Happy Thing #1:

Yea! Shawn got in!

See, originally UCR had turned down his application. We were confused -- even more so when we got the letter saying that the reason he'd been rejected was because he didn't have enough transferrable units.

Excuse me?

Turns out the problem was that he had so many transferrable units that he had to add an extra page to the application to list his classes -- and they kind of forgot to count the entire page.

So he went down yesterday and pointed out their mistake, they re-evaluated his application, and reversed their decision.

Yay!
(The first spelling looks more literary, but the more informal "yay" looks more like actually cheering. Any preferences?)

And, as an added bonus, this means that, as of September 22, we'll both have health insurance again!

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Happy Thing #2:

While watering the garden this morning, I discovered that we have over a dozen new baby trees in our front yard! Measured against the one that was dead when we got here and the two that died last year, this makes me very happy. We've already got four sturdy saplings growing along the fenceline that Shawn has said he'll transplant this year, so our private forestation is looking pretty good.

Shawn expressed some concern about how many trees our yards can actually hold, and he's right -- considering how big pines can get, I think we can probably comfortably fit in five or six of them, including the fence-line saplings. The rest, I'll incubate until they're big and healthy enough to transplant to the wild once the drought ends (however long that takes.)

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Happy Thing #3:

Aaron the Blog Pirate is having another free screening of his movie, "The Yellow Sign," tomorrow (Wednesday) night. (At least it's a little more advance notice than the last one.) Interested? Check out the details.

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QotD

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson