Saturday, January 21st
My weekend plans changed when I found out Manley Goodwin passed away. He is my aunt Janet's husband, and we grew up hanging out at their house when we were kids. Manley was a huge celebrity in town, and everyone knew him which is why it was so hard to hear that he left us to move onto a better place. At first, I wasn't going to go to the burial but just the celebration of life, which was a couple weeks away from the burial, but at the last minute, I chose to go.
I called Mom and Dad to tell them I was getting ready to go and that I would meet them at the Rainier Cemetery. Manley wanted to be buried in Rainier. Jeff made sure that happened. I got some clothes on, wore warm clothes, my hiking shoes, a hat and gloves. It's been rainy and cold the past few days and I wanted to make sure I was warm.
I headed into Rainier. I've driven past the Rainier Cemetery hundreds of thousands of times but have only been inside of it maybe four or five times. I parked and walked up the hill. I saw a lot of people I knew on the way to the gravesite. I saw Mom and Dad pull up and they helped Janet up the hill. My great aunts and uncles were getting creaky and old. As we all made it up the hill and said our "hi's" and "how you doings," it started lightly snowing.
We all gathered around the covered area. I let the family and older folks stand under the tent while I stood on the outside. Like any funeral, they started with welcoming us and got into talking about Manley's life. After that, they did a military ceremony and presentation of colors to his sons and then thanked us for coming. It was very well put together. I personally enjoyed the military presentation of colors to his sons. I stuck around for a few minutes and talked to a few people and then left to head over to Mom and Dad's house to fill up water jugs. When I was done with that and headed home, I stopped at the recycle to get rid of the paper, plastics and metals.
I got home and Ben and I started getting our food ready (a healthy take on Sloppy Joes) for our 90's themed game night at Lindsay and Justin's house. I was just going to wear my Dan Marino jersey, but Ben wanted to wear Legends of the Hidden Temple T-shirts. We chose silver snakes and had Josh make them for us. I was kind of disappointed that no one knew what show that was once we got to the party. Oh well.
We headed over to West Side Oly with our food, tables, chairs and a thirst for competition. I was so ready to crush 90's trivia. We tried getting there early to get a good parking spot since we had the tables and chairs. Sure enough, we got there, I backed in and Ben and Justin unloaded the tables and chairs. Everyone who was coming, arrived donning their sports jerseys, flannel and 90's inspired colors. Most of us were kids in the 90's except for Del, Josh, Heather and Celeste. Del, Josh and Heather are already in their mid-40's, so they were the older kids in the 1990's and Celeste was born in the early 1990's, so she was a small child during that time.
We ate our 90's inspired food - Sloppy Joe sliders, taco salad with Fritos, bagel bites, pizza rolls, Fruit By the Foot and Chex Mix. None of us could find Surge but we joked around about it.
We played a very close game of 90's trivia that Nicole created and it made us remember some of the things we were into as kids. We played a game called Blockbuster, a statistic game and a game where you came up with a bad movie review. We had a great time! There was a lot of laughing, yelling and we were all very surprised we didn't wake the baby.
We cleaned up and thanked Lindsay and Justin for hosting. Ben and I got home, unloaded the Escape and got ready for bed. The next day would also be busy.
Sunday, January 22nd
A few months ago, I asked Erika what would be a good theme for Doug's birthday party? We pondered for a while, she threw out some ideas and it just hit me, SpongeBob. Erika thought that was a great idea and it would be easy to decorate for.
Over the next few weeks, I collected SpongeBob decorations from Walmart, The Dollar Store and thought of ideas for stuff I already had, like making seaweed with my green paper streamers. I had an idea of how I wanted the dining room to look. I asked Erika if she was willing to make SpongeBob cupcakes and she said she would.
We had a couple "setbacks" in January and as it got closer to his birthday, he told us that he didn't deserve a birthday party. I told him, I don't care what you say, everyone deserves a birthday party and you're going to get one anyway. He just scoffed. I asked Mom what I should make, and she said probably pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans. I could make that happen.
I purchased everything I needed the Friday before and got all of the decorations together. Erka purchased everything she needed to make cupcakes. I was actually really excited to see how they turned out. That morning, I got up and started cleaning and arranging the living room. We watched some crappy football and then started getting the food cooked. I got the decorations up; Ben brought in chairs and helped me finish decorating while we kept an eye on the food. I told Doug he couldn't come in the living room until everyone was there.
Everything got ready about the time everyone came through the door. Erika was extremely proud of her SpongeBob cupcakes. I actually thought they turned out pretty well! We got them on a platter and set them aside. We all dished up, ate and relaxed for a bit. Doug seemed to be enjoying his birthday party and thought the SpongeBob birthday theme was funny.
We put candles in his SpongeBob cupcake, sang and he blew up the candles. I got out the ice cream to go along with the cupcakes and dished everyone up. We chatted, ate and then Doug opened his birthday gifts. Mom replaced some of the stuff Jenn took when they broke up with her Amazon cards. Erika and Zac got him some weird random things and Grandma got him a shirt. It turned out to be a good birthday party.
The rest of the day we spent cleaning up, doing dishes, laundry and continued watching more crappy football. We finished getting ready for the upcoming work week.
Next Adventure: A Little Bit of Geocaching, Errands and Top Rung
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