The Real Life Adventures of Cynical Woman!!

I have been working on the webcomic, honestly and truly! But this past week, 3 very big events all happened at the same time.

First, it was time for COOKIE PICK-UP! COOKIE PICK-UP is an anuual Girl Scout event, where cookie moms the world over (or at least in our local area) gather together to pick up several thousand boxes of cookies and bring them back to their garages in hopes that their troops will be able to sell them before the cookie moms pull out all their hair! It's a joyous event, especially the part where everything that would normally be in the garage now has to be stuff in the house to make room for a couple thousand boxes of cookies!

So my garage is stuffed to the gills with boxes and boxes of cookies, which I had to divide up into each Girl Scout's individual order. Thankfully, yesterday all the girls showed up and took their cookies home! And the reason they did so was because…

We celebrated Princess' eleventh birthday!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAY! My happy-go-lucky baby has turned into a moody pre-teen and now we all get to celebrate!! She turned eleven on Wednesday, so we had a mini-celebration then, but the big to-do was on Sunday. So we invited all the Girl Scouts, plus several girls from Princess' class and a few from our local neighborhood, and that meant the total headcount of pre-teen girls in my house yesterdy was around 20. Yep, 20 pre-teen girls spent the afternoon running screaming through my house, in and out the doors, dropping cups of lemonade on the carpet (three cups dropped in the first fifteen minutes alone), icing spattered on the walls, and every dish I own in the sink and a few in the trash can for some reason.

Naturally, for such a big event, I had to get up early to prepare. So I was up at 5AM and started the day by cleaning up the house. And then I went to work on the cake. Princess wanted a Doctor Who-themed birthday party, so I had ordered a silicon mold of the TARDIS and another mold that was smaller TARDIS' (TARDII?) and Daleks. I wanted to use the bigger TARDIS mold I used to make the top tier of a 3-layer cake. The smaller mold I lanned to use to make candy TARDISES (what the hell is the plural of TARDIS?!) and Daleks to place around the second layer of the cake. I had lots of blue, teal, purple and black food coloring plus bright primary colored candy melts. I was all ready to go.

This three-layered Doctor Who cake looked so beautiful… in my mind. The reality turned out to be a little bit different.

For starters, there was a little problem with the TARDIS portion of the cake. I managed whip up the perfect color of blue for the batter and bake it in the two halves mold. When I pulled it out of the oven, the cake was slightly over-flowing the mold. No problem, I thought, I had planned to use a bread knife to level off the two halves before pasting them together with TARDIS blue frosting. I left the two halves to cool while I worked on the frosting, and when I came back, they looked like this…

Is it me, or are two giant butts erupting out of the TARDIS to moon me?

What's worse is that after I leveled off the two halves (cutting off the butts, as it were) and I pulled the cakes out of the molds, the halves that had been inside the mold had shrunk up to look like something that out to be singing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” with the California Raisins. I tried putting the two halves together with the frosting, as planned, but the result was still pretty shrivelled-looking.

Sad TARDIS. Sad, sad, shrivelled TARDIS. I am a bad TARDIS cake baker.

So the top layer of the TARDIS cake was kind of a bust. And the party was rapidly approaching, I had to come up with a fix fast. Fortunately, while the cake mold had been a bust, the candy molds were working. The mini-TARDISESESSSS were coming out just fine. The daleks looked only slightly lumpy in the wrong places. So I switched gears and cleaned out the TARDIS cake molds and filled them up with royal blue candy melts and I made two candy halves of the TARDIS cake mold.

AND IT WORKED!!!

Granted, it wasn't perfect, but it looked good enough to put on top of the cake!

So I finished up the cake and this was the final product!

I didn't realized until after the cake was done that I didn't have any appropriate candles, so I took what I had – 4 flowerly birthday candles – and I planted them around the cake. I scattered silver sprinkles over black frosting to make it look like a galaxy background, added the Dalek candies, and TA-DAAAAAAAA! The cake was DONE!

And then a hoard of screaming pre-teen girls showed up and ate everything in sight while they destroyed my house.

The good news is that everyone seemed to have a great time. Plus, at the end of this shin-dig, all the Girl Scout parents showed up to get their kids AND their kids' cookie orders, so I was finally able to move a few things out of Pixie's bedroom and back into the garage.

The bad news is that I realized at the end of the day that I had spent over 16 hours on my feet and my spine felt like it had fused together and my knees felt like they'd been hit by a baseball bat. I hurt all over.

And then I realized that I had just spent MY BIRTHDAY (yes, Sunday was MY BIRTHDAY) with twenty of Princess' closest friends. Who had destroyed my house.

Yay.

So it's Monday, and I have no webcomic for you because I spent all last week getting ready for cookie pick-up and because I had a big birthday party to pull together for Princess and when I realized how hard I had worked and how much I hurt after everything was done, I took an extra dose of my arthritis meds and I slept for as long as I could.

And did I mention that in the midst of all this we had a sleep-over, and Princess had two major school assignments due, and she had to work on her Girl Scout Bronze Award project which the troop is presenting at Thinking Day next weekend?

And that apparently the Doctor sent the girls several notes throughout the day yesterday warning them about Daleks and Weeping Angels and the Vashta Nerada? Thus they spent a lot of hours running around with their sonic screw drivers, listening for cries of “EXTERMINATE!”, refusing to blink, and counting the number of shadows I have.

So there you go. A very jumbled explanation of why there is no comic, which is also pretty much an accurate description of what my life is really like. Sad, isn't it.

But hey! Amusing picture of butts hanging out of a TARDIS cake, right?

There ya go 🙂

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