On a Quest for a Cake Pan

Jackson turns one in 16 days.  I have been in the throws of party planning for a couple of months now.  I rted down one path with the party theme but changed my mind about half way through after seeing how Jackson reacted to the characters on Veggie Tales.  So instead of "The New Sheriff in Town" theme I started out with, we are going for a Veggie Tales theme.  I got lucky because I found a lot of the decorations on the Veggie Tales website and they were on sale at the time.  But I have been struggling with coming up with the perfect cake.  My internet searches uncovered a lot of ugly Veggie Tales cakes.  You would be surprised how bad people can make a cucumber and a tomato look.  And then I found it!  Wilton makes a Larry and Bob cake pan that comes with instructions on how to decorate it.  Perfect!

Or so you would think.  The pan is discontinued.  So I started a quest to find this cake pan.  I found it on eBay right of the bat but the person started the bidding at $40 with a buy it now of $60.  I don't think so.  Not for a cake pan that originally sold for $10.98.  I kept checking back with eBay every few days and suddenly there were 4 cake pans up for bid in the price range I was willing to pay.  So I started bidding and won one.  The listing said I was supposed to have the pan by June 20th.  Well, the 20th came and went and the seller still hadn't marked the item as shipped even though I pay for my listing as soon as I won it.

So I sent a message to the seller and received no response.  I waited a few days and sent another message.  Still no response.  But the next day I received a Paypal shipping notice.  Great, I thought. I got my message across.  So I waited for the package to show up and kept my eye on the tracking.  I wanted my cake pan. Well, the tracking showed the package had been delivered on Thursday but we didn't have a key in our mailbox for the package box so I could get my cake pan nor had it been left at our house.  (We have community mailboxes that are about the size of a post office box so large packages are left in the big box with a key for the recipient in your small box.)  Friday came and still no package.  So I called the post office, provided the tracking information, and was told they would look into it.

I guess I should mention that during this same time I received the shirt I had ordered from etsy for Jackson to wear for his party.

Monday came and still no package nor were we getting any information from the post office.  So Chris went to the post office on Tuesday and spoke to the supervisor.  They said they would open an investigation into the location of our package.  The interesting thing is that the key had been missing from the package box on our street since Thursday so I just knew our package was in there and the key had been put into the box for the empty house next door.  But the carrier said that the package was for another house not for us.  So I went back to my tracking email to see if I could figure anything else out.  And there up in the right corner of the email in small print was a link to the transaction id.  I clicked it and at that moment realized I had been an idiot.  The tracking information I had was for the shirt not for the cake pan.  

So back to eBay I went to figure out what to do about my missing cake pan that I had pay for 3 weeks ago. I now have a case opened with eBay.  I still want the pan because I really want that to be Jackson's cake but I don't think I'm going to get it.  I'm guessing I will get my money back once the week passes and I don't hear anything from the seller.  I checked the feedback on this particular seller and it turns out that, despite a 100% positive rating, there are several comments about her shipping late and she currently doesn't have any other items listed on the site.  Looks like this is e recurring problem with this particular seller and taught me to read the feedback closer before I purchase from someone.