Dear Diary, February 24th was the most embarrassing day of my life.

Yesterday morning, we were all getting ready to leave for school when Zach went to retrieve his breakfast burrito hot pocket from the microwave and realized something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. He warned me the smoke detector would probably go off, and so since we've had plenty of experience with these kind of situations we jumped right into our plan of attack. He flipped the oven exhaust on and ran to open the front door. I grabbed a chair and a magazine and began furiously fanning the smoke detector. Sure enough, it went off. And kept going off. Seemingly getting louder by the second. We began to worry that we were waking up our fellow apartment dwellers, so Zach instructed me to take the detector off the wall. Detector kept shouting at us, so Zach ripped it open hoping to take the batteries out. None were in fact inside and so we were at a loss for how to stop this screaming buzzer. I was beginning to panic out of intense embarrassment. Before I know it, Zach had had enough and with one quick snip, CUT the wire going from the wall to the alarm.

Finally! Some quiet!.... kind of. We could still faintly hear an alarm and after walking outside realized it wasn't just OUR apartment alarm we had triggered but each individual apartment's. By this time most everyone had evacuated the building and were generally confused. To make the situation even more fun, as we were apologizing we hear none other than our trusty community fire department (sirens, lights, bells and whistles) and the lovely campus rent a cops. And then as if on cue, Reagan proudly proclaimed, "Fire truck to the rescue!"

The enemy of good is better, right? Well the story gets better. We desperately needed to get to class so we just kept getting ready for school amongst all of the commotion. As if the brouhaha could get ANY worse, when the firemen came up to check us out, I hear his dispatcher say through the walkie talkie, "All campus building alarms have been triggered."

Awesome. Now it is truly impossible for this situation to escalate any further.

Finally the alarms gave up and there was peace. We scurried out the door and miraculously managed to make it to class semi on time. Granted, Zach heard a couple "why does it smelled like bonfire in here" or "does anyone else smell smoke" whenever we entered the room but after he explained that the hot pocket was to blame most people understood.

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I felt like I needed to do something for our neighbors to show them our remorse for yesterday mornings' events. During class during a break from class, Katie and Casey helped me brainstorm some ideas. We came up with some winners. They included, but weren't limited to;

• some type of food utilizing a donkey cut out and written on the donkey it would say something along the lines of "Sorry for being a pain in the..."
• sugar cookie cut outs in the shape of fire trucks
• a "Sorry!" game piece and a tag line of something like "Sorry! for starting your day out with a bang" or "Sorry! for waking you up at the buttcrack of dawn then forcing you stand in the snow while wearing your pajamas..." Here is Katie's artist's rendering of her vision:
  
  
• Zach suggested writing "...taking wake up call requests for the rest of the semester!" on a card
• My personal favorite of Katie's was to deliver cookies and have my boom box playing Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" in the background

I ended up making some inside-out whoopie pies, wrapping them up all pretty and attaching a nice apology note.

I think my peace offering went pretty well and at the end of the day when it was all said and done, I've learned that whoopie pies really suck to make.