The Queen's Rambles

Virus protection is enabled, but I still am a little worried. Just a few minutes ago I was having a major problem. Whenever I would hit enter, the battery saver control panel would open. Then half my keys stopped working. Weird. Scary! I rebooted the computer and things seem fine, but it has me a little freaked out. The virus protection is up to date, so I hope it really works.

I am also really confused because the computer has started sending regular e-mails to the spam folder. If I hadn’t gotten a group reply to a very important e-mail I never even would have thought to check. Grrrrrr.

Anyway. . .

We went to order Erik’s birthday cake today and now I’m scared. As I feared, the book had no outer space themed cakes, which was a little irritating since HELLO! Little boys love space! I didn’t see any pirate themed cakes either. The Safeway book was pretty threadbare, unless you are interested in the most popular shows on television. Too bad the Safeway cakes are about a million times better than Giant. Costco has the best cakes, but we don’t have a Costco membership and I’m not going to buy one just for birthday cakes. I wouldn’t mind having a membership if the store wasn’t so flippin’ insane even during weekday mornings.

I’ve been sort of worried about finding an outer space cake, so I had a couple of plans running through my mind. I bought some little space figurines the other day and was thinking I could put them on top of cupcakes or something. But making and frosting cupcakes? Meh. I don’t want to do any work.

I also looked up outer space cakes and found some examples of homemade birthday cakes. Some looked great, some looked horrible. I know me. Mine would be right in line with the horrible ones. I do not have good fine motor skills.

Another problem? I need to feed about 25 kids and adults with this cake. I need 1/2 a sheet cake. I don’t want to deal with that at home.

I have, perhaps, hit upon a solution.

Star Trek is a popular show, yes?

They had a Star Trek cake. It was very spacey looking with a plastic USS Enterprise and the plastic words Star Trek plopped on it. I asked if they could just leave the Star Trek stuff off, while still airbrushing the cake to look spacey. Then I can put some astronauts and robots around on the cake and it should be good enough.

The baker was very confident that this would work, until he started writing the directions to whoever the baker will be on Saturday morning. I’m hoping whatever they come up with with work. I am going to pick it up about five hours before the party, so we should have time to do damage control if need be.

Anyone have any great space themed game ideas for a four year old’s birthday party? We are doing pass the planet instead of pass the parcel. We also have the pinata, but I was at that park today and have no idea how we are going to hang it, unless we hang it off the monkey bars. How much would the other park patrons hate us? Probably way too much. All of the trees in the park are so old and huge that they don’t have any lower branches that would be reachable, even by a ten foot ladder.

I saw a picture of a guy holding a pinata off the end of a fishing pole, which could work if we had a fishing pole (and very little fear of four year olds with baseball bats).

Mostly, the kids are just going to play at the park. Erik is getting to an age where he really enjoys organized games, so I want to do a little something to make the party more than “play in the park, eat cake, go home.” I wouldn’t want to go overboard, though. No bounce house or astronaut clown for us! Ha. Maybe I can get Mike to dress up like an astronaut clown. I should ask him. At the very least he’ll laugh so hard that he’ll turn bright red and look like a clown. An alien clown. Because human clowns are chalk white. Right? It all makes sense in my head. Stop looking at me like that!