This, that, and the next thing — all absurd.

Until someone uses it, I forget that “absurd” is one of my most favorite words. It’s so perfectly descriptive. (I like most words quite a lot, so it is minorly deceptive of me to be declaring a most favorite.)

Absurd. Like seven medicine dosing cups in the dirty dishes — and that’s not even at the apex of allergy season. Absurd like the feeder calves across the way out the front window being so content that they don’t even stand up to take a poop. Absurd like having literally 93 synonyms and similar words for “perception” and not a single one of them being the word I want.

Meanwhile, I have done an absurd eleven loads of laundry without folding any of it. That’s because my workload has been absurdly absurd. It’s a good problem to have — genuinely excellent. Because when school lets out — absurdly, in a mere 12 days — my ability to get to finish lines is, ah, shall we say, a bit limited. But I must fold some laundry … as I sit here typing and not folding laundry, and in fact generating more to fold while I type.

It’s probably safe to say that whatever remains in the kids’ drawers is there to provide the opportunity to do a streamlined seasonal clothing swap and throw away outgrown underwear.

Some areas close to us have had some nice little rains over the last few days. I see north of Pleasanton got a little over two inches, their best rain in a year. I’m watering the lawn like it’s going out of style, and that is allowing me to observe some overtly flirtatious behavior among the avian population.

One of the birds (not engaged in mating rituals because it probably already is feeding babies) is a particular robin. This robin also is a bit absurd plus there’s coincidence involved. Nebraskaland Magazine shared a photo recently of a partially leucistic, or piebald, American robin in early April. Sure enough, today I had a partially leucistic robin in my yard. I’ve seen her before but didn’t really think anything of it. But now I own a new word for it.

Birds aside, I am at best a poor gardener and groundskeeper, a situation not helped by a healthy and robust kochia population for the last 20-plus years and a (purchased) mulch bale for the garden that brought in bindweed three or four years ago. Remind me to mulch with only shredded paper in the future. Grr.

But when it comes to dandelions, I’m fighting the good fight. Almost every time I go outside to move the sprinkler or to hang jeans on the clothesline or go to the Suburban for whatever reason, I’ve got the dandelion knife in hand.

I love the book Dandelions, by the inimitable Eve Bunting, but dandelions in actuality are really bad. We have a neighbor to one of the fields Jeremy farms who for years didn’t control dandelions, and they invaded the field to the point that he had to do some pretty intensive control — only to watch them come back the next year because the neighbor wasn’t controlling.

The appearance on that neighboring property of three miniature horses and six dogs, one of which is creepily part wolf, and a four-band horse poly tape hot fence around the entire thing (and a shock collar on the wolf) — that solved that particular dandelion problem. But I still fight them here at home, despite their cheery hardiness.

Meanwhile-meanwhile, did I mention our absurd schedule aside from my own absurd workload? End-of-year things have overtaken all people in education, from parents and siblings to the superintendent and board. All of us. So tonight while Jeremy plants corn (at long last!), we are off to an academic honors banquet.

And I’m not sad about any of it.