Discovery Beach Birthday Cake

My birthday was over the weekend and, pretty much since the start of our courtship, Carrie has baked me a boardgame-themed cake. In the last year, we haven’t played too many boardgames together, other than some card games. However, we have played a lot of games with our son.

So Carrie made the cake inspired by our favorite game to play with him Curious George: Discovery Beach Game.

(Okay, it may not be his favorite game. That might be Connect 4 or MasterMind for Kids. But the Discovery Beach games really are good kids games. Fun moving parts that play into the decisions)

The board has removable panels that you lift up to see blue sand and various colored tchotchkes. Carrie duplicated that by cutting out panels in a sugar sheet and using candy shapes. It came out really nicely and was a yummy cake to boot.

I also taught myself the solitaire game Shooting Party (Haven’t decided if I want to go so far as to make the Edwardian deck but I have had fun with the game) as a way of fitting a new game into my birthday.

After the doodle went to bed, we got in some games to Six and wrapped up with a game of Jaipur. It’s been quite a while since we’ve played Jaipur and it’s even better then I remembered. That little game really is an evergreen.

42

I turned 42 today.

To be honest, I'm kind of past the point where I really think about the number. The last time I thought about it was when I turned thirty and I dreamed I was surrounded by teenagers chanting I wasn't a hepcat anymore.

To be fair, thirty was kind of 'What am I doing with my life?' In comparison, when I turned forty, I was married, had moved across the country and had an infant son. That was more of 'Wow! Look at what I've done with my life!'

But as someone who read his copies of Douglas Adams until they were literally in pieces as a teenager, I have to acknowledge forty-two.

Even folks who don't know Douglas Adams from Evelyn Waugh know that forty-two is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

I swear that in the annotated scripts to the radio plays, Adams stated that the whole point was that it didn't mean anything (although I bet it has come to mean something to a lot of people) 

But I am going to take this from it. Yeah, the number isn't important. What matters is what I've done with those years. And, while there have been some bumps and twists along the way, it just keeps getting better.