A Fun-Filled Weekend in Jane’s Domain

It’s Monday afternoon. I’m still finishing my morning coffee because, well, I slept over 10 hours last night. I kind of have a rule of not drinking coffee in the afternoon because I don’t want to be awake all night from the caffeine buzz.

 

Guess I’ll be testing that little theory tonight, won’t I? If I’m able to fall asleep with no interruptions, I may have to change my ways. You’ll see me with my hot pink coffee mug permanently attached to my fingers guzzling java at dinnertime.

 

Anyway. WHY am I drinking coffee in the afternoon and WHY did I sleep over 10 hours last night?

 

Well, it’s because I went to Steubenville for my friends’ daughter’s graduation party over the weekend. That’s the quick answer. The long answer follows.

 

See? Long time friends.
Nick had hair and I was cute!

I’ve written about him before – but I’ve known Nick since my first year at Ohio State and we’ve been friends ever since. Time used to be measured in years, but now we measure it in decades.

 

Yikes – how is this possible? And when did we get so old??

 

But it never matters once we all get together because we just fall right back into our decades-long friendship. Other OSU friends were there, too. Nick’s twin brother, Joe (of course) and Charisse from Cleveland and Butch and his wife Dragana from Columbus. (Whom I never see, by the way, even though we live only about 15 miles from each other.) 

Other friends I’ve known seemingly forever – the two Mikes and Randy and Chris and Deena and Nick. (I hate when I name names…I’m always worried I’m going to leave someone out. Plus, I’m never sure if people actually want me to name their name!)

 

Nick and Beth’s daughter is heading off to college in the fall and I just wish so much for her in her college experience. I hope she learns a lot. I hope she has fun. I hope she makes mistakes (because we all do), but I hope she accepts those mistakes and learns from them.

 

But, mostly, I hope she meets a group of friends that she will be able to laugh with, lean on and grow with for the rest of her life.

 

The party, by the way, was amazing. The decorations were incredible. There were so many pink balloons, my little heart was overwhelmed with joy. But, truthfully? I got tired just looking at them all because I know how much time and effort went into all that decorating. 

But Beth did not act exhausted in the least. (Unlike me during some of the mega-parties Vince and I used to throw. I’d sit down somewhere during the middle of the party wishing I could just take a nap!)

 

But I also know they had a lot of help and support. That’s the kind of people they are – will step in and give anyone a hand – so others want to do that for them, too.

 

They had food catered from all sorts of local eateries (Pastaio and Scaffidi's – if you’re ever in the area, you should definitely check ‘em out). Other places, too, but I don't remember their names. Nick prepped some of the food himself. And there were cakes and cookies and tiramisu, oh my! 

The pool table was covered in pink plastic and then covered again with snacks and crackers and meats and olives and other appetizers. So much food that I actually thought that was the party food.

 

How am I still making this rookie mistake? Italians do NOT stop at mere appetizers!

 

I only found out later that the lasagna, meatballs, chicken limone and all manner of Italian foods and pastas were being served in their outdoor kitchen. (I used to think we had a lot of space in our house what with our two kitchens both upstairs and downstairs. Yeah, right. We were rank amateurs. Nick and Beth have three…!)

 

But as the party progressed, we toasted our friendships with limoncello shots. We took lots of photos. I drank more wine in one night there than I had in the entire previous month. We got into serious conversations. We got silly and laughed. A lot. We chatted and caught up with one another’s lives.

 

There were a couple people there I hadn’t seen since before Vince passed who gave me reassuring heart-felt hugs and also gave me a chance to talk about him a little bit. So, even though I missed him (as I do every single day), I didn’t have too much time to be sad.

 

But he would’ve loved being there in the middle of it all. And he would’ve taken far more pictures than I did.

 

And it was after 3 a.m. before I headed upstairs to crash on the couch.

 

I slept for a few hours only to get up in the early morning, head out to the patio near the pool and hot tub – and do it all over again. Well, except for the limoncello shots and the wine. For me, anyway. Driving back to Columbus later in the day precluded me drinking anything but coffee and my ever-present 24 oz drink bottle filled with water.

 

Everyone else waited until the afternoon before they broke out more bottles of wine. And they also brought out the trays of leftovers for an afternoon meal.

 

I was inside looking at the pool table once again covered in pink plastic and large trays of foil baking pans. I laughed and said, “This would be the party food I had for one of my parties. Here, it’s your leftovers!”

 

Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Vince was of the opinion that it was far better to have plenty of leftovers than to run out of food to serve your guests.

 

He did not subscribe to the Anne and Henry Domian Food Serving Rules. Wherein a person was offered either a hamburger or a hotdog during a Saturday cookout.

 

That used to make Vince laugh as he and his friend John used to cook burgers and hot dogs and steaks and chicken AND crab legs on the grill. Concurrently. But, on the other hand, mom and dad didn’t used to waste food, either.

 

Anyway, it was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. Nick supplied me with enough leftovers to last the better part of this week. And I drove home exhausted but smiling thinking about the conversations we had and my friendships with these special people.

 

How ‘bout you? What fun thing did you do this past weekend?

A Big Project in Jane’s Domain

Earlier this past week I had one of those days where I had many things I should have been doing, some things I needed to do and a few things I wanted to do. Instead, I sat here at my computer and started to write.

 

But, then, writing is something that combines all of the above. So that can’t be a bad thing, can it?

 

It was the 28^th of June, and if my parents were still alive, they’d have been celebrating 71 years of marriage. As it was, they were able to celebrate their 63^rd anniversary and were literally three days shy of their 64^th when Dad passed in 2016.

 

I still think of them every day and am so glad they lived good, long lives. And they were able to show us what a happy, healthy, loving marriage looked like.

 

That day I also learned that a high school friend, who has been fighting pancreatic cancer, found out the cancer had spread to his liver. Pancreatic cancer is one of those scary ones. But he was truly fighting – and I believed he was going to beat it. I still believe he can, but the news brought tears to my eyes. And this is a person I haven’t seen since I was seventeen. I can still picture him in Mr. Seavy’s World History class, giving me grief because if I didn’t know the answer to a question, Mr. Seavy was going to give the entire class a pop quiz.

 

(And, c’mon. I knew the answer!)

 

But if anyone can beat cancer, he can, so I’ll continue to keep him in my prayers. If you can, as well, I’d appreciate it. And if you don’t pray – then send good thoughts, vibes or whatever voodoo you do out into the cosmos for healing.

 

The subject of the blog I was intending to write escapes me now as I’ve just gotten back to my computer to finish it. Since I’m not a duck, I guess sad news is harder to slide off my back than, well, water would.

 

Or something like that.

 

Anyway, I ended up spending the day working on a project I’ve been meaning to start for more than six years when I cleaned out my parents’ house. And that is – to organize the boxes and bins of photos I have stashed away in the spare room closets. I want to sort through, toss the blurry or bad ones, scan the good ones, and then get rid of the hard copies.

 

These aren’t only my parents’ photos, but those two or three extra boxes and bins were enough to add to the scope of the project and make it really challenging.

 

Because I, myself, took many, many photos through the years. And in the thirteen years we were together, Vince took even more. But so did my dad. He brought his trusty camera with him on every globe-trotting trip he and mom took. And after he got those photos developed, he carefully labeled each one and placed them in a small album dedicated to that particular trip so that they had photographic evidence of them all.

 

If something came up in casual conversation about a name of a town in a foreign country, Dad would excuse himself, find the album and bring it down to show us the photo and describe the significance of that town.

 

When he met Vince and learned the spelling of “Cordova,” he stood up and left the room. Dad was not someone anyone would ever describe as rude, so I just looked at Vince and shrugged. But soon Dad came back to the family room with an album showing numerous photos of Cordova, Alaska, from a cruise he and Mom took years prior.

 

Sadly, these photo albums don’t have the same significance to us as they did for mom and dad – and no one wants a shelf full of travel photo albums to places that we didn’t travel.

 

That breaks my heart a little bit, but I simply don’t have the shelving real estate necessary to keep them all. And my closet space is at a premium, too, and I’d like to free it up for, oh, I don’t know, clothes, maybe. Or shoes. You know, stuff that’s supposed to go in a closet?

 

So my plan is to look through the books and find photos of mom and dad that we might like to have – photos from a time when they were healthy and able to enjoy and remember every moment of the particular trip they were on. Then I’ll scan those photos for my family members.

 

Great plan, eh?

 

Yeah, well. I’m now in the thick of this great plan and my living room is filled with small bins of photos that I have separated into categories. Photos from my childhood years. College years. Adult years. Family photos. Friend photos. Vince photos.

 

My living room looks like one of those old Foto-Mat kiosks exploded. (Remember those?!)

 

Yikes.

 

Now, of course, I’m torn because I have other things I need to do. There’s a stack of financial paperwork on my dining room table for a project I’m working on. There’s a stack of clothing in my bedroom that I started to sort for donation or resale purposes.

 

And there’s a stack of large, unmarked bills in a duffel bag that I need to count and then launder.

 

So I have a lot of projects going on.

 

Yeah, yeah. I know. Obviously that last one isn’t true. I was just checking to see if you were still paying attention. Besides, I’d be the person who’d actually put the bills in the washing machine because I didn’t understand the concept of “money laundering.”

 

Crime would NOT pay in my case.

 

Anyway, I digress.

 

And I procrastinate, too. So I’d better get back to those photos. Since I’ve gotten this far, I can’t stop now. It absolutely cannot be six more years before I start scanning them.

 

Wish me a little luck – and a whole lotta perseverance.