Just a quick heads up for those of you who haven’t already gotten the news via Devon’s FB feed: as of this morning we are both theoretically and practically empty-nesters. As I mentioned when I dropped Jeremy off for college in Rolla a few weeks ago, we still had Andy home for a few more weeks. She’s entering her fourth year at Hampshire this fall, but had a summer job at SLAC. Which turned out to be not only an excellent real-world work experience, but probably put her in the best physical shape of her life. SLAC, you see, is about a 30-40 minute ride uphill each day, which she biked without complaint and without exception. The only downside was me having to deal with the trauma that, out of the blue, my daughter spent her summer doing machine learning.

But the job at SLAC is over, and classes start at Hampshire this week, so this morning we took her to SFO together and put her on a plane east. No, we didn’t even put her on the plane – not that such a thing is even possible post-9-11. We simply drove her to the curb, hauled her duffel out of the back of the car, gave her a kiss each, and hit the gas. (Okay, we might have high-fived each other down the on-ramp.)

Devon and I are headed back to the farm tomorrow after much too long away. Future posts will undoubtedly be much more goat/cow/chicken-centric. But we’ll keep you posted whatever happens next, I promise.