Box Turtle

In the spirit of Box City tomorrow, we feel it is appropriate to share this one with you. For those of you who don't attend UF, Box City is an event run by Habitat for Humanity Campus Chapter in which teams build houses out of cardboard boxes and sleep in them overnight to get a new appreciation for how difficult it would be to live on the streets. Without even considering the theme, Caitlin suggested we should do a turtle. You'll learn from these posts that in most cases, we don't do anything half-assed. It's all or nothing. This was one of those cases. By the end of the day, the body of the turtle was roughly the size of an above ground circular pool, but only about three feet high, with the head, feet, and tail extending beyond that. One of the regulations of Box City is that no part of your creation can be on the grass. Only once we put the feet on did we notice that we had broken this rule. The three of us, plus three others had to pick up the turtle and move it roughly five feet forward. This was obviously easier said than done, but we did it. Upon completion of Squirt, we grabbed as many blankets from the house as we could. In order to be eligible for the prizes in the morning, two people needed to be in the box at all times, from eleven that night until seven the next morning. When we came back with our supplies, we discovered someone must have tried to break into our home and in doing so sent poor Squirt's head rollin'. Now you have to imagine this turtle's head, if his body was huge so was his head we were able to crawl in and out of...so needless to say Squirt was eating us repeatedly. It was an easy fix though. After the first hour, we found out just how cold and dark it was inside the box turtle. Caitlin and KTSue made a run to WalMart for taplights so that we were able to see what the heck we were doin'. We came back out to the car, only to find that the battery had died. As Lindz and Skylar were in the box at the time, they couldn't leave to come help us. We ended up having to call a friend, who had gone home sick earlier in the evening. We couldn't get the jumper cables to work properly so we left the car in the WalMart parking lot to deal with it in the daylight. Now, when we first settled into our respective places in the large area we were all near each other, but had our own bubbles. Not even 30min after laying there we realized how cold it was, and Caitlin popped up having to pee (go figure). So she went to the building that was supposed to be open ALL NIGHT, but as quickly as she left she was back doing, what, you may ask?...the pee pee dance, because the building was locked, every last one of the doors. So Cait and Lindz proceeded to run all the way back to the house across campus so that Cait could pee, they bundled up and came back. It wasn't till morning that we realized Skylar lived in a dorm closer to where we were (yes, by the time you're doing the pee pee dance, all logical solutions go out the door. All you know is you gotta pee and you gotta do it NOW). As you can imagine, the box was freezing overnight, only moreso. By the time they came to wake us up in the morning, everyone was huddled in a giant pile in the center of the box...spooning and still shivering. Point of this story: after all this turmoil, we didn't even get a freakin' prize! Needless to say, we were a bit disappointed. Scratch that, we were pissed! Thanks and love.