Josie has been away at Kidratee camp all week.  I've missed her.  It's been oddly quiet and dull around here.  This morning, Jay and I got up early and hit the road for Lake Koronis.  Beautiful country out that way.  Jay hadn't been there since he was a kid and his family used to go to the resorts out there.  When he was six or seven, he actually camped out on an island on the lake one night with some other kids who later on became kin: their sister married Jay's brother.

Anyway, it was cool, damp and grey when we left the house but we found the edge of the foggy damp and suddenly it was gorgeous.  By the time we got to the camp it was a perfect  summer day.

At the camp, the kids put on a show of their karatee routines.  They demonstrate their skills in forms set to music and it's very entertaining, but the most impressive part of the demonstration is the discipline that has obviously been instilled in each and every one of them by the head of the school; Karatee Man.

He has a name, but "Karatee Man" is like his super hero identity.

Karatee Man brooks no nonsense and the kids know it and act accordingly.  That alone is worth the price of the camp.

Josie earned her red belt this week and she and Meg were partners in their red belt routine.  They were very good.  Josie never looked as graceful or as sure of herself while she was taking dance as she does when doing her karatee routine.  As great as it is to flit about in a sequined tutu with a beaded head band, I guess it's even cooler to know that the moves you're performing could put a serious hurt on someone.

Josie slept half the way home.  I think she could sleep for the next three days.

After dinner, my sister and I planned on taking the kids down to the Bandstand for ice cream and a power trio.
FiveTen was bringing rock 'n roll back to the Lake!  Couldn't miss that!

We walked from Katie's house.  She lives less than a mile from the bandstand.  We had four kids, two walkie talkies and a fishing pole.

We couldn't bring a stroller for Molly, as it was locked in the garage and Mike had taken the key to a fantasy football draft party.  Molly, game little trooper that she is, said she was ready to walk.

Two blocks from the house, she turned to her Mom and said "My feet hurt, carry me."  Katie convinced her that she could make it the rest of the way, distracted her with a walkie talkie and sure enough, Molly made it to the lake.

At the bandstand, we immediately bought the kids ice cream at the concession stand.  Either the servers were completely stoned or had decided that tonight there would be no profit margin, because each of the single scoop cones the kids recieved had at least a half gallon of ice cream perched precariously atop the cones.

There were no complaints.

We wandered over to the benches to listen to the band. 

That was a better surprise than the ice cream.  They were really good.  FiveTen is a power trio; guitar, bass and drums.  They played Allman brothers and Hendrix; what Zack refers to as "Seventies guitar music" and laments that no one plays stuff like that anymore.  I was really sorry Zack didn't come with us, he would've loved it!

Jay joined us in the audience.  He had driven over in the convertible.  Now, Katie and I are a little too young to have been Hendrix fans.  I'm not sure if Katie was even born when he died.  I'm at least familiar with his stuff and I like it, but Jay is older than we are and he had older siblings.  And all of them were heavy into the music scene.  Jay grew up with a bunch of friends who were incredibly talented musicians, several of whom became professionals.  Most of them wanted to be Hendrix.  Jay knows  music.

Jay was very  impressed.  He thought all the renditions that Fiveten did were right on the money and the guitarist was one of the best he'd heard. 

We were going to tell them how good they were after the show and how much we enjoyed it.

Then Josie cught a fish.  You'd think this was good news.  After all, when you bring a fishing pole to the lake the idea is to actually catch something, isn't it?

Well, the catching was fine, that part was easy.  It's when someone said "What do we do with it Now?" that the trouble started.  None of the girls would touch it.  Finny was still eating his ice cream, so his hands were full.  I left the music to de-hook the fish, but I told them it was a one-off.

"You catch it, you get it off the hook." I said, as I wiped off my hands and returned to the concert.  Two minutes later, Molly came running exitedly over to tell us that this time Meg had caught a fish. 

Meg had caught a fish and immediately disowned it.  We sent word back to the kids to deal with it and turned our attention back to the show.

Ten minutes later, Meg brought the fishing pole (sans fish) over to us, dropped it on the ground and matter of factly said "I don't want to have anything to do with this." Then she vanished into the night like the Viet Cong.

Before we could even wonder what had caused Meg and Josie to retire from fishing so suddenly, Finny had a problem.  Sometimes large quantities of ice cream affect him in a not so  salubrious manner; it goes through him with a bang.

He'd just eaten the world's biggest ass cream cone.

Without going into the hideous details, let's just say that twenty minutes later, we weren't sure he had the energy to walk the eight blocks home.  Remember, this kid had just spent a week at camp having fun twenty four hours a day and hadn't had a good night's sleep in seven or eight days.

Katie asked Jay how many kids he could fit in the back of his sporty little saab.  I elbowed him in the ribs before he could yell "None with diarrhea!" and he graciously offered to drive some kids back to Katie's house.

That's when Molly, who had been dancing wildly for about an hour, dissolved all over her Mom.

Remember Hurricane Katrina?  It was kinda like that.

Jay looked at me and said "you walked here with them?  What were you thinking?"

What?  Josie and Meg were fine.  Now that the fish had stopped pestering them.

Molly perked right up when she found out she wouldn't have to walk all the way home.  There wasn't enough room for all of us and I wanted to walk anyway.  It's a gorgeous night.  Surprisingly, Finbar cowboyed up and said he'd rather walk, too.  So Jay took Meg, Josie and Molly back to Katie's; Katie, Finny and I walked, and after he dropped the kids, Jay went and got us some dinner at Famous Dave's.  I picked up Josie from Katie's, we drove home and ribs were waiting for us.

All in all, pretty much the perfect summer night!

I'm just sorry we didn't get to tell the guys in the band how much we enjoyed the ROCK SHOW AT THE BANDSTAND!!

 

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