Living with roommates

Isn't it funny how a small noise can trigger a memory? Tonight I had that type of moment; I was sitting on the couch when the smoke detector went off ((low battery)). While most would think this would remind me of the time I caught ramen noodles on fire (I forgot to add water...), it reminded me of a late night with my old roommate.

Remember when you were in college living with roommates having the time of your life? Yeah, my roommate situation was a little different. I lived at home with my parents until I was 23 and moved to NC with a man who is now my husband. So where do the roommates come in to play? Doesn't every newlywed couple move in with another newlywed couple? No? OK, well hear me out. After a little over a year of living in a tiny apartment, Taylor decided it was time to move on, and since we lived near the beach we might as live at the beach. Taylor was looking at some houses for rent at work one day when he and a co-worker started talking about getting a nice house together at the beach, since it's so expensive to live at the beach. When Taylor first approached me with this idea I thought to myself "hell no". But then I reconsidered and asked who. It was a newly engaged couple we had hung out with only a handful of times. I finally agreed, telling Taylor if I could live with any other couple it would be them.

They drove 15 hours to spend one day at our wedding in Indiana!

I just knew it was going to be a great set up. The boys worked the same schedule, so when they were gone, they were both gone together and then it was just like only living with another girl. The boys were already pretty great friends from working together, and I just knew Katie and I were going to be the best of friends. I knew we wouldn't annoy each other, mainly because we worked opposite schedules and we were also day and night when it came to personalities. Katie is a lot more quite than I am. I envisioned how great it would finally be to live with another female (whom I wasn't related to!), I would wake up early on Saturday mornings and crawl in bed with Katie for morning giggles while our men made us breakfast. We lived together for almost 3 years and this picture I had envisioned never happened. First off, I don't get up early, second of all... our men do not make breakfast. Truth be told, my husband never cooks, and her husband's cooking pretty much always involves a grill.

Girls buy matching shoes, boys grow matching creeper mustaches.

So while our friendships were not exactly how I had planned them, they were so much more than I could have ever asked for. After hearing about other peoples horror stories with their roommates, I can't believe how easy we had it. There were never fights or awkward moments. Katie and Colton became family. Katie and I never did have that morning of giggles while the boys slaved over pancakes, but you better believe that biatch was there for me when I woke up and my eye was swollen shut, from a spider bite, and drove my scary looking self to pick up medicine. Poor Katie also had to drive Taylor to the store when he had just had lasick surgery; imagine a drunk, white, Stevie wonder look a like walking around your grocery store with a sweet blond hair blue eyed southern bell quietly giving small children candy behind his back and trying to convince them he isn't normally this creepy (or something like that). And Colton might not have ever made pancakes, but was always willing to throw down on the grill for dinner, hang pictures on the wall, and kill spiders with out having to be asked twice. True friends right there.

So back the point of this post, the smoke detector. The home we lived in was a brand new, beautiful 3 story town home, equipped with hard wired smoke detectors. Meaning: if one would go off, for whatever reason, every single other smoke detector would go off. So late one night, the boys were at work, Katie had been well asleep for hours, and I had just got off work sitting on the couch enjoying a bottle glass of wine. All of sudden the whole house started beeping like crazy, this had happened a week prior and all we had to do was touch one and the whole house was quite again. Well this particular night, the press of a button was not cutting it. The alarms stopped for a whole 30 minutes before they started again. We tried calling the fire department and no one answered. I freaked and called 911 and then realized it wasn't really an emergency and hung up. DON'T DO THIS!  It didn't even ring, but they called back anyways. I apologized for hanging up, and they told us to immediately evacuate the premises. So there Katie and I sat at 3 am waiting for whomever to show up. The fire department did show up and thankfully didn't cause a huge scene, since we basically lived in a retirement community and our neighbors hated us ( the fact that we rented and were two couple living together made them think there were freaky things going on.. there were not!). Some 45 minutes later the fire department was clueless and just decided to do a hard reset on our system and we were finally free to go back inside. It was not funny at the time, but I am thankful now to have that memory with such a sweet "sister" now, that can be rekindled with the simple beep of a smoke detector.

Who knew friends could turn into sisters?

Love her!