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Fighting Fire with Fire

I recently remarked to a friend that you need a sense of humor to run in my family. For example, I got a pack of beer & a weighted jump rope as part of my Secret Santa gift this year. My parents saw the beer, and said, "the gift-giver must think you're an alcoholic." My sister saw the jump rope and said, "the gift-giver must think you're fat." See, sense of humor.

My cousin is about to find this out first-hand. See, she was over at our house on Monday while I was at work. My sister was wrapping my present at the time, and she invited my cousin to help out. I'm not sure who's idea it was, but they decided to have some fun with it. Specifically, they decided they wanted to make it harder to open my gift. I haven't opened it yet, but I'm told it has multiple layers of wrapping, and my cousin went to town on it. She even started writing things on the wrapping paper, as an extra taunt.

But they told me about it, so I had time to scheme up some payback. Guess who hasn't gotten her gift yet? Yup, my cousin.

Now, I could have done the same thing to her, but that would've been unoriginal. No, I needed something different, so I only used one layer of wrapping paper. I did, however, have a bunch of extra Scotch tape lying around and some free time. *grins*

The gift is a block about 10" by 10", maybe 2" high. I spent about 25 minutes wrapping it, and I probably used over 100 pieces of tape in doing so. I put a grid of tape on each surface of the gift, and made sure that subsequent rows were aligned in different directions (so she didn't get lucky and yank the whole thing off in one pull). For extra kicks, I also made sure to tape down the seams on the outside. The best part is that it looks fairly normal, and unless you knew to look for it, it'd look like a normal wrapping job.

See? Sense of humor.
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