip to Boston to secure housing. We were happy to leave things in his hands.

Andrew’s older brother is a remarkable guy. He’s a good husband, a good father, a good brother and a good son. He’s very intelligent, very hard-working, very loyal, very thoughtful and very considerate. I think of him now as my own brother.

There is a streak of primogeniture in him, as he views himself as the rightful and natural leader of his two younger brothers (who are generally happy to fall in line with whatever he has in mind). This very occasionally leads to the odd conflict, but such conflicts are short-lived and seldom serious in nature.

He and I had a serious disagreement over Easter weekend 2006, the first weekend I spent in Andrew’s family home, and that disagreement ruined the entire weekend for the entire family. He and I had a strained relationship for the following two or three months, but our relationship was repaired exactly two years ago this week, when we all spent ten days together up at the lake. During those ten days, he and I somehow managed to bury the hatchet. He has never held that old disagreement against me, and we have been friends and family ever since.

I met Andrew’s older brother late on Friday night, February 17, 2006, when Andrew and I had gone to New York for Presidents’ Day Weekend. He was the first member of Andrew’s family I met.

Andrew and I spent that entire weekend in New York with his brother and his family, and our days in New York were the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth days I knew Andrew. Early the following week I described that weekend in four email messages to a friend of mine. I post the texts of these email messages below, in sequence. They directly follow upon my previous five days with Andrew, described in old email messages I posted on March 28, 2008.

Andrew’s brother does not object to these old email messages. In fact, he thinks they are amusing (and often hilarious).

This very minute we are sitting out on the deck, up at the lake, with an hour or so to kill before dinnertime. Indeed, I am using Alec’s laptop, the only computer on hand for any of us this week.

Alec brought his laptop with him so that he may monitor the stock market as it continues its slide. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 1800 points-–it has dropped from 13,000 down to 11,200—in the four weeks since Obama effectively wrapped up the Democrat presidential nomination.

2008 has been the year of “The Obama Market”, declining with only slight pauses since January 3, the day of the Iowa Caucuses, which came early this year. The markets, always looking ahead six to twelve months, are projecting two things: Obama will be the next occupant of the White House; and Obama’s Hard Left tax and economic policies will pass a heavily-Democrat House and Senate early next year.

Capital will contract.

Hard times are ahead.