On the only truly sunny, gorgeous day we’ve had this year, a group of attractive people met at Family Fun Center in Tukwila for Mike’s Pretty Pretty Princess Birthday Party.
Family Fun Center translates directly into “Could be a lot more fun with less screaming children and slow-moving families but they are cash cows so it’s never gonna happen unless you are loaded enough to rent out the entire building, suckas!”
…We were not loaded enough to rent the entire building. The building itself is very high-ceilinged, the better to reverberate the sorts of shouts and squeals and screams that children are prone to making, particularly little girls and the eardrum-damaging shriek they make when they are overstimulated. I swear that when we approached Family Fun Center, I could watch the building thrum from the noise inside. Hence, we did not spend all that much time inside.
We started off with minigolf. Minigolf, if you are unaware, is a game about putting mastery, taking the ball to the hole, not rimming the hole, but putting it in. It’s also about innuendo, smacking friends with golf clubs, whacking other people’s ball out of the way if at all possible, and riding said golf clubs like ponies through the brush. It also features some “obsticles”.
Some of those “obsticles” included ramps into old-timey prospector cabins, an employee who kept wandering through the middle of our game, and a hole filled with mysterious slimy water.
After we finished our game, we bravely ventured inside to play some laser tag. The majority of our group ended up on one team. The other team was comprised of eight year old girls, who were seriously not cut out for the business of war. One of them dropped her gun and ran shrieking; guns are attached to the vest, so it skittered behind her, which only served to make her shriek and run faster as it knocked into the backs of her legs while her vest informed her she was being killed over and over again.
Laser tag was fun, though I wish that we would have had a little more time to play–it didn’t seem that we got a whole lot of time for what we paid. I also think it could be even more fun ramped up a notch for adults. Perhaps not as painfully extreme as taser tag, but what if every time you died, you took what felt like a punch to the gut? What if you had to take a shot every time you hit the recharge station? These are ideas that I feel need to be revisited with a business license and some money behind them.
After laser tag, I discovered that the skeeball machine would not accept my prepaid family fun center card and would require me to pump more money into the place which I was not about to do, so I made my way out to the batting cages.
We (read: not me because I am uncoordinated and would certainly hit myself in the face with a bat) knocked the hell out of some balls, and then it was time for go-karts. Also known as Exxtreeeeeme Danger Karts.
To my great shame, I skidded around corners so poorly that Chris was able to pass me; I am clearly not cut out for the world of Exxtreeeeeme Danger Driving.
After go-karts, we’d all had enough and gorged ourselves at Famous Dave’s BBQ. I badgered the waitress to bring Pretty Pretty Princess Mike some dessert, but much to my chagrin, they don’t sing or dance or make a public fuss over him like I’d hoped.
Happy Birthday, Sir Dorks A Lot!
