Last Friday night was one of record-breaking rallying – at 11:00 pm Mink and I decided we should ignore our working-week exhaustion and go out, and we met Mathis and Peter at Charlie P’s for dancing into the wee hours of the morning. Since getting home at 5:30 a.m. is not conducive to doing much productive for the rest of the day, on Saturday night we eschewed going out on the town in favour of building the most epic fort that has ever existed. I can thus cross it off of my list!

43. Built an epic fort in our apartment

I will post pictures if I ever get around to downloading them from Mink’s camera, but for now, let imagination suffice. Here is some suitably epic music to accompany this post (and also, O Fortuna is just awesome. But it inevitably reminds me of the opening sequence in Jackass…):

Peter and Mathis came over with extra sheets and stuffed animals, as instructed (although, in Peter’s case, he brought one of those squishy travel pillows affixed with paper eyes and a mouth in lieu of a real stuffed animal — because apparently real adults don’t have stuffed animals just lying around? Questionable.). Mathis brought speakers, now on loan to us indefinitely, so we could have Girl Talk blasting as inspiration. We also had an appropriate amount of alcohol for the event, to make it a legitimately “mature” activity. Not that I should have to justify the awesomeness of building a fort with one’s friends at age 25, amirite?

We started construction in the living room quickly, our main tools (as in typical fort construction) being sheets and blankets, pillows, clothespins, string, and duct tape – a surprising amount of duct tape, actually. The cornerstone (if that exists in forts made from only soft materials) was a sheet held up by a neon pink string attached to the light fixture in the middle of the room. If this sounds structurally unsound to you, you’re absolutely correct in that observation. We clothes-pinned the sheets together and duct taped them to various doors and walls on the borders the room, the living room paint job suffering horribly in the process. It’s pretty miraculous that the whole thing didn’t just collapse on us in the night.

A trick of the trade: the key to having an awesome fort is in the lighting. Overhead lights ruin the mood, so we strung up our white Christmas lights all throughout the inside of the fort. This created a pleasing starry sky effect, with our disco ball standing in as the moon (it happens to be attached to the same light fixture, and is an integral part of the occasional light switch rave).

And then we played drinking games, because we were four adults in a fort. Predictable, I suppose.

When the 1:00 a.m. hunger struck, we decided we should procure pizza. The problem with this plan was, they aren’t really into food delivery in Vienna, and apparently it only became an option about five years ago. So no one picked up the phone at our usual pizza place, which is really cheap and awesome and fast. We ventured onto the internet to find a random place that would deliver, and were successful –- but we were rewarded with the most expensive pizza of life. I suppose it was delicious, but for 41 euros I can pretty much buy enough food for the month. Swindled.

Swathed in the warm light of the fort and comfortably full of pizza, we listened to Mathis’s crazy-good, bass-pumping music and eventually drifted off to sleep.

Mink and I managed to leave the fort up for the next few days, with only minor alterations made so that we could actually get through the living room and into the kitchen. It was sad to have to dismantle it at all, but it was making me a bit claustrophobic in the end. Now our living room’s back to its usual airy, sunny self. And, that neon pink string is still hanging from the light in the centre of the room if we ever get nostalgic.