An Apartment!

For the past two years, summer for me has meant packing up my stuff from my cute little dorm room and moving it across town to an apartment for three months. This summer, I am living in River Heights in a two bedroom apartment with three of my friends. The complex is located right behind the MMC campus, and I work here at school, so I take advantage and walk to work every morning and back home for lunch. It's fantastic beings I love walking, especially in the beautiful summer weather, and it also saves on gas money (because we all know how ridiculous prices are!).

I must admit that it is somewhat of a hassle to pack up my stuff at the beginning and end of summer to move back and forth from the dorms to my apartment, but I've been super excited both summers of my college experience to move to new locations and new experiences. At the end of this past school year with four girls, only two bedrooms, one bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a rather small living room, I was a bit nervous for my relocation to our new apartment. The place looked too tiny to pull through, and I felt claustrophobic after examining it post lease-signing. However, I should have known to never underestimate the classiness of women. :) I must say that with our furniture and wall decorations, the place is rather cute with a homey atmosphere, and I'm happy to call it home for the next three months.

I share the small bedroom with my best friend. Beings it is only 5' by 5', we had to be resourceful in moving in to say the least. Luckily, our experiences with college dorm rooms have already taught us the basics. My Dad built me a set of bunk beds that we are using (he is possibly a bit too excited about his handiwork). Boxes of winter clothing and excess books, photographs, and trinkets were left packed up and sent home for the summer. Once the beds were in place, the rest was a matter of creativity - a couple of trips to Walmart later for plastic dressers and hooks, and we were able to treat ourselves to DQ blizzards as a reward for our intelligent designing. :) We were even able to fit a mini fridge and a television comfortably into the room...I know, wow!

The four of us all have different work schedules, so we usually get up at different times and competition for bathroom time hasn't been an issue. If nothing else, living in an apartment or a dorm room re-emphasizes the importance of communication and compromise! My roommates and I know each other's general schedules and discuss possible conflicts about shower time, etc. before they come about. I myself am impressed with how smoothly four girls are functioning with only one bathroom.

Past experience and stories have taught me that food could be our downfall. To avoid squabbles over who's gulping all the milk or eating all the crackers, we each have our own cupboard and buy our own food. We don't hate each other by any means, but it cuts out a lot of possible pointless drama. And because we are friendly people, we do have a community food cupboard. We share bread and milk and occasionally such yummy things as ice cream and cookies!

Thankfully, I live with girls who do not enjoy filth. We each do our share of cleaning and picking up after ourselves. We pay rent on the first day of every month. To make things simple, we just split it four ways and submit four separate checks.

The place is typically locked up and quiet during the day as we are all working or out and about. The evenings are our time to relax and chat about our days and our lives. It's great to go home after a long day at work and have friends to talk to and hang out with. The first couple of weeks of summer have been great with my apartment roommates!

I have to head back to the lab to culture some proteins, so until next time, yay for summer! :)