I arrived home from the Mirabeau Room just after midnight and promptly crashed into bed. I managed to sleep in a little on Saturday morning, but not nearly enough to prepare me for what was waiting.
It was my nephew Evan's sixth birthday and like we had done for his brother's birthday in March and his birthday the year before, we went to the local Chuck E. Cheese's for the birthday festivities.
My sister hoped to avoid the crowds by going early in the afternoon. This was a great idea. When we arrived there were still plenty of tables available and few of the games had any lines waiting.
The Chuck E. Cheese motto is, I believe, "where a kid can be a kid". However, they forget to add the much less catchy "and an adult can be bored out of his mind". I was forced to wander around after my three year old nephew as he "played" skee ball. This is the first time, I think, that I have ever seen anybody score a zero. Still, he was excited to collect the single ticket given for this masterful performance.
I did manage to slip in a game of Space Invaders and a game of Centipede--some of the true classic video games--but it has been so long since I've played them that I didn't get much further than clearing the first level of each game.
When the meal finally arrived, we sat down to enjoy the pizza. They decided this time to avoid the grease pit that was the meat pizza we had last time by ordering a plain cheese and a ham and pineapple pizzas. The grease level was certainly cut down dramatically--to the point of being unnaturally dry and tasteless. Still, pizza is pizza and I have no resistence to pizza. I ate more than I should and regretted it for the rest of the weekend.
After finishing the pizza we started on the birthday cake, selected earlier from among the many fine cakes Safeway happened to have available that morning.
After exchanging all the hard won tickets for a few rolls of Smarties, we were out the door a mere two hours after we arrived.
