I am convinced my fire alarm is lying to me. #IGTR

I am convinced that if there is ever a real fire, I will die inside my residential college building.  I think the problem stems from how many false alarms (literally) are set off through out the year.  When I first moved back in from the summer, it didn't quite feel like home until the first inconveniently timed fire alarm went off.

They never occur at a moment when you're like "Hmm, I feel like going for a stroll outside" or "I think I'll take the stairs today!"  It's when you've been up all night working on a project and are now just finally closing your eyes to a well earned afternoon nap.  Or when you've returned home on a Friday night at 2am and want nothing more than to crawl into bed.

But nope.  The fire alarm goes off.

And won't stop.  This thing has literally been going off for like twenty whole minutes.  You were kind of silently hoping that it would stop within the reasonable amount of time during which you would be excused from not having reached the ground floor yet.

The thing is... you just live so far from the ground floor.  I mean... it's like a lot of stairs.  You probably have a better shot taking the elevator in a fire than trying to get out in time after taking thirteen flights of stairs. And the chances of this being a real fire are about twelve to zero.

You and your suitemates, who also haven't evacuated yet, meet in the hallway of your suite to deliberate.  Should we go to the ground floor?  It has been a long time since it went off.  And maybe if the fire isn't real, they would have turned the thing off by now.

You reluctantly put on a sweater (hey, it might be cold outside) and exit the suite.  You still fully intend to take the elevator down (like I said, lots of stairs), but when you get to your floor lobby, you notice that every single person on your floor has convened on the balcony.

That counts as outside, right?  Besides, this building is pretty much solid brick and concrete.  If it hasn't burned down yet, it ain't ever gonna. You decide that staying on the balcony is basically the same thing as evacuating to the ground floor.

You justify this to yourself by reasoning that if ever there was a real fire, you could probably be airlifted from the top floor balcony by a helicopter.

Yup.  You'll be just fine.  You wave to your friends down below.  Another fifteen minutes goes by (or two to three hours, depending or how badly you had wanted to sleep), and the alarm is finally off.  You learn that is was something completely mundane yet random, like welding in the basement. You go back to bed, silently begrudging the forty minute (or four hour) dent into your sleep schedule.

I know the importance of a good weather app. #IGTR

If you go to Rice, you have probably discovered the importance of having a good weather app on your phone.  And I don't mean the questionably-accurate, Houston-wide average that is displayed on your home screen right beneath the time (who knows how many times that will lead you to disaster before you graduate).  No, what a Rice student requires is a zip-code specific application with an hourly breakdown of temperature and chance of precipitation.

Now, perhaps this year's freshmen have not had a chance to fully appreciate the necessity for such an app during the drought, and it's possible that returning students have allowed themselves to temporarily forget its utility.  I myself uninstalled my weather app over the summer and have since been too lazy to download it again.  This would have been fine, had I remembered Rice Rule #12: Always keep an umbrella in your backpack.

I had perhaps seen the temperature on my phone when I woke up in the morning, but it had been nothing out of the ordinary, likely somewhere in the high 90s.  No reason for me to investigate further.  The walk to my morning class was disgustingly hot and humid, as per usual.  The classroom, which I've been cursed to have a morning class in every single semester of my college career thus far, has an almost immediate soporific effect on me.  (Can you blame me?: the seats are relatively soft, the windows are way at the top near the ceiling, and the lights are almost always off as to accommodate a PowerPoint presentation.)  I fell into that terrible, desperately-trying-to-stay-awake-but-your-head-keeps-lolling-and-you-are-for-all-intents-and-purposes-unconscious waking sleep state, as per usual.

When the class was finally over (no, but really, who ever decided 75 minute morning classes were a good idea...), I emerged from the cavern only to find that not only had it started raining, but the sky was actually falling down.  As all the smart, prepared Rice kids fished inside their backpacks and came back up with a umbrellas and headed off into the downpour, I lingered underneath the overhang, cursing under my breath, realizing that my umbrella was still on the top shelf in my closet.

Now, you may think that should this ever happen to you, you will be fine.  You are wrong.  Because this only seems to occur when you are woefully inappropriately dressed.

Also, you will be at the farthest possible point on campus from your residential college.  You will realize you literally could not be any more physically removed from warm things (like dry clothes and lunch).

As I finally braced myself against the rain and stepped out into the elements, I realized... well, it wasn't so bad.  There's nothing quite like that intoxicating scent of petrichor during the first rain of the year.  Besides, Rice has a small campus anyway.