living with lianne

typical day unfolds:

5:55am - Janean wakes up
5:56 - Janean turns on the water pump and takes a shower
6:02ish - Lianne rolls out of bed, sits on the couch, eats toast, yogurt, and fruit.....half asleep
6:15ish - Janean finishes shower, puts clothes on, walks into living room...Lianne still half asleep
4:53pmish - Lianne can't correctly annunciate the Arabic word for "arrange"..but is convinced she's saying it right. but she's not. Janean and Arabic teacher laugh because instead of "btizboty" she's saying "btizbooty."
4:57ish - Lianne is still convinced she's saying it right and is now arguing that i'm saying it wrong. Which, at the time, I wasn't.
4:59ish - My turn comes.....and of course, I say it wrong. We all laugh.
9:10ish - Lianne and I enter the store to buy phone credit. I say, "Oh, look, they're showing Castaway on the T.V." Lianne argues, "That's not Castaway....that's...I forget what she said...some other movie..." I argue back, "No it's not!" And then this weird music starts playing and the guy yells, "YELLLLAAA!!!" It was a commericial for Mobinil or some mobile phone company! We were both wrong......we both laughed.

Sometimes I wonder if living with Lianne is a glimpse of having a younger sister or having a husband!!! Not that she's manly (or I, for that matter :) ......I've had a few roommates, but living with Lianne is like an ongoing comedy. She's so playful and.......young and lively...with stupid jokes and when we poke fun at each other, I'm the dry, sarcastic, witty humor, and she's like "Yeah....well......you're STUPID!" "Ouch, Lianne...that really hurts. Did you think of that on your own..." and this is how it goes. Both smiling and laughing at how silly we are......Lianne with her crazy ideas and me with my "old, tainted, grandma ways" as she would say.

Living with Lianne is a lot of fun. We're both usually really busy and tired. So our idea of fun is dodgeball in the house (sorry Taunt, our landlady), roasting marshmellows with candles, bonfires on our deck, popcorn fights, dough darts in the kitchen, gingerbread houses in February, talking about randomness, and all in all, just living our lives together.

I had no expectations of who I'd meet when I moved to Cairo. Living with Lianne, though, has definitely been one of my highlights.....the majority of my memories have her somewhere in the picture...whether she's making sand angels in every desert we travel to, trying to convince me that it would be funny to throw things at people as we drive by them on the street, throwing food on the walls, making odd noises at the wrong moments, or whatever else she does to make me roll my eyes and chuckle......our age difference (four years) brings us together rather than keeping us apart.

i will never forget "that one time i lived with lianne"! :)

i love you roommate, teammate, classmate, sister, friend....accomplice ;)

P.S. and it was Obama who called that reporter "sweetie".....not OSAMA! :)