So, I really love my new place here at PSU, but I drafted this a long time ago and figured I’d remember some of the good old days of living in my last apartment. Here’s a few highlights.

• The Volcano and Banana Floaters Tea: As a housewarming event, Steve and Alex stole a volcano-aquarium thing from the girls upstairs (which was kept proudly in my room). During this process they did other stuff to their place, including putting a banana into the teapot. A few days later we were talking with Grace, who was drinking a cup of tea. “Why does this taste like bananas?” she said. As we held in our laughter she exclaimed that there were “banana floaters” in her teapot.
• Count Beerula’s Lair: Our kitchen had a giant cardboard cutout of a beer bottle wearing a dracula costume. You could put your head through the “face” and everything. This was Count Beerula. He lived in a closet in our kitchen, a closet that actually went up to the second floor, boarded off behind the wall of our housemate’s closet. On rare occaisions we’d go into the lair and beat on the wall screaming her name and making spooky noises.
• “I’m a responsible individual!”: For Steve’s sake, I won’t put this up here.
• The Cake rule: Our first meal in the place, we found a box of cake mix and sprinkles left over by the previous residents. We made it and someone said “There should be cake every weekend. And there was. Often we’d bet away our cake-baking duty, and arguments could be won or lost simply by retorting about the quality of that person’s cake that weekend. “Dude I really just don’t think he’d be a good candidate for president.” “Oh?! Well your cake this weekend is terrible!”
• The HPTI Problem Solving: I have a post about this elsewhere. I’m too lazy to link it.
• Balloons: After the HPTI Problem-Solving competition, I hid the balloons steve put in my room away. For about 3 weeks, every time he would leave, I would take out a balloon and draw a happy, toothy, grinning face on one of them. Then I would place it somewhere in Steve’s bedroom, usually wearing one of his hats, or peering out from under a pile of clothes or something. Every time he found it, he would pop it on a nail in my door. After awhile, Steve started losing it, and refering to the balloon as “Him”. “I don’t want to see ‘him’ again. ‘He’ shouldn’t be smiling so much. Balloons don’t even have teeth!”
• Valentines Day Brownies: Once I made brownies (as a substitution for cake which I was quite sick of) but sadly they got burnt. Oh well, I iced them anyways but nobody in the apartment would touch them. A week later, for Valentine’s day, we took the stale old brownies and wrapped them up on a plate with a Valentine, leaving them at the door of the girls above us. They actually ate them. Upon finding out, we all almost died of laughter.
• The night of the eclipse: The first day I moved in, I took Steve’s horrible old microwave (circa 1888) and put it under the counter since the one I brought was so much better. One night, an eclipse drove Steve mad and he told me that it hurt him that I did that to his microwave. Then, he ordered me as the director of the teaching-intern program (which i was a part of) to switch them again. Instead, I put the microwave in his room and started microwaving some easy-mac in it. Steve again was upset, and ordered me to move it back, which I did not do. Then he faked an e-mail to my boss about my insubordination and went off to tell me that if we microwaved the punxsatawney phil beanie-baby, that all would be forgiven. Phil caught on fire, and was put on display with the fine china (read: budweiser plastic cups) in the china cupboard.
• Juice!: Steve, who was an avid fan of Arrested Development, would often bounce about the house exclaiming “Juice!” similar to the show’s character Buster Bluth. In the show, the character Buster would get high off of high-fructose corn syrup. In real life, Steve got crazy sugar rushes off of my homemade sweet-tea (admittedly it is just like rocket fuel). Steve often had times where he’d ween himself off of it, or go on binges where the pitcher would be empty in like 2 days, screaming “Juice!” (ala buster) with every cup.
• Beggle: Steve hated the way that some people pronounce the word Bagel. So we determined that “beggle” was a whole different word. Definition: To jollily implore goods or services from another party. Usage: Molly beggled six-hundred pounds of buffalo meat from the zoo.
• The Holiday Inn Guys: Go on youtube and search for the holiday inn commercials with the business guys. There was a week where we quoted it more than we actually talked to eachother.
• Tea for Grace: As a present for our upstairs housemate Grace, we made her some tea out of tea, cloves, ketchup, peanut m&ms, some stuff I forget. She didn’t drink any.
• Trombone language: Once Steve came into my room and refused to speak in any language other than Trombone. He just made trombone noises in my doorway for like 10 minutes.
• “Downtown!”: Steve put on a hoodie and paraded around the apartment with the hood up singing the song “Downtown” by Petula Clark. After stalking me and Alex, singing the song, making food and singing the song, bursting out of doors and singing, etc., he would run into his room, take off the hoodie, and pretend nothing happened, only to don it again and start up again.
• Steve’s hammer smash: Steve took out his frustrations on a dvd player. With a hammer.