The allure of the raspberries took Aidan and I outdoors yesterday...

The cool, stiff breeze made the porch inviting and Aidan read another chapter of Harry Potter to me.

Wendy took advantage of some of the great local produce, and put together her veggie layered lasagna complete with her first batch of goat cheese mozzarella.

After soccer practice Aidan and I remembered to record July's progress on the piece he is practicing for his eventual auditions. This is Month 2 of the possible 30 months this will take to fully conquer. You already know he likes a challenge.




Today...

At 10:30 a.m. I am at my desk uploading some pictures to my laptop to begin a session of writing. Aidan has awakened and is knocking on my door. He has sleep in his blue eyes and sits on the edge of my bed. I am in the one chair in the room.

"I thought of something we can do," he says. "We could go get some strawberries and chocolate chips  and make chocolate dipped strawberries. Do you want to?"

My thoughts review this. Shall I set aside time I'd planned hours earlier? His sleepy eyes win me over as I think about how much fun it is to wake up with an idea and jump into the day with it.

"Yes, we could run down to the Landis (local supermarket) for supplies. Check with your mom and see what she says since she is heading out on her errands very soon. I'll finish loading pictures here while you do that."

He is back in seconds. "Yeah, she says it's fine. But we have to go soon because the last of Nate's hay is coming and she needs us here."

We look up a Food Channel recipe. We only need a couple of ingredients and instructions are simple.

For a few short minutes we are distracted while we try to access his text messages. (His precious iPad is dead. I am almost as grieved as he is with the loss. It is his second one after the first disaster when that one fell from his music stand and slowly went to pieces over weeks--eventually replaced. This one had a similar slow death by cracked screen when without its case it was broken in his mother's purse during a long car ride. Now very reformed and conscientious about keeping it protected he must still go without until some later date when negotiations with parents has yielded a path to a new one. In the meantime, he gets very limited use of his mother's MacBook Air.)

Shopping is swift and we devour a doughnut apiece. Landis makes good pastries, pies and cakes. We return home and his mom is already gone. We text her so she knows we are watching out for the hay.

Well it all turns out OK. The chocolating endeavor is a success though the warm weather keeps the chocolate a little gooey. The hay comes as expected and I find out Nate won the election with plenty to spare having garnered substantial Democratic support besides his own Republicans.

Keoni has been busy in D.C.

NSO Summer Music Institute Orchestra-Strauss' "Don Juan" & Sibelius's Symphony No. 2

We enjoyed watching his quartet and, also, the July 7th solo. Some of his friends (some as far away as Tucson) have gone to the same SMI along with him.We follow him on Facebook and texting as well. I think he's talked to his mom a time or two. We've grown used to him going somewhere in the summers, but this time I miss him more; perhaps, because I know he'll be off to Georgia next month.

This morning during the time of chocolate I needed some white vinegar for my laundering in the wash machine. The machine needs a small dose each load or stinky molds grow somewhere in the drain system and waft over the porch outside. The vinegar keeps it down. But, the gallon jug was empty, and the toilet paper in the "powder room" next to the washer and dryer ran out. The supplies are down the rickety, inhospitable basement stairs.

Me to Aidan, "Please, would you fetch a gallon of vinegar and three rolls of toilet paper from the basement?"

The stairs rumble and I hear Aidan below, "The toilet paper is packaged. Throw me a scissors."

I take careful aim wondering at my sanity; then, ever so gently lob the scissors handles first toward the bottom step where it lands and bounces to the still rain-wet floor. Success! Nothing is impaled.

Aidan quickly has three toilet paper rolls in hand.  "Catch!" he says, and tosses them up to me one at a time and I catch them all. Holding a gallon of vinegar he bounds up the stairs, two at a time.

...............

This evening another trip to the park for some basketball. It was a short stay--not his forté. A couple evenings ago he wanted to figure out how fast he could run. Using my iPhone feature I clocked him over the 30 yard course he'd measured off. Later we sat at the kitchen table and turned the data into MPH--18 MPH from a standing start, 22 MPH from a running start.