This weekend, Kid Number One graduated with great honors (summa cum laude, if I might have a moment of vicarious pride here) from WVU and has set about her job search with increased ferocity. I don’t know all the parameters, but she’s at least trying to stay somewhat close to home base. Kid Number Two, meanwhile, moved into her very first apartment. After a year of dorm life, she and a friend have taken an apartment in Morgantown. She’s actually subletting until their lease starts at the end of summer, but she was itching to get started. Eighteen-year-old me totally gets it, but old man me has to chuckle that she chose to pay rent instead of lounging and mooching here at the farm. She’ll come to see the error of her ways, I’m sure. I mean, it’ll be years from now, but whatever. She spent a week or so here with us, and maybe that was enough.

The chicken run is nearing completion, so the ladies will soon have more space overnight. They’re spending their days roaming the yard and garden, happily munching on bugs and various green matter, oh, and shitting everywhere.Everywhere.  I appreciate the fertilizer, ladies, but I’m not sure we need it on the porch. We had a wild turkey mistake the chickens for birds of a feather and land in the yard near where they were pecking and scratching. The error was quickly noted and the turkey quickly made its way into the tree line. I am here to report its avian flub, however. It’s what I do.

Asparagus harvesting continues apace, but I think we are nearing the point of surrender, and we’ll let the plants go wild very soon. I’m considering pickling a few jars of the purple spears, too.

We are now fully greened here, and that wonder of the brain has occurred again: I can’t really remember what it looked like when all the trees were bare. Weird, that.

“Anyway, like I was sayin’, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. There’s uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that’s about it.”

Well, that’s about where we are with asparagus right now. The house came with an established asparagus bed, and friends, it is bountiful. As with everything else around here, we are relying on a combination of local knowledge (Dr. Evil’s folks) and the internet to figure how to harvest the asparagus. Internet says to harvest every other day until the crop runs out, and we attempted that at first, but now we find ourselves harvesting daily. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine problem to have, but holy smokes.

We also got our garden in this week. It was a bit late, but I blame Amazon and their nebulous idea of what 2-Day Shipping really means. The chickens are fully grown now, and quite amusing, I might add. Kid Number Two, having finished her first year of college (!!), is visiting us for a while and enjoys running around like an idiot to make the chickens run behind her. Maybe after a couple more years of higher education she’ll be a leader of men, but for now, she’s a fine leader of hen(s).

We’ve spent a small fortune on material to built an enclosed chicken run, and at this point even I am sick of my “these are some expensive eggs” jokes, but as Dr. Evil’s Pop frames it, it’s not about saving money. Which is good, because we’re not.

And the verdict was: two spaces after the period is better.  It makes reading slightly easier.  Congratulations, Yale University professor Nicholas A. Christakis.  Sorry, Lifehacker.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/04/one-space-between-each-sentence-they-said-science-just-proved-them-wrong-2/