Things Are Not What They Seem

As I mentioned yesterday, May is the Month of Cakes around these parts. It requires planning. And, inevitably, it requires purchasing. One of the cakes I’m planning is a pirate cake which I have used to justify buying old timey Black Jack pirate candy and gold foil-covered chocolate doubloons (though I will be making the pirate’s chest myself out of modeling chocolate). I have already made one sweaty, heart-thumping visit to Do It With Icing, the toy cake supply store (where I have left many hundreds of dollars over the last couple of years) for the necessaries and I am sure I will be back, but I didn’t find the one thing I’ve been meaning to buy for a while now; topsy turvy cake pans. You’ve seen the cakes that come out of these things—they’re all the rage now—Mad Hatter-like creations tilted at extreme angles. The topsy turvy cakes are “something different,” except now they aren’t anymore because they’re all over the place. No matter—I want the pans. So at the beginning of the month I shopped around and found a set for sale from a place in Glendale, California, which is just up the road apiece from me. The pans shipped right away, but no shipping information or tracking numbers were provided. Oh.

I waited a week. Then two.

“When are your pans getting here?” Maya asked me, after listening to me mutter about the delay. (I might have said something along the lines of, “Where are my $#^&*%@ pans already?!”)

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I think they might be coming from China.”

They arrived yesterday, about three weeks after they’d shipped, with a note, which read, in part:

“We apologize for the delay on the shipment of your order. Our container van consisting of our Topsy Turvy Pans had been randomly scheduled for complete custom inspection that our Department of Homeland Security perform to all incoming container vans for the sake of our nation’s security. We understand that you needed to receive your order on a timely basis, however, because this is a government safety procedure and there are protocols that are needed to be followed, we cannot go around or make the process any faster.”

So, first of all… What would a “container van consisting of Topsy Turvy Pans” actually look like with all those crazily tilted shiny angles? And by “container van,” do they mean “container on a ship coming from somewhere much farther away than Glendale”? Because I don’t know that the DHS is really that interested in cake pans coming from Glendale.

On the other hand, cake pans, national security…it all makes sense now.

Not really.

My point (sort of) is that things are not what they seem.

The world is topsy turvy. 

Best advice?

And now back to planning the pirate cake.