Stories I like to tell: Part I

Have I ever told you about our first apartment? It was the cheapest married student housing Ricks College had to offer. Sounds perfect, right?
When we moved in there were boogers on the wall. I'm not kidding. Right behind the couch, a striking collection of boogers wiped there by the previous tenants. We could hear every single noise from every apartment adjacent to ours (ev-er-y noise, I'll speak no more of that). Early on the hot water handle broke off of our shower. (Promptly reported to the manager, by the way...to no avail!) Not a problem, there was a little nub we could still turn with a pair of pliers. This worked great until the little nub broke off as well. More determined attempts to get the water to turn off resulted in the entire pipe bursting free of the tiled wall before a mighty spray of water. The water came out with such force that it filled the tub faster than it could drain. Scott stood directly in the deluge holding a towel against the renegade pipe with his knee to stem the flow while I ran and pounded on the manager's door to wake him up (it was about 6:30am). After about an hour the plumbers arrived and turned off the water. For the entire building. Because that was the only way to do it, you see. Sorry guys, I hope no one else needed to shower or use the bathroom this morning. Our complex was in "downtown" Rexburg and located over various shops and businesses. Our specific apartment was directly over the second hottest dance club in town. It was only open two nights a week, which was the good thing. The bad thing was that on those two nights we had to speak up to hear each other over the techno beats below us. Our floor vibrated. When the party place closed, the dancers most often planted themselves directly below our window to spend the rest of their night laughing and talking in nice loud voices.
This was the place where I attempted my first "real" recipes. (Like an entire pan of tater tot casserole, you know, for just the two of us.) This was the place where we learned together that you're not supposed to drain chicken fat into a mug and leave it out for a couple of days (the whole building remembers that smell). This was the place where the day we moved in we had a fight over a table until we realized we'd simply misunderstood each other. Here we enjoyed a nightly ritual of watching X-Files reruns together before bed. This was the place we invited our new married friends (can you believe we're married? can you believe we have married friends?) over to carve pumpkins. We celebrated the first of our birthdays together (it was Scott's. I gave him socks and a Matchbox 20 CD. I learned for the first time that he peeks at his gifts early! for shame). Here we got used to sharing a bathroom (with or without a working hot water handle). This was our first official address that we shared as Mr. and Mrs. This is the place where Scott learned that I'm cheap as can be and didn't see the point of turning on the floor-board heater when we were in bed (that's what covers are for!). I learned that having warm feet is invaluable to Scott and cannot be achieved with covers alone in Idaho winters with ice forming on our windows overnight. This was where Joel and Jenica saved our marriage by giving Scott an electric blanket for his birthday. This is the place where we learned through trial and error to rely on each other and carve out our new positions side by side. Where we willingly put off some aspects of who we used to be and got to work on being one instead. Our first apartment was pretty much perfect.