 "Photo: Joanna Allerhand/The Daily Northwestern")
Pat Fennig was just trying to get a good night's sleep. Then a drunk passerby stuck his sword inside Fennig's igloo.
Yes, Fennig, a Weinberg freshman, spent Saturday night in a homemade igloo he and his friends built near The Arch.
"You build an igloo and what else are you gonna do with it?" said Fennig, who said he spent his night counting the drips of the slowly melting igloo and answering questions from curious onlookers.
The tale of the igloo began at dinner Friday night at Allison dining hall when Music freshman Rob Perlick-Molinari asked Fennig, his floormate in Shepard Residential College, if he wanted to build a snow fort.
But Fennig decided that building an igloo was more his style.
"I was John the Baptist and Pat was Jesus," Perlick-Molinari said. "I was like, 'This is a cool idea.' Pat was like, 'This is the essence.'"
What began as a fun wintertime activity soon found a charitable purpose when the friends decided to charge an entry fee into the igloo to donate to tsunami victims in South Asia. They raised $85 during a 12-hour stretch on Sunday.
"Everyone seems to be doing something to help the tsunami victims," said Fennig. "And I hadn't, so this seemed like a good opportunity."
Fennig said someone corrected him and said that his creation was actually a quinzee, which is a snow mound hut, and not an igloo, which is made of blocks of ice.
He added he knew when he and Perlick-Molinari started piling the mound of snow Saturday afternoon that this was not just going to be a little snow fort.
To ensure that the igloo was structurally sound, Fennig recruited his high school friend Andy Azman, a McCormick freshman, to help engineer the igloo.
"I knew all along it wasn't going to be some wimpy igloo," Fennig said. "It was gonna be the best you've seen."
-- Diana Scholl
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