Tom Foolery II

When Ben went to Vienna he gave me his apartment key 'just in case' I needed anything, my roommates were loud and I needed to escape, or I just wanted a change of scenery. I was telling Meagan D. about how I thought it was a sweet gesture, when her face lit up and she said "Mary! We have to do something to his room while he's gone!" The thought honestly had never occurred to me, but I knew Ben had a good sense of humor, so we met up with Brendan to brainstorm what we could do to his apartment before he got back. We came up with plenty of stupid ideas together, but none quite as brilliant as Brendan's contribution - "Let's wrap everything in his apartment in newspaper. I mean every single thing." Perfect.

We knew where the campus recycled piles of newspaper, so Meagan and I went to pick up a few stacks. We made it about 20 feet at a time with our huge stacks before we had to take a break because the weight was killing us. Luckily there were waist-high posts along the way. When the posts stopped, though, we had to call on our friend Cameron to help us carry the rest to our apartments because we just couldn't make it. Thank goodness he came when he did, (even though he wasn't all that thrilled when he found out why we woke him up to help us with something), because as soon as we got back to our apartment it started pouring outside. Perfect timing! The two of us carried what we could to Ben's later that day, and Brendan picked up the last of it when he joined us to help. In total it took about 5 hours for the three of us to wrap everything he owned. And I mean everything - in drawers, all clothes, every individual shoe, his closet doors, everything.

Here is Ben's room before:

Because of his broken leg he had to prop the end of his bed up with stuff so it was elevated when he slept, which is why stuff is shoved under the mattress. Everything on the bed was working materials.

His desk and closet before, and the stand he had laundry
drying on.

Me wrapping everything on his desk and window stand - dvds, empty bottles and cans, printer, computer. We even wrapped up his trash.

Meagan working on shirts and shoes. You can see his extra crutches wrapped in the corner.

Brendan and I working hard.

After a little while of working we decided it would be fun to take a break and try on Ben's clothes. He is quite lean, and so we thought it'd be a good laugh for basically any of us to try anything he owned on:

Brendan in his shirt.

I couldn't get his pants done, by I did get them on over my own jeans, which was a feat in itself.

Brendan struggled a little more than I did with the jeans.

And that's as far as they went on him.

Meagan struggled to get them done like the rest of us.

But then managed to hike them up even higher and create an impressive 'mom-jean' look.

After all of our hard work, we finished the morning of his arrival:

His bed.

All of his shoes.

The inside of his closet.

The desk I wrapped. The St. Patrick's Day hat was Meagan's handiwork, and a work of art I must say. She maintained the shape and everything!

The finished product! If you look under his mattress you can see that we wrapped up the soccer ball, and everything else, propping it up.

Beautiful.

We found out quickly that we took WAY too many newspapers, and left the rest of them at the entrance to Ben's apartment complex for anyone who wanted them. When Ben and I got to his apartment that night, he saw the piles and said "What's this?"

I said "Newspapers I guess" and tried to sound indifferent.

"Great!" he announced. "I want one!"

He spent about 5 minutes trying to rip a newspaper out of the plastic binding holding the bundles together, during which I couldn't stop smiling to myself and thinking "you have plenty of newspaper already." The fact that he worked so hard to get a paper made it even funnier when he got into his room and saw what we had done. He laughed pretty hard, and was impressed by how much work we put into it. It was kind of like Christmas everyday for him from that point on - he was re-learning what he owned, and trying to guess what different objects were before he opened them. He was guessing which shoe was which and tried to find the match he needed while unwrapping the fewest incorrect shoes in the process. After a few days, when he finally decided to unwrap everything, he told me it wasn't quite as funny when after two hours he was still unwrapped.

What he soon discovered, though, was that we bought and wrapped a few of his favorite beers for him as a 'welcome home, please don't be mad at us' gift. He appreciated the gesture, and didn't complain much after that :)