The townhouse in Waterloo

It was your average evening. The normally blue skies were turning a pale orange as the sun set, the evening breeze was rolling in, making everything a bit more relaxed and a little less hot. It was my last day of summer vacation in Florida, and I have to say I was very enthusiastic to be going home. Although my time there was great, and the locals treated me much better than my last trip to Florida, I was getting homesick; if you could call it that. I was going into my second year of university in Waterloo, Ontario, and I was staying in a townhouse with some of my good friends from first year, Garret and Sean. I was new to the whole 'our own place' thing. I lived on campus most of first year, only moving into the new place about a month before summer. Garret and Sean were great. Probably more of the reason I was homesick over the home itself. The place was pretty nice. It was recently built along with four others, all placed in a sort of square. The back doors of each house led out into a little courtyard in the back. Think of it as a shared backyard. The idea was pretty neat, but nobody up kept the back lawn. All of our front lawns looked amazing. Bright green grass, healthy trees, and the house beside us even had a small rosebush. The back, however, looked like something out of a horror movie. The trees were doing alright because they were hogging all the rain. The two birches in the back were massive. Their leaves created a great shade in the back, making it a great spot to read or relax. The grass, however, was yellow and white with entire patches just missing and replaced with dirt. The flowerbeds that scattered the back were filled with weeds and wildflowers. On top of that there were anthills littered across the lawn, making ants in our houses a regular, and annoying, experience. The actual houses themselves were not too shabby. All four were identical, save for the colour of our roofs. Mine had navy blue roof tiles, while our neighbors had grey, black, and brown respectively. This made for comic feuds between the houses, such as Blue House VS Grey House. We would regularly play LAN games on Xbox, usually Halo, and the losing house had to do some yard work in the back. That was another reason I wanted to go back. Garret, Sean and I had been planning a LAN party amongst our own house for about a week via text. We would have had more but all of the residents in the other houses were still on vacation or visiting family. My roommates themselves had only recently gotten back from their own vacations. I was a little worried they had ditched me as neither had returned a text in two days, and the ones near the end were very short and told me very little about what we were doing. The original plan was to hit up a few local bars and then return to play some drunk Halo CE. My bet was that they had found a party to go to or something. My trip home was uneventful. Canadian customs is the easiest thing to get through. Not that they're not thorough or don't do their job properly, they are just way less strict and not nearly as 'in your face' as American customs. The drive from the airport to home was great. I hadn't driven my Pontiac Sunfire in two weeks. The little red pile of scrap was the best, I had installed some great subs and upgraded the stock speaker to some actual good quality ones. The one thing I cared about was the music. The car could be a used derby car, but as long as it has good speakers I'm in. Suffice to say when I got home after blasting music for fifteen minutes I was feeling pretty good. I walked up the steps and unlocked the door. I stepped in, took of my shoes (we had a strict no shoes in the house policy) and carried on in. The interior of the house was somewhere between 'what were they thinking' and 'these guys are genius'. The man 'game room' as we called it (it held out TV's, consoles, and couches) was directly connected to the kitchen through two openings in both the left and right sides of a wall that went down the middle. From the game room you could see the table through the left and the fridge t