Two unrelated adventures

A while back, before school let out here, Little Guy ran across instructions in a book for how to "walk" the solar system. So we went to the corner and drew the sun, then paced off the requisite number of steps between each planet. It wasn't far to Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, but it was a good number of steps to Jupiter, and (as I recall) 242 between Saturn and Neptune. We marked each planet on the sidewalk in chalk:

The whole thing stretched nearly eight blocks. And yes, we included Pluto. Though last week I finished reading How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming, and now agree we really should have stopped at Neptune. (And yes, we know that Mars is the next-closest planet on the sunny side.) 

Tonight Little Guy and I went on an unrelated adventure: raspberry picking in the park.

We wandered the side trails for over an hour, and aside from startling some groundhogs (which have multiplied this year the way skunks did last year) we had no mishaps greater than scratched-up arms. We managed to find several pints worth of berries.

There was a lot of poison ivy around, so we washed ourselves down with rubbing alcohol when we got home. While doing that I remembered remember one of the most brilliant signs I've ever seen. It  was in a carefully-kept garden in a trendy area that abutted a less affluent neighborhood. It said simply, "Caution: Poison Ivy". Don'tcha know that this is the city, and NO ONE was jumping over that fence and trampling the flowers... because no one knew what poison ivy looked like, and they were terrified they'd catch it!

We had several pints of berries, and since they were a tad sour we cooked them up into a phenomenal sauce which we had over vanilla ice cream. Delectable.