Saturday, August 25, 2012

Start of Junior Year

This is the apartment building Adam will be in til next May.  The angle is terrible, but I was standing at the car guarding all his belongings while Kurt and the kids carried his things up to his apartment. It's about two blocks from campus.  He has four roommates, three of them are Northampton graduates and four out of the five of them are engineering majors.  Turns out Matt, who is in Adam's bedroom, has a brother James who graduated with Alyssa and was in band with her.


This is the living room.  The wall opposite the sofa will house THREE flat screen TV's!!  I think the plan is to mount them on the wall.  I don't know if they'll be watching the same thing, or Adam mentioned something about using headphones and they could all be watching something different!  Sheesh!  I had a little 13 inch TV when I was in nursing school...and was thrilled to have that!!


This is the view of the kitchen area.  The refrigerator has no bars across the shelves in the door, which pretty much makes those shelves useless!  And to top it off, there's only two shelves total in the main part of the fridge!  I believe one of the parents addressed that issue with the maintenance guy who came up at one point (that story to follow later....).  Hopefully they'll fix it for these guys.


This is the small balcony off the living room.  They are on the third floor.  That's Adam's bike; he's not sure what he's gonna ultimately do with it.  It'll be a pain to keep it there all year and have to take it up and down the stairs or the elevator every day.  Apparently there's one bike rack for the entire building and it's at the opposite end of the building and not in a very well lit area, so he's kind of reluctant to keep it there.



This is a view from the entrance of Adam and Matt's bedroom.  It's really small.  Adam's bed is in the foreground.  Off in the distance you can see the corner of the one desk in the room.   There's only one desk per bedroom.  Fortunately, Adam and Matt are alone in their room.  The other bedroom is the same size and there's THREE of them in it!  One of the beds is a bunk bed.


Please note the disgusting color coordination...blue bedspread....black sheets.  Alyssa is appalled at his choice in colors!  It was pretty comical at Target when they were looking at sheets to buy (Adam threw his sheets away in May when he came home...beings as how they'd never been washed, hence the reason for new ones!).  He picked the black sheets, before we knew it, Alyssa had snuck the black ones back on the shelf and threw a different color in the cart ;-)  Next, she tried to change out the bedspread, so it'd match the black sheets...LOL!  I don't think they really look all that bad :)  See that little space alongside his bed where the night stand is?  We went to Ollie's and got a computer desk for him to tightly slip in there instead of the nightstand.  He needed somewhere to put his desktop computer...there was no where else to put it!  We started out looking for a desk chair, til it was all said and done, he picked up a folding chair, which I think was the wisest choice of all...there's so little room in there, that this way he can fold it up when he's not using it and slip it under his bed.  Oh yeah...the bed.  Unfortunately, his bed had a head and foot board.  When you're 6ft 7in, that doesn't work out so well :(  He took something apart and rid himself of the footboard, but there's still like 4 posts sticking up, which he'd have to be aware of while sleeping.  He got the brilliant idea while we were at Ollie's to buy a box spring, which would then raise the mattress up about 5 inches, which will then allow his feet to hang off the bottom of the bed and hopefully avoid the posts.


This is another view of their bedroom.  That's their bathroom; it has a walk in shower.  The bathroom in the other bedroom has a tub/shower in it.  Adam's just thrilled to have his own bathroom!


Alyssa offered to come up and do their cleaning for them.  For a price.  She originally suggested $5,000 per month ;-).  They weren't interested.  Wonder why.


This is the view going into the other bedroom.  One of the guys in that room apparently is quite the cook, and he loves to bake.  His mom was telling us how he got a new springform pan, but hadn't had a chance to use it before he left to see how a cheesecake would come out using the pan.  These guys may be eating well :-)  This guy also lived in an apartment last year, so he had tons of kitchen stuff, which worked out well, since none of the other guys did!  I'm not sure how they will work out the food situation.  One of the guys brought about ten boxes of cereal, and I think they had about 30 two liter bottles of soda :)  Adam's on a smoothie kick right now, he took my old blender up and bought himself a juicer, so I think he'll be buying himself lots of fruits and veggies.


He drove around the streets behind the apartment building this afternoon hoping to find somewhere near by that he could park his car instead of always having it in the commuter lot out near Beaver Stadium, but found nothing.  All of the streets have no parking on the one side and the other side allows parking, but you can't park there from 2-6 am, so unfortunately he's gonna be stuck having his car parked a mile or so away.

Ever since Alyssa was a freshman at PSU, we have gone out for a Friday/Saturday in October on one of the weekends that there's an away game.  We would get out there in time for supper on Friday, then on Saturday, spend time with the kids, do some sightseeing, or shopping and just have the opportunity to spend some quality time with whichever child was living out there.  It's always worked out to be the weekend closest to our anniversary.  I fully anticipated doing likewise again this year, but learned yesterday that this year the fall conference for DiscipleMakers was moved a week earlier and is this same weekend that we usually go out.  October was the ideal month to do this; it was midway between the start of the semester and Thanksgiving break.  Unfortunately, unless we go out on a football weekend, I think there'll be no annual trip to PSU in October this year.  It was a little mini-vacation and had turned into a tradition.   I'm really disappointed. Really.

**I promised to tell you about the maintenance guy and why he was in the apartment.  Apparently, a 'couple' decided to try and find an empty apartment last evening that was not locked, and lo and behold, the guys' apartment door had not been closed securely.  They entered and had 'relations' on both beds in Adam and Matt's room.  There were some disgusting things left on both mattresses and the floor :(  The maintenance man came up and thoroughly scoured the carpeting and replaced both mattresses.  They apparently caught these two on hidden cameras entering the apartment, but at this point have not identified them (and may never).  Supposedly they will be contacting the police, but didn't choose to do it today, as the building was so hectic with students moving in.  I'm not sure that ultimately anything will come of it, but I was impressed with how the maintenance guy handled the whole thing.

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