Check your links and blue cake

The day I announced to my friends and family that my paper book was available for purchase, I had a few things on my mind.  First, I had to make a cake for my son's at-school birthday celebration.  I don't know how it works in the US or elsewhere in the world because I didn't have kids when I lived there, but here in Germany, it is totally ok to bring homemade cakes to school.  So I had cake on my mind when I wrote the announcement e-mail and insterted the CreateSpace and Lulu links.  I chose around 150 friends and family to send the e-mail to, and clicked send.  Yahoo immediately identified me as a spammer and wouldn't let me send the message.  After chatting (online) with a Yahoo rep, I learned that you can only send 50 e-mails per hour to Yahoo addresses and 50 to non-Yahoo addresses, and that having links in the e-mail can also id you as a spammer.  So I removed the links by typing them in manually and deleting the links I had copy-pasted into the e-mail.  I didn't do what my computer expert husband would have done - I didn't check the urls before sending the message.

A few hours later, when the US woke up, I started getting e-mails from friends and family, telling me that the CreateSpace url wasn't working.  I had somehow inserted an unnecessary "0" somewhere, and so the link was broken.  At least I could tell who was actually trying to look at the site, right?

That was pretty frustrating. And I was not about to e-mail 150 friends and family to let them know that I had sent a broken link.  I'm only telling them if they e-mail me back.  The correct link is https://www.createspace.com/3656029.  Of this, I am sure.

The cake was more of a success.  It was blue.  As in blue cake, not blue frosting.  If you dye a yellow cake blue and bake it, the baked part on the outside becomes brown.  It is extremely ugly.  But then you can frost it and cover it with a layer of marzipan.  And make green marzipan mice to decorate it.  And then you get thanked 10 times by your son for his mouse cake.  And then you don't feel so bad about the bad link, because the blue cake was definitely the bigger (and more important) success of the day.