SoapZone Community Message Board

After the service, there was an elderly woman aimlessly wandering around the parking lot. She said she was "looking for her car". My good church friend recognized her as "C", a sporadic attendee. Good church friend's friend--"L"--is a nurse practitioner and has caregiving baked into every fiber of her being. She guided C back in the church, sat her down and gently asked for more details. C recited her name and the names of her two daughters and said her children were "talking in the sanctuary". I checked it out...nobody in the sanctuary that I didn't know. Several of us kept C company, wondering what was the next step. 30 minutes after church was over, a car finally pulled up...it was the daughters. Apparently they'd dropped Mom off at church. L, who doesn't put up with nonsense, kindly but firmly told the daughters that C was a delightful woman and we were happy to have her at church but she'd been confused, wandering a very busy parking lot, and maybe it was time to talk to C's doctor about Mom's mental status? Less kindly, L told the rest of us that C was "buckets of crazy" and likely well into dementia. We've had parents drop their kids off for Sunday School and church so they could get a free, child free morning but I don't recall anyone ever using our church as an elder-sitting service before.

I had my bff's niece's graduation party to get to in the afternoon but first I needed to buy her a graduation card (I'd purchased one before that was a money holder but when I got the party invitation, it said "no gifts" so I wanted to grab a different card). I stopped at the Dollar Tree across from the local mall and selected a card. I then got in line with a bunch of other people and only one cashier, a surly older woman who was not having her finest day and...I'll just leave it at that. Later on, Dad and I discussed whether it's OK for a frustrated cashier to take out her bad mood--earned or not--on her customers. I, having just been on the receiving end of that bad mood, said no.

The party itself was lovely. I mentioned in the weekend PP that I'd never been inside the Henn Mansion, and I was really impressed with how beautiful it is. Bff's family is also just really, really lovely...at one point, a much older woman walked in just smiling from ear to ear. Our paths intercepted, I said hello...she immediately enveloped me in a hug and asked how I was doing. Oh, fine, I told her and complimented her on her pretty pink cardigan, which made her smile even more. Later, I asked bff's nephew "Who WAS that?" and found out it was bff's great aunt, who's past 90 now. I got to meet a few other folks I'd not yet met and enjoy a really nice spread, followed by a walk on the beach afterwards. Later, bff's cousin invited everyone to come see the house he and his son had bought with the purpose of flipping. Normally I wouldn't care much about a house tour...but the house is in the ultra-toney village of Bratenahl, purchased for $2 million and expected to sell for around $7 million. The outside looks like an English boarding school (that's probably haunted) and the inside a super expensive bed and breakfast. There's 4 floors (a finished basement, the main floor, the second floor and a finished attic), 9 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms and numerous "extra" rooms such as an exercise room, a game room, a home theater and--one of my favorites--a room in the basement that's solely for poker games, complete with an enormous poker table. Honestly? The place was huge and stunning and very nicely decorated--they kept a lot of the wood paneling and original ceiling details plus some fixtures, door hinges and the call light system used for summoning the maid or butler--but it feels more like a museum than a home. Bff and I both joked about the carriage house being bigger than our houses and being more than enough for either of us; if tomorrow I won the lottery and bought the place, I'd either have to stay on the main floor and rent out the other floors/rooms (the owners' suite is downstairs and you can see Lake Erie without even getting out of bed) or live in the carriage house and come out only to use the monstrous pool around back.

Here's the "before" pictures...all the busy wallpaper and patterned carpets are gone

We got back to the party just after it had ended and everything was put away, so yesterday bff's family invited me over to grab some leftovers. Bless bff's sister...she seems to think there's 10 of us living in this house instead of just two. I came home with containers of roasted chicken and sliced beef in gravy and rigatoni and Slovenian potato salad (similar to German potato salad, only the potatoes are mashed) and green beans and cold cut mini sandwiches on Hawaiian rolls and both chocolate and vanilla cake and cookies and a small bag of rolls. I put smaller amounts of everything in separate containers and took some over to my good church friend today...Dad and I will STILL be eating leftovers for the rest of the week <g>.