a few days ago at the beach while we were skim boarding(which is quite fun and i would recommend anyone tries) we kept moving further down the beach to get to better areas of the shoreline to skim. after we finished up and were walking back, as we got to the area where we put our stuff down we saw it was all ruffled and moved around. obviously being the optimist i am i thought dan took our stuff back to the house, but that was just wishful thinking at it's best. unfortunately but fortunately, we immediately got word from one of the people sitting near our stuff that two kids ran up, quickly took me and steve's wallets and phones and ran away. that said, they did give us a fairly descriptive description of the kids and as we were walking towards the boardwalk one of our friends was holding steves wallet and said the kids had thrown it in one of the many trashcans after taking all the cash out of it. this gave me a glimmer of hope as i don't really care about the $160 some odd dollars i had in my wallet nearly as much as i care about my license, credit cards, health insurance card, etc etc. after checking the same trash can though i was left sifting through random peoples garbage and no wallet.

we walked down the boardwalk a little while and reported the situation to a cop who basically told us that there is little to no chance of getting our stuff back, which is understandable and i'm glad the cop was honest rather than bull****ting us that everything will turn up blah blah blah. so at this point i'm just furious that some ***** kids are going to make me go out of my way to do a ton of work to get my stuff back. i decide my best bet is to walk back to the part of the beach where we found steves wallet, and check the other garbage cans nearby. the first i check is a swing and a solid miss, but jeff(jschnett) immediately sees my wallet sitting atop a pile of garbage in the first can he looks at. luckily all my stuff is still there with the exception of the cash obviously.

so at this point all me and steve are out is ~$260 and our phones, which is a bigger deal for him than me cause he has an iphone and i just have a ****ty nextel. after coming back to the house i sign online and get a message from my dad telling me that my phone is at a store on the boardwalk and i can go pick it up. i get there and the owner tells me they are closing and someone was there but didn't leave the phone there, which i wasn't too worried about because i couldn't imagine not getting the phone back after someone went out of their way to get in contact with me and help me out. sure enough the next morning i went back and they had the phone there, luckily, because it had died at that point. steve still hasn't gotten his phone back yet and it doesn't look too good at this point, but there is a new iphone coming out in a few weeks which he likely would have upgraded to anyway.

all in all, i realized plain and simple that i'm just not careful enough. i don't protect my stuff as well as i should and it never worried me until this. it's sort of one of those things that i never worried about too much because i just(stupidly) never thought it'd happen. i mean, i obviously knew there was a chance it could always happen, but it was never a priority in my mind to be as careful as i should be for whatever reason. i suppose it may have been worth it for me to lose that $160 if it prevents me from losing more money/more expensive stuff in the future.