Day 272: Donatello's Birthday Party

Guess what? My birthday was a few days ago. Ordinarily I don't get too excited for my birthday. I don't hate getting older--most of the time I have to do mental calculations to remember exactly how old I am--I just feel a little uncomfortable with the amount of focus people put on me all of a sudden for one day. This is not to say I haven't enjoyed my birthdays. I've had some good times, last night included. I didn't have a party; we just met some friends for dinner. I got lots of cool Spider-Man and TMNT stuff including the new IDW Volume 1 collection of the original comics autographed by Kevin Eastman!

My wife took the theme of the night in a different, but equally nerdy direction (she threw me a TMNT party a few years ago; I'll get to it in a bit). Over the last few years she's really cultivated a love for baking and decorating things and she's gotten pretty damn good. One of my other (many) loves is Tolkien's Middle Earth. I love all of it, not just Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but the entire world and all its lore.--

Before I start rambling about Middle Earth I'm going to stop here and promise to explore this in another post.

--My wife has read The Hobbit several times, just finished Lord of the Rings all the way through for the first time and we're both waaaay excited about the upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit. So this year, she made me a book cake. An awesome book cake that looks like it has real pages and... just look at this thing!

It's huge and awesome and, most importantly, delicious. I chose Strawberry cake without knowing what she was making, so she put a cream cheese layer. Get it? Strawberry's and Cream Cake. As in, "Do you remember the taste of strawberry's and cream, Mr. Frodo?" There are layers of meaning to this cake (as well as just regular layers).

So anyway, I drew this picture of Donatello (me) ready to blow out his candles on his birthday. I'm going off the assumption that the Turtles aren't really brothers in the genetic sense and so they celebrate different birthdays. The others aren't screaming in horror, they're singing "Happy Birthday" to him.

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Instead of writing a big long post about my birthday this year I thought I'd share a few pictures from my TMNT birthday from a few years ago.

 My sweet Donatello cake

Ninja Turtle cupcakes made by my good friend Crystal! The TMNT heads were ring party favors.

My friend graciously let me cut the cake with the broken hilt of Narsil. 

Apparently cutting cakes with a sword is a thing I do. I cut my Spider-Man groom's cake with a samurai sword.

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Here are a few pictures my mom gave me of when I was younger. Proof that I have always loved the turtles.

Me at 5 years-old. Note my coordinated outfit.

 My 6th birthday cake.

6 year-old me at some school carnival thing.

Clearly they didn't have a Donatello cut out.

Day 129: Comic Con!

This isn't a post about the real comic con. I mean, the really big comic con, the one in San Diego. But it is a post about my first comic con experience which happened today. In Austin. For like almost 2 hours.

So a few weeks ago there was a Groupon for a $10 pass for the last day of the Austin Comic Con. We snatched it up because we always want to go to these conventions, but it never seems to work out. We figured $10 a ticket isn't too bad even if we don't end up going.

Well, we did go, we were just a little late. My wife did the Race for the Cure 5k this morning and then we went and had breakfast before we had to drop her aunt off at the airport. Once we got home and got ready and then got back downtown it was after 3:00 and the con was only open until 5:00. That's OK, we already had tickets and they were only $10, plus we were in costume so we couldn't just go home.

Oh yeah, we wore costumes. Did I forget that part?

My wife wore her April O'Niel costume which she worries over and complains endlessly about every time she wears it and then ends up getting like a million compliments and picture requests. She was definitely the favorite out of the two of us. If you're attractive, you have boobs and you're in costume you will get stopped every two feet for a picture at a comic con. I know that now.

I, on the other hand, was wearing a new costume I put together and was slightly less recognizable: Dr. McNinja! I've been wanting to put this costume together for a while, I just haven't had the time or reason to. I was quite pleased with myself even though most people didn't know who I was. The nice thing about being Dr. McNinja is that it works on two levels. On one level you get the people who recognize the character; on the other level you get the people who see you and say, "Oh, cool, a ninja/doctor." Close, but not quite.

Since it was the end of the last day of the con we didn't have much time to look around, but we did see some cool art and talked to some interesting people. We spent some time chatting with a local artist, Tim Doyle, who did a poster that we just happened to buy last week. We actually have two pieces of his in our house, but more on that in a later post.

We didn't end up buying much of anything seeing as how we don't have much to spend to begin with, but it was a lot of fun. I'd say that $10 was worth the hour and a half we spent at the comic con. Maybe next year we'll get to experience more of it.

I drew the Turtles walking a stereotypical convention floor. Donatello's checking out a comic booth where the artist and writer are waiting to sign something. Raphael is looking at the weapons. Michelangelo is checking out the costume booth and trying on an oversize head piece modeled after his own head (very meta of you, Mikey). Leonardo is just walking and taking it all in. There's a lot to see at comic cons after all.