Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I woke up this morning, having dreamt of cereal. I dreamt of Raisin Bran, Fruit Loops and Shredded Wheat. I'm telling you this because we don't own cereal. We have never owned cereal as a married couple (except the one time someone purchased us a box of shredded wheat while in Seattle). I wished that we had cereal this morning. On Monday morning, we discussed breakfast foods in my English writing class. As a culture, we have established rules for what passes as breakfast foods and what doesn't. You do not make or order a pizza for yourself in the morning, nor do you make a casserole. However, cold pizza has become a breakfast food, along with cereal, waffles, french toast, etc. Rebecca breaks some of these cultural rules. Instead of toast, we eat grilled cheese for breakfast. Instead of "sweets" for breakfast, she prefers crackers and strange combinations like french-toast-grilled-cheese-with-syrup. Why are cultural rules like this set up? They have no helpful purpose, in my mind.

Well, I got better this week from the cold I was fighting last week, but Rebecca got much worse. Monday morning I dared to go to class; I went with my class up to Rock Canyon park to install some Tibetan Prayer flags. I had previously previously attempted putting up some on my own, in order to evaluate what formally needed to be improved. This time, I wanted to see what my advanced studio class would come up with when presented with this concept. So the seven of us built our own poles and flags and went up to the mountain side to present our prayers to be carried by the wind. It was an interesting experience seeing what others thought about this idea. I filmed the project and you can review it here. I have since realized that the best presentation of my idea demands a dramatic increase of the number of flags in order to make this project work: to go from conceptual to real. I also liked the idea of having it relate to more than just one person, which would mean I could use more people to aide me in putting up a large number of flags. As a social project, the community could get involved.

In the afternoon, I felt lightheaded because I was still slightly sick and moving around too much, so I went home and missed my Modern Art theory class. Tuesday was much the same, except that I couldn't miss classes because I had papers due. But Rebecca started to catch the cold I had. By Wednesday morning, she was ill enough that we slept in and stayed home from school. It was a miserable day. Thursday night we tried to catch up on homework projects and Rebecca worked late in her computer lab while I digitized and edited some video projects.

Although she still wasn't feeling better on Friday, she went to school and I went to work and we tried to get as much done before the ward potluck dinner in the evening. Some of the projects I was doing at work were due by the end of the day, so I worked hard on them. The most difficult thing was making sure that nothing needed to change before I put in the animations on the activities. I think that the MTC development crew is used to making a great deal of changes on their activities in post-development. Unfortunately, in Flash that isn't a very good attitude to have; it takes just as long to alter things in a Flash activity as it would to do it right the first time. All day long I kept verifying with my superiors that nothing on my project needed to change, little by little as I developed it.

The ward potluck was okay, but our new friends from the ward didn't show up, so we tried making new friends. We left early, went back to campus and Rebecca tried to finish more homework. She wasn't successful: we needed to come back Saturday evening. But Saturday morning we woke up late and turned on General Conference. Elder Eyring and Elder Holland's talks were very good. I've included a paraphrased quote from Elder Eyring's talk that really struck me.

After the two Saturday sessions, Rebecca and I went over to her friend Cindy's house and we built some 10 foot cubes around trees. I've been playing with this idea in my head for some time, originally trying to develop a way to build cubes out of lightweight metals like titanium or aluminum. Over the past half year, I've decided it's more important to get out there and try building these cubes with other people than it is to find the answer to how to design an easier way to build them. In other words: my engineering skills aren't quite as good or as resourceful as they need to be.

So Rebecca filmed Cindy, Cindy's friend Justin, and me building these cubes around some trees in a park. When I post the video, I'll talk more about the ideas behind it, but it looked really good to have these 10 foot PVC cubes enclosed around some trees. Hope you all have a good week.
love,
Wayne and Rebecca

A week ago, my advanced studio class went with me up Rock Canyon park and we installed some prayer flags on the mountain side. I have been interested in Buddhist and Hindu religions for a long time; I have read many Vedas in trying to understand Eastern Philosophy and religion. One of the things which interests me is the connection between Tibetan religious life and so-called "Mormon" religious belief. I wanted to investigate connections beyond those of geographical local.

As a class, my teacher wanted us to propose and execute an "art adventure" with the class; we were to lead our class in something that would help us think about art. I have been thinking about these prayer flags for some time, except that Rebecca keeps telling me that it needs more thought. I was grateful for the chance to execute it with other people in order to explore some of the more formal and theoretical aspects of this idea in an academic setting.

Academics aside, I have studied Tibetan prayer flags and, like my brother, I am trying to explore orthopratic versus orthodotic sources and their relationship to the culture and theology of the culture. Tibetan flags have sources which reach back to pre-Buddhist (Hindu and Bonpo) philosophies and healing shamans. How and why has this custom become so important to Tibetan Buddhists over the millenia?

This video shows the seven of us putting up our personal prayers and then talking about it. I have since decided that I want to do this project on a massive scale involving as many from the community as I can. This project is about defining what our community understands as prosperity.

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Some older footage of us trying to get our cat to jump for the video camera. We filmed this back in February of '05. Just got around to putting it online.

The video file is about 10 MB. It will stream for you.

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I have spent the past 8 months working on this idea. Originally, I was trying to engineer a way for building a 10 foot cube (or larger) out of lightweight material that could be quickly set up and quickly taken apart. PVC pipes don't really fit either of those qualifications, but they are cheaper than titanium and they stand out better against the shapes and colors of nature. Plus, we are able to have friends come help build these boxes and interact more with the community.

We got our friend Cindy to help us and she brought along a great tree climber, Justin. Both of them gave immeasurable help and we couldn't thank them enough. This coming weekend, we hope to employ Karl and Angela's help in building more of these in different locations.

I've been trying to give myself a way to express my ideas outside of a gallery setting. After having been rejected repeatedly from one of the worst gallery spaces I know of, I began to think about conceptual systems which "box in" norms and develop cultural standards. Social systems have been an important part of my work. Formally, I wanted to see the idea of sculpture break through a centralized mass and into a virtual and dynamic space, moving, breathing, growing, and continually in flux. I really enjoy land art for its temporal qualities and I wanted to not only create a temporary (it was only up for 15 minutes!) "sculpture", but beyond that, a "sculpture" where the 3 dimensional space in and through the boundaries was the sculpture and the created form disappeared as only a frame to the conceptual space.

Is this social art? Not as interactive or social as I want this project to become, but this is a good start for now. We plan on escalating our plans as time goes by. The important thing is that we finally were able to get out there and build a couple cubes. From here, things will only get more complicated.

I'm sorry that the quality of the video is so poor, we had to condense it for the web. The audio is also rather quiet, so turn up the volume on your speakers.

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Second stage of working on these four pieces. I am still struggling with spacial relationships. I'm happier with the latest one I started and the balance between "media saturation" and visual narrative. Need to start putting these in shows and see reactions to them. You might want to visit here to see what these paintings used to look like a month ago.

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Normal, normal. It was a pretty normal week. I got my big project done for my NLP class (the one I am also the TA for) late Monday night, which counts as 2 days late. Most people turned it in 2-3 days late. But we get 5 free late days to use as we wish, so it doesn't affect the grade for the project. I'm just glad I was able to finish. :)

And so Tuesday I had trouble focusing on the next thing I was supposed to be working on, and instead decided to declare it a "no homework day" in order to celebrate. So we hung out and helped our upstairs neighbors with their drain problem and did exactly no homework all night. Yay. It was a nice break. Of course, I'm paying for that now by having a couple of busy days planned for Monday and Tuesday this week. Sigh. Some day I'll be done with homework, right? :)

I'll let Wayne talk about Wednesday. He went with one of his art classes to the Museum of Art's secret hiding place, or vault, where they keep expensive pieces of art that no one is allowed to breathe on.

[I held an Andy Warhol lithograph. How many people can claim that? Monday morning we were supposed to go on another "art adventure" with my advanced studio class, but since the student planning it hadn't really planned ahead, we pushed back the trip to Wednesday. On Wednesday, we went for a tour of the vaults in the BYU Museum of Art. It was interesting to see how they store stuff and how much of their collection is based on stuff either by or donated from Mahonri Young's work. He had collected a few Rembrandt etchings and other notable works. But the best part of our tour was talking with the museum staff about acquisitions and how things work on that end. The MOA has a nice amount of money it can spend, but most of the work is donated from wealthy families. The museum has 10 Andy Warhol lithographs of Marilyn which I was able to just hold (it was so cool!) and I got an up close personal look at some Norman Rockwells, the entire collection of C.C.A. Christensen's work and some other gems. It was nice because it's the first time I've actually got to TOUCH important work as opposed to just being able to see it in person. It was a great experience. I'm in awe. -Wayne]

Saturday we did another art project with boxes in a park near our house. Karl and Angela helped us this time, which was fun. I think we're learning more about how best to construct these cubes, so it's a good learning experience. And we're having fun in the process. It looks really good when we get the cubes up, and I think it would look even more interesting to have more cubes and cubes of different sizes; Angela even suggested stacking cubes on top of each other, which would be another fun variation.

And I've decided that I can't plan on doing homework on Saturdays anymore. It just doesn't happen. I try and get homework in, but between errands and cleaning and other projects, I never get enough time to do all the homework I plan on doing. Unfortunately, I didn't learn this lesson early enough to apply it to this past Saturday, and we were up until 1 or 2 in the morning trying to get as much done as I could.

The late night made us pretty sleepy today, enough so that Wayne didn't really know what hit him when we met with a member of the Bishopric this morning and got callings finally. He'll know by next week for sure! :) Wayne gets to teach Sunday School again to the youth...this time to the 14-17 year olds (few enough youth that they only have two classes). And I'll be serving as the second counselor in the Young Women's presidency. Scary huh? Any advice/ideas to pass along? The last time I was in young women's was when I *was* a young woman, so I'm not sure what to expect from the other side of things. Should be a fun adventure though! (I thought it was funny...the first question the young women asked me was: how old are you? They didn't think I looked old enough to be a leader! Hehehe. They also thought it was neat that we got married "back east.")

We saw War of the Worlds this weekend too. But we actually enjoyed it. Not one we want to own, per se, but worth seeing in the dollar theater. :) It sparked an interesting conversation about aliens and the book the movie is based on, at least, and was a fun ride. A few plot holes, but it just gave us more to talk about. :)

Anyway, hope you all have a fun week ahead of you, hopefully less busy than ours will be!

Loves,
Becca and Wayne

Last year, a professor led a discussion in one of my advanced studio classes about student "placement" rates. Most colleges try to collect data about post-graduation placement and alumni involvement with their degrees. In the visual arts program, it is a bit difficult to determine an actual "placement," since degrees don't lead to traditional jobs. Yet there is an even more disturbing track record for visual arts graduates than most other degrees. It turns out that after 5-10 years, only 5% of BFA graduates are still doing art. Not just that 95% of students aren't doing art on a regular basis, but aren't even making art at all. Only 5% are still making any amount of art.

Females have a lower percent of continuing in the arts than males. This difference between whether a man or a woman goes on to do something with their degree in the arts is staggering. The high concentration of women in my art classes also shows a horrible trend in these numbers; there are on average 7 out of 10 students are females in my classes. With the large proportions of women in my classes and the dramatically small amount of women involved professionally in the arts, most of my classmates don't have a good probability of continuing to do art later in life.

So this week, during midsemester group reviews, another professor brought these statistics up. He also pointed out that 50% of people who graduate with their MFAs (literally an average of $50,000 for their graduate level education) don't continue on to do more art. With that in mind, he continued with the group critique. This left me, all week long, thinking about the relevancy of my classmates' opinions and comments.

5% is a very small number, especially when dealing with an already small population (my classes are usually no larger than 15 students). I've already thought about the personal consequences of these numbers. As a male art student, I have a much higher probability of continuing with professional art. But probabilities mean nothing on a personal level. As a person, I am 27 years old, doing art more vigoriously than I ever have in the past. Most students, by my age, have either decided to continue on with art or to move on to some other career choice.

I tried not to let this affect my attitude. I wanted to get the most out of the comments in my group critiques as well as the group projects we have to work on in my sculpture class. But the impact of these thoughts has left me skeptical about the environment I'm in.

Yet, this train of thought led me to understand better the philosophy behind very competitive/limited art school admissions. Some of the better schools have very competitive admissions, only admitting 6 students a year to their programs. I think this is a weeding process, trying to restrict entrance to only those who are dedicated enough to make something out of their education. I'm not saying that this philosophy is effective in its aims, but the idea is still (possibly) there.

As this idea was mulling around my head, I thought that maybe I should be more selective about which schools I should enter. Instead of agreeing to go to a second choice school, I could take a residency for a year and spend my time with professionals who are committed to their art and serious about the art community. So we started looking into art residencies.

Most of them are fairly isolated geographically (we could do an art residency in Yosemite National Park!) and vary widely in every possible aspect of the residency: housing, time spent, cost, etc. We might end up doing a residency for a while next year if I don't get into the schools I'm aiming for.

This week we also spent some time looking at digital cameras. Having to document my artwork has been a tricky business for many years. Sadly, the art world is still interested principally in slides and refutes those of us who want to document our work digitally. Yet, the more contemporary art circles (land art, video art, performance and installations) are starting to prefer more dynamic methods of documentation like video. Since slides are still an integral part of showing my work, we've started considering other alternatives that might make sense. Digital cameras are still very expensive and we'd need to get a fancy one (a non-point-and-click camera) in order to get the best color and focus (for conversion to good old fashioned 35-mm slides). For the time being, I'm borrowing a friend's digital camcorder (thanks a million Dave!) and that should suffice our needs for video (digital is easier to edit and higher quality than our Hi-8 camcorder). But even though we've really appreciated Aunt Sharla lending us her digital camera for all this time, we know that someday we need to give it back to her (so she has to learn to use it! :) ). Ah, if only they didn't cost $500.

Rebecca had her first mutual activity this week. She mostly just had a presidency meeting and was introduced to the girls. The previous presidency was still in charge of this activity but the new presidency got to know the girls a bit and are anxious to do some fun activities soon.

We've both got midterms this week and will be very busy. Our annual trip to Oregon is coming up and I've been thinking a great deal about that. It's been five years since my close friend McKell died on the coast and the impact that's he had on my life is immeasurable. I always look forward to this "pilgrimage" with deep humility.

We hope you all have a great week, lots of love,
Wayne and Rebecca

Today in my senior college level english class, my professor wrote some important movies up on the board. Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dr. Strangelove, etc. When he wrote Dr. Strangelove up on the board, some of the people in the class childishly giggled. He then asked who had seen the film. Out of the entire class, I was the only one.

Brilliant thought provoking films like Dr. Strangelove are considered classics, but aren't passed down to a youth obsessed culture. Instead of critiquing our culture, we are fused to it. How saddening to think that movies like Titanic (of which I saw four years after it's release and after very confused, self-deprecating girlfriend coaxed me into seeing it once) are the widest seen/funded icons of contemporary life and intelligent gems aren't passed around for the experience of all.

Have you seen it?

Falafel
-------
1 15 oz. can of garbanzo beans, drained
1/2 cup onion, chopped
1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1 TBS fresh parsley, chopped
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp groun coriander
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp ground red pepper
2 cloves garlic, minced

Tahini sauce
------------
1/2 cup parsley, chopped
1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup tahini (if you don't know what this is, ask us!)
2 tsp honey
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tsp salt
black pepper

You also need
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2 tsp olive oil
4 pitas (i think that the six-inch variety is nice)
lettuce

First make the falafel. Put all the ingredients into a food processor and blend until smooth. Make 3 inch patties out of the mixture (it should make about eight of them). Put 2 teaspoons of olive oil into a pan and fry up the patties. They won't completely solidify, but you need to keep them together. Fry them until they're browned.

Next, put the tahini sauce ingredients into the food processor and run until very smooth.

Now it's time to put the sandwiches together. Warm up the pita (about 30 seconds a piece in the microwave should be just right) until they bend really well, so you can roll them. Put two falafel patties on each pita, covering with about 2 TBS of tahini sauce. Then cover with lettuce (however much you want). Roll the sandwich up and enjoy!

I just found THE most amazing program, brought to you by the makers of Firefox.

Sure, firefox replaced Internet Explorer for me pretty quickly. It was a much better designed program with better security features. But the developers at Mozilla are at it again and they just release a SUPER-BETA new browser called Flock!.

It's got dead ends everywhere (so they disclaim on their site), but I haven't found any. I don't recommend anyone go get it now, because there are a lot of features they are improving, but if you're the type of person like me (freak) who likes new things and wants to give feedback on things they could improve, then maybe you should try it out.

Update: for example, although they have a great weblog publisher which is going to revolutionize the way we blog to websites, making it simpler and more user friendly, it lacks the ability to add categories to a post. we'll see if they improve on that, eh? oh and they also add in technorati tags...whatever those are for.

Technorati Tags: art

Whew. I'm amazed at what we were able to fit into our lives this week given that Wayne had three midterms and I had a midterm and a project that took 30 hours of my time (on top of normal homework and other projects and research of course--I wrote an outline for my new thesis proposal so I'm starting to get somewhere there).

Yesterday we went up to Rock Canyon with one of Wayne's friends and Karl and Angela to install some "prayer flags." I believe we had over 40 (probably 44?) 6-8 foot poles (dead branches we found in the park near our house) with Target bags tied to the tops of them as the flag. We hiked up a fairly steep cliff, hoping not to slip down, and used rocks to help set up these flags. It actually went much more quickly than I expected, but Wayne wants to try it again and tweak some of the visual elements of the project. Like, instead of putting all the flags in a clump, maybe put them in a line along a trail or something. We'll see. Now we have all the branches (I think it took longer to collect and find the poles than it did to put them up!) so we can do it again. Read about what the idea is behind the prayer flags here.

We also came to the conclusion after some more research on digital cameras and converting digital images to slide format that digital cameras just aren't yet "good enough" for that. From what we've read, in order to get the same clarity and quality in a slide made from a digital image as from old-fashioned film, we would need a 10-11 MP camera. Even the thousand dollar camera we looked at was "only" 8 MP. And we can't even afford that. So for now, we'll try taking our own slides from film using my film camera. Hopefully we'll be able to take nice enough quality ones ourselves. [I used to be really confident of taking my own slides of my art work until I had a really bad stretch when I took over three rolls of slide film and all of it was ruined by over or underexposure. Ever since then I've been really gun shy to get back into taking my own slides. - Wayne]

Again I did no homework on Saturday, between the prayer flags, the temple, dropping paintings off at the Springville Art Museum to try and get into a show there, and going to see Wallace and Gromit. But we had fun! Which I think we needed after surviving the week. Wallace and Gromit was sooo fun. It makes our official list of "movies we want to own someday." Which is a pretty short list, so that says a lot. :)

I also saw a couple of friends on Saturday for wedding dress shopping. One of my former roommates while I was doing my undergrad at BYU is getting married, and came out to visit family and make plans, so Christy came down from Idaho and I made it to the mall to visit as well. It was fun to hang out with Angela and Christy - I only wish I had longer to spend!

The rest of the week was full of homework and exams and projects and work. Oh here's a funny tidbit...Wayne got a 24 cent raise at work (yay for him!) and he now makes more per hour than I do. Hehehe. Silly CS department. On Tuesday I went to the stake youth standards night, where they fed us and talked about Joseph Smith. Seems to be the theme for the whole year. :)

Star has been nothing but trouble this week too. I think it's because we've been gone so much that she thinks she can get away with jumping on tables and climbing inside our box springs. Wayne talked with his Psych class on how we might be able to positively reinforce proper behavior. It's a tricky thing...how do we give her positive reinformcement [or positive punishment?] for *not* going under the bed? So maybe we'll try out some of their ideas.

Anyway, that's all folks. Hope you all have a fun week. And our letter next week will be late, since we'll be driving back from Oregon next Sunday. Loves to all!

Becca and Wayne

ps. go see pictures of some of our recent work at karl and angela's site.

We had some requests to show what our cat looks like now, since she's grown since the last video and pictures we've taken. I guess here's a photo of us just doing what we normally do on a weekend with the cat. Pay close attention to her falling off the bookshelves. That makes me laugh every time I see it!

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Here is the second installation video of my continuing frames project. This installation was built in riverside park in Provo, Utah with the help of Karl and Angela Rees. It was a tricky build, because the trees we chose to use had small branch spans and weren't old enough to support much weight. It was a delicate balancing act to get the cubes up. There weren't very many options at this park.

Again, we filmed it and posted some pictures. The cubes were built facing the parking lot, but we didn't have anyone come up and talk to us about the project like we did last time. I have been scouting out new project locations, and I think my next spot might be on the river, giving it a more dynamic internal space to relate to the frame.

I almost fell out of the tree, once. The pictures are from this installation space and also look at the pictures that Karl and Angela took.

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Again, I tried to go up Rock Canyon and install some prayer flags. This time I made them more coherent, all using the Target Stores' standard shopping bag. I also thought that, with the increase in number of flags, there would be a stronger presence. Although they looked great in person, while standing inside the installation, as seen from a distance, they looked small and insignificant.

I've decided two possible reasons for this problem. On the one hand, putting an installation on a mountain side is a dangerous business because the mountain is so large. It engulfs the installation. There is too much space. On the other hand, I think that spacing the flags out in a chaotic pattern dissolves some of the coherency they could have. I believe that I might try installing this work by a body of water on a rocky beach and see how it looks; or it might look better if I give up the chaotic arrangement and line them up.

Lastly, there wasn't much wind. Although I thought this wouldn't be a problem, it was. Without the wind, the flags looked impotent and didn't stand out as flags. They looked like trash.

This could possibly be overly critical, but I'm just trying to get this project to work, visually. I enjoyed installing it and am especially thankful to Mike, Rebecca, Karl and Angela who helped put it up. We'll see how things improve in the future. Check out the video or look at Karl and Angela's pictures.

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Going to Florence, OR this weekend. Be back by Monday. I plan on doing art while we're there.

30 OCTOBER - 28 DECEMBER 20th ANNUAL SPIRITUAL & RELIGIOUS ART OF UTAH (All main floor except HD gallery)

Special Exhibition

I was juried into the 20th Annual Springville spiritual exhibition. On their website, they have this picture displaying my piece. Hopefully this means I can now officially ask for shows; Springville Art Museum has a policy only to do shows for artists that have been admitted into their juried shows. This is a good step for me.

Update: The Deseret News ran an article on the show on November 20th, 2005 in the Arts section. The editors highlighted one of my pieces in a photograph representing the show along with Jaqui Larson and others.

I was juried into the 20th Annual Springville Art Museum Spiritual Exhibition. My triptych, Crucifixion, will be up from October 30th to 28th of December.

Oh man. I picked up this book because I kept seeing it in every bookstore on the front table in the youth fiction. Of every store. And since there have been something like four sequels to the book, I was intrigued. I couldn't make out what, if anything, the book was about besides that it had something to do with fantasy in some way or another and had connections to the "who-done-it" genre books. So I was interested and we picked it up.

Granted, we didn't read the book so much as listen to it. Books on mp3 are a great way to go for long car rides. But let's pretend I actually read the book and not talk so much about delivery of the book.

The story follows Artemis Fowl, a 12-year-old criminal mastermind as he attempts to steal a fortune from leprechauns. An interesting plot devised from an author who I can only assume is Irish himself, with all the explanations of how Ireland is the center of the universe. But let's talk about the book. It was good, I'll give it that. Being a crime story, you always have to be asking yourself how each party is going to get out of their situation and what tricks they've got up their sleeves. This book does a great job of leading you along to try to guess what this so-called boy genius has prepared.

But there's one big problem. There wasn't any hero in this book. Everyone was amoral and there wasn't anyone you actually cared about. From the start of the book, I didn't hold any admiration for the titular character and his band of criminals. The fairy folk, or the "people" as they're called, are just as amoral as the criminals trying to steal from them and it makes for a story that is interesting, but lacking in concern for the characters.

It was fun and very modern (compared to most fantasy books), but the technologies used in this book will be very outdated in less than ten years. Despite liking crime stories like this, I have to admit that if I had something better to do, I might just have put this book down and never picked it up again.

I don't know how to begin this entry. Or how to end it. Or what belongs in the middle.

This weekend, Rebecca and I drove up to Florence Oregon to spend the weekend on the coast, reflecting. Rebecca's grandmother passed away on the 28th, the same day that five years earlier my friend Mckell died. Usually this trip is refreshing; I enjoy the smell of the coast and the beauty of it refreshes my senses. This time drained me and there were several times when I just wanted him back in my life.

The drive was mostly uneventful. After a busy week of school, we left Thursday afternoon and drove all night long. At 8am, we pulled into Florence and went straight to the south jetty, watching the sun rise over the lower clouds and the turbulent waves. It has been really pleasant to come to Oregon with Rebecca; she makes this experience more bearable/enjoyable.

We talked a great deal with the Brockbanks and the Woodards. We drove all Sunday long to come back to Utah and had a hard time waking up this morning. Rebecca's arms are still sore from going rock climbing with the young women last week, but we're trying to get back into "normal life."

Just a last FYI, I was accepted into the Springville Art Museum bi-annual art show. This is good news because now I can do other shows there.

Take care of yourselves,
Wayne and Rebecca