Pictures from Nicki's Birthday and American Stereotypes

So, it seems I have to revisit Nicki's Birthday for a moment, as the pictures are just too funny to leave out:

Mark and I had bought cupcake mix, thinking it would be fine to make one cake instead of cupcakes for our double layer cake. Unfortunately, what we didn't realize was that we actually bought mini-cupcake mix so we ended up with super skinny cake layers... we attempted to make up for it by loading the middle of the cake with strawberries and half a can of frosting... Mark got a little over-excited when trying to get the top layer out of the tin... hence the puzzle we attempted to reconstruct on top of the chocolate layer and frosting. :P

Some of the results of the icing fight that ensued. 

As we waited for the cake to bake we also managed to eat about half a can of frosting between the two of us, the resulting sugar rush lead to running and screaming around the flat as we chased each other with handfuls of frosting.

Mark attempted to write "Happy Birthday" in fudge icing but ran out of room and we wound up with a "Happy Birth" Cake. At some point we realized it was a lost cause and dumped endless amounts of sprinkles on it in defeat. :P

Nonetheless, Nicki was thrilled and it was a surprisingly DELICIOUS cake.

Here's Nicki! We printing some photos of all of us at K-mart and put them in dollar-store frames. We also had  everyone sign around the collage in the big frame. That was Mark and I's b-day gift. (along with the cake!) Ta-dah!

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On a totally different note, in my American Foreign Policy tutorial today we went around the room and introduced ourselves. We had to say our name, our year, and one positive and one negative thing about American International Relations. Now, my class is extremely diverse. There are only two Americans, my friend James and myself, a handful of Australians and several people from all over the world so some of the answers were fascinating. However, what was even more interesting than the individual responses was the general consensus of the class the George Bush was evil and Barack Obama is the great future. I found this to be extremely interesting. Even though many of the international students (I use "international" to mean non-American in this case, rather than non-Australian) could not name one specific thing that Obama has done that they think is worthy of such high praise, nonetheless, they all agree that the world should love him. It's an interesting dynamic. I'll expand on this topic later, I'm rather sleepy, but I just wanted to put that little bit of food for thought out there.