Michelle, those kinds of one-on-one parent/child trips are so precious, and formative. He'll remember that the rest of this life.

I also slow down during the summer; usually the lawn is dormant during the dry and heat, but not this year. The weather was in the high-80s for the last week, not bad (all things considered).

I like cities in measured doses also. The thing about where I live, something my next door neighbor and I were talking about this afternoon as we leaned on our rakes in the very back of his yard, overlooking the creek, was how our neighborhood doesn't feel like a city. Though we're very close to two Interstate highways, this area is a creek bottom and there is an extensive greenbelt running through the area. Our yards have some of those woods and the creek, and it feels like we're out in the county, not in a city of a half-million people. We were talking back there because I had just finished with the loppers, pruning a pathway for myself along the top of the bluff over the creek. He was still dragging downed limbs from the yard out to the curb; I had finally finished moving my stack. We have enough room to let this stuff pile up for a while and still have plenty of space for everything else, but a stack in place for too long is going to become a habitat for mice and snakes, and the dogs won't leave either of them alone. I like the wildlife here, but try to keep most of it out of the yard so the dogs don't hunt them.

Large pile at the curb, tired feet on me. I've entered my foods into My Fitness Pal and though I don't have my fitness tracker right now (waiting for replacement with the next model), I can tell I had quite a workout. No knowing how many steps, but I probably would have hit 100% by mid-afternoon.