I ain't no Miss Muffett

I was sitting in bed trying to figure out where to put the pole at the wedding ceremony when a fat spider dropped from the ceiling and plunked itself on the edge of the bed. It poked me with one of its hairy legs and said, "Fluff, you seem pretty calm these days. Did you forget about the Upcoming Event?"

"No," I said, "I'm just not going to worry about it until it's nearly upon me."

"Speaking of which," I continued. "could you back your hairy butt up a tad, you're encroaching on my personal space." I said this in an extremely calm fashion, for I am well-composed these days.

"Really?" it said. "So you aren't in the least bit rattled by the Upcoming Event or my gross appendages?" This while feathering a few strands of my hair with two of the eight.

"Dude," I said, "No touchy the hair." and I gave it a resounding SMACK on its left pedapalp. It gave a bit of a squeak, startling me for I would have thought a giant arachnid would bellow or roar, not squeak like a silly little girl.

"Well there's no cause for violence," it said while moving over a skosh. I thought I saw the glimmer of tears in one of its four eyes, and my heart softened just a tad. Still, it was a spider; I adjusted the magical covers and went back to thinking about the pole.

I'm learning to deal with spiders these days, and I've had a couple of recent successes. Take, for instance, the cupcakes.

We had a birthday celebration. We ordered cupcakes made to look like pool balls. We agreed to pay an arm and a leg.

I sent the cupcake shop a picture of pool ball cupcakes. I asked if they could do that in the time allowed. I went to pick the order up at the agreed-upon time.

Now, take a moment to open a new browser. Using BING or google, your pref (but I highly recommend BING), do an image search for pool ball cupcakes.

See all those pics? All with 1 - 8 on solid balls, 9 - 15 on stripes? In order, yellow, blue, red, purple, orange, green, burgundy, black? I sent the decorator one of those pics. She spent four hours decorating 15 cupcakes. Solid yellow was numbered 1, striped yellow was numbered 9, a greyish sort of solid was numbered 8, and there all resemblance to any of those pictures stopped; not a single one of the remaining cakes was appropriately matched to color or number. And they were glittered.

I discussed the issue with their storefront representative. The discussion was calm, cool and collected on both sides. She wanted to "redo" the numbers; I had no time to wait. I asked if I had to accept the order; she said, "No, of course not! It's our fault."

I left the store. We went to the party at the pool hall. I was a little sad that the birthday boy didn't get to see the cool pool ball cupcakes, but heh, no big deal, we had another cake there anyway. I made it up to him later, too, by taking 20 pictures of various women's boobs. I think he will find that a reasonable consolation.

The next day, the cupcake shop owner/manager called and left me voicemail telling me she was going to still charge me the $60 because her decorator spent a lot of time on the order and the cupcakes were absolutely darling.

I left her voicemail that she did not have my authorization to charge the card and we weren't paying for darling.

This started an email trail that her head decorator eventually tagged onto. Here is a snippet from that convo, a comment from Heather, HEAD DECORATOR at New York Cupcakes:

Heather: "You seemed extremely laid back about what you were expecting, and never once was it mentioned that these needed to be an exact replica of an actual pool ball set."

Good LORD, Heather, why on earth would we want accuracy? What the hell do you think the PICTURE was for?

Good thing we weren't putting the irish lad's NAME on the cake, eh?

Still, this inspires me to add a feature to my schizophrenic blog, Wreckorators and their wrecks of art, starting with this one...for Heather.



That's some pile of...cake, eh?