And I'm Back With Roommates Part 4

To anybody who is still reading, sorry for the delay. I'm back here with more stories of roommate rendezvous--or whatever you want to call them. There will also be new poetry posted on my emo blog--it's not exactly emo, but it's more emo than the roommates story, so that's where it's going for now. So without further ado:

Roommates (Part 4 of 6) The Time in Between:

After my ex-best friend's sister moved out in November of 2002, my remaining roommate (now known as my SIL, also known as Becca) and I signed another year lease in the same apartment and decided to try to find a perfect third roommate. The problem with this was that neither of us could actually REALLY afford not to have a third roommate.
It seemed as though things were going to work out well when a friend of my SIL's that she knew from work got kicked out of his parents' house. It seemed like the perfect situation-- we needed a third roommate, he needed an inexpensive place to live-- perfect, right?
He moved into our apartment on Thanksgiving Day when Becca and I were hosting a murder mystery dinner for our parents for Thanksgiving. So the roommate number 3 and his friend show up, make a couple of trips to get his things, and when they finally come back for the murder mystery dinner, they are carrying beer--I'm not sure how they got it, since they were both 18. This put me in quite the awkward position being that I was the only one living at the apartment who was legal drinking age. I told roommate number 3's friend that he could not bring the beer into my apartment where I was the only resident of legal drinking age. He got all huffy with me, and went out to his car where I'm sure he downed at least one of the beers. He came back in for dinner and was basically snarky with me the entire night about how uncool I was for not letting him drink. Whatever.
After that night, things were not bad with roommate number 3. He mostly kept to himself and spent all of his time on the internet. This was a bit of a problem since we had dial-up back then and Becca and I were both in college. We occasionally had to ask him to stop the games so that we could get online for school related things. There was also the debates. Some nights, Becca and I would have these conversations where we just sat up debating things-- politics (which she is very good at, now having her degree in Political Science); religion (which I was very good at due to passion and persistance); hot button types of issues (abortion, gay marriages, etc.). We sometimes got a bit loud during our debates and would eventually end up crying and laughing and baring our souls about things that have made us who we are. And roommate #3 was freaked out by this. He just thought that we were always fighting.
Needless to say, roommate number 3 did not last long. Shortly after Christmas, partway into January, he decided to move in with his beer drinking friend in an apartment closer to town. Lemmon Valley is not a good place for the beer drinkers to live should they have to make a quick escape for more beer.
After roommate #4 moved out in January, we began the search for a new roommate. We put up fliers at UNR since it was just before the beginning of the spring semester--right when lots of people are looking for a new place to live. We got a few phone calls, but most people didn't want to live in Lemmon Valley. We weren't terrible worried for the rest of January because roommate #3 had paid a partial month's rent before he left, so we were okay for money.
We posted our open room on one of the roommate finder sites online, but really had very little luck there. It was a stressful time. I had changed my major from education to English writing in November and that left me needing 5 writing classes and a social science to graduate. So in the spring of 2003, I was enrolled in 4 writing classes, working full time at the Evil K and I had no idea where my future would take me-- I just knew it wouldn't be teaching. That decision was a long time in coming and came after I received a swift kick in the butt from God after two years of nudging had failed. But that's a story best left for another post.
In March we finally got a response from someone on the roommates site. He was a recent college graduate who was going to be doing some science thing with little kids for Americorp. He was moving from Indiana and wanted to have a place lined up before he made his move. So he came to visit the apartment in early March, and we didn't hear from him again. Finally, two weeks later he sent us a message saying that he wanted to be closer to the campus, but that he had really enjoyed meeting us. So we continued into April in the same frenzy we'd been in for most of February and all of March. I was particularly frenzied with graduation looming near. That semester I had 150 pages of final portfolio work due at the end of the semester and every paper I'd written for the entire semester had to be reviewed and revised one more time. And things were exceedingly tight with just two of us paying rent-- but emotionally it was a very easy time. During that time Becca was quite a good roommate even if it was a little weird having my brother stay the night every Friday.
Finally, at the beginning of May a friend of mine let me know that she had a friend who was looking for a roommate. We eagerly took her information and made contact. She came to look at the apartment and decided to move in ASAP. So she gradually moved her things in and while I was receiving my unofficial diploma at UNR's graduation ceremony (I wasn't officially done until August), she was moving the last of her things into our apartment.

Stay tuned next week for Part 5 where you will learn all of the terrors of the new Roommate #3.