Russell P. Knighton, Ph.D. (candidate)

So, it is official: I got my acceptance letter today. For those who don't know, I applied to the Ph.D program at the University of Maryland, so that is the letter I'm talking about. Ok, technically I got the financial aid portion of my acceptance letter, which wasn't really supposed to get to me until after the official acceptance letter, but it still let me know that I have been accepted. I'll be starting up in August and will be teaching while I go to school, so I'm pretty excited about that. I feel a pretty strong draw to the academic environment, so this should be a pretty good experience for me. Plus, the money that I get from that will be enough to pay for the child care that we'll be needing. We really have been blessed.

On a somewhat related note, we have now closed on the house, which means that the whole point of buying were we did in order to be closer to school was not in vain. We spent most of the day today over there cleaning up and getting the feeling that the place was actually ours. We also painted the boy's room a nice shade of blue, and Iain only leaned against a painted wall two or three times, so all in all we will consider it a success. Especially since we got the paint really cheap ($1 for the gallon). It was fun being able to paint our own place. We still have a lot of painting to do, but we feel good getting the one room pretty much done.

Oh, one more thing. I got my diploma today. It feels kind of funny to have the actual piece of paper, but I'm sure I'll get over it. I graduated suma cum laude, which makes me feel pretty good too. Of course, if you listen to Alisha, I'm not smart enough to have the 4.0, so there must be some mistake. :)