Bwogger Sara Vogel points us in the direction of the Housing website, where there is a list of all summer dorm renovations. "We cannot guarantee projects or timing," it warns. Anyway, we are excited!

• Three lucky apartments in Woodbridge (right) are getting an environmentally-conscious makeover, complete with Energy Star appliances and lighting and Forest Stewardship Council-certified furniture and flooring. 

• McBain's getting a new elevator and it -- along with the existing elevator -- is going to be remodeled after the "sleek" new elevators in Hartley.

• Oh, and remember last summer when the north side of Ruggles was renovated? Kind of? Oh good, because the south side is currently undergoing the same renovations "to replicate the same look and feel as the rest of the building."
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Room Hopping has been on hiatus--until today. Emi Noguchi and Noam Prywes bring you another little residential corner of paradise.

For 18-year old Chelsea Ward, C '09, "where are you from?" is an extremely complicated question. She hails from Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; Rochester, New York; and Buckinghamshire, England. Add to that the two months she spent in Japan last summer.

Memorabilia from Chelsea's world travels abound in her cozy Hartley single: photos of her various host families and friends in Japan to complement posters from her visit to the Prado, next to the picture of her name written in Arabic that she got on a two-week backpacking trip to Spain.

The "quasi-Asian section" (She's an EALAC major, already in her thesis seminar) is tranquil, replete with glowing paper lanterns and calligraphy samples a woman gave to her before she knew any Chinese. She also has a startling number of books. "When I came to college I had to edit all the books I had at home," says Ward. "I had probably 300 books after the first narrowing down."

Then there's that glorious view of the quad from her two large windows. When asked about the binoculars on the sill, Chelsea explains, "Those come in handy when watching demonstrations. No one's used them to peek in any windows..." She trails off.

The room's most striking item is framed by the windows, a painting ("Hang on, it's skewed,") by a high school friend based on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!.

A Hartley passerby's favorite feature, however, would have to be the white board at the door. The regularly updated poll, situated in a much-trafficked hallway, offers questions ranging from the spiritual- "If you meet the Buddha, should you kill him?"- to the highly annotated Valentine's special, "When did you lose your virginity?" Bwog discreetly left its two cents and bounced.

Since then, every single poster that I saw has been taken down. It is possible that there are others that I have missed, but last night, I saw three different ones that are now gone. I don't know if this implies an overwhelming interest, or a change of heart on the part of the post-er, or that the pre-existing Ninjas are upset by the prospect of competition and have sought to discourage it. Perhaps this is simply the business of the night.

Let's not kid ourselves- we've all been rudely awoken by the ungodly shrieking of a fire alarm and we've all cursed the name and bodily person of the (usually) faceless, unknown culprits. But, thanks to the personal touch of Columbia Housing and Dining, fire alarm emails have recently included the specific suite numbers of the culpable parties and awesomely withering summations of their crimes.

On Saturday, the EC alarm went off three times in the span of three hours. According to the email that EC residents received, the alarms went off at 8:35, 9:33, and 10:32 PM, and, for the first two alarms at least, the FDNY determined that they were caused by:

"careless cooking by a resident of suite 1202-1203 on the 12th floor."

On Saturday and Tuesday, the Hartley alarm went off at 8:55 and 11:07 PM, respectively. Caused by...

"careless cooking by a resident of suite on the 8th floor" and "careless cooking by a resident of suite 8-C on the 8th floor"

Perhaps this is Housing and Dining's form of the public pillory. Careless cookers everywhere beware.

Shakeer Rahman reports:

There is a lot of free Dinosaur BBQ in front of Hartley-Wallach.

Beth Milton adds:

Really good food. And still there as of 3:45 pm.

And a lonely container of leftover potato salad sat at the Lerner Front Desk through the end of the Varsity Show-- approx. 11:00 pm. That's gross.