Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Karl and Angela had a Cinco de Mayo party up in the canyon at a park. We had a mexican picnic and beat open a pinata. It got a bit cold, so we tried making a fire. And lit the pinata on fire.

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This was the first week of our last term here at BYU. Rebecca is still plugging away at her thesis and her advisor is making her set some good goals so she can get this done in time. Hopefully there will be a light at the end of the tunnel soon. But all my classes this week were brief. One bad thing about spring term is that some teachers feel the need to cram twice as much in because the term is shorter. So my Biology GE class will be a drag, but the rest of my classes will be a nice breeze through spring term, then I'm done.

Monday evening, we hadn't started school yet, so we drove up to Salt Lake city to spend the evening with Karl and Angela and Rebecca's aunt Sharla. We ate dinner and played games until late. It was fun and we found that fluxx was a bit trickier to learn in one sitting. Tuesday morning was nice because I spent the whole morning painting while Rebecca worked on her thesis. Rebecca had a good phone interview with another job.

We had a Cinco de Mayo party up in the canyon. You can see the pictures somewhere else on this webpage, like right here might work. Good food and fun, until someone got hurt. Poor kids.

Unfortunately, there really isn't much to do in Utah unless you like hiking, which we might. I was sore on Saturday from running around with some friends, so we bummed around doing nothing. I seem to remember that two summers ago when we were stranded here in Utah for the summer, we didn't do anything either besides sit out on our back balcony and listen to kids play and the river flowing and reading lots of books. Time for book suggestions; got any?

I'm not exactly sure what we did this week...I'll be honest. But stuff, definitely stuff. :)

I know somewhere in there I checked out a couple of bags full of library books, and made progress on my thesis. I'm getting so close to being able to just run all my experiments and conduct the survey. I'm shooting for the end of this week to finish the experiments; hopefully it won't be much longer than that because I have hard deadlines approaching sooner than I would like!

Half of a couple of days this week was shot because of a couple of phone interviews. Why the HR people take so long setting things up, I don't know. One of the interviews went well; we talked about ideas behind current research and possibilities for the project the company is working on. The other didn't go well at all. I think the hardest thing for me is showing confidence when I'm trying to work through a "technical" problem in an interview. They can't see my facial expressions, so I know I have to be verbal about my thought process, but it doesn't come naturally and I often find myself adding a "I think" or a "maybe" at the end of my answer. And halfway through the interview I could tell the interviewer was docking me "points" for lack of confidence. I had the right answer...but you know it is a bad sign when the interviewer starts being sarcastic.... Oh well. Hopefully the interview I felt good about will result in a call back. :)

Other than that, we worked on a lot of projects and made it up to the Hogle Zoo for a couple of hours. We gotta get in enough zoo trips before our annual pass expires next month! Besides, who doesn't like a good excuse to watching the monkeys play [or American Brown Bears for that matter...]? And Monday we did dinner and games with our upstairs neighbors. We should do that more often.

Ta-Da. That's all we did this week. Happy Mothers Day.

This is some of the pictures from our campout this weekend to Payson Lakes with Karl and Angela. Although there was snow on the campground, it didn't get too cold at night and we all survived. The scenery was beautiful and it was so relaxing to be up in the mountains in the outdoors.

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Note to self: artificial turf is nothing like real grass.

My injuries this week started on Wednesday when I went for a goal in my soccer class. I slid for the ball, realizing afterwards that artificial turf acts more like sandpaper than real grass. My leg was shredded. It didn't hurt so much at the time, but it continued to hurt worse throughout the day, making the worst pain right when I was trying to sleep. Now one side of my leg is a large wound, but fortunately it is healing well.

That's really only the start of it. Thursday night I got hit in the face so hard that my nose was bleeding. And I think I might have fractured one of my knuckles. And then, on our campout Friday night, I slipped on the snow and re-opened my leg wounds. It has definitely been a rough week. [but Wayne has been a trooper, and kept working hard at everything anyway...despite the added "color"! -beck]

Monday we drove up North because it was our Nephew Davin's birthday and Chris and Katie were visiting. Which is why the next day we ate at a Thai restaurant with Karl, Angela, Chris, Katie and Davin and played frisbee golf afterwards. We were glad they could make time to see us on their trip here and sure had fun playing with them!

Lucky for me, only Wednesday and Thursday were the only really painful days. Wednesday night, I threw together a fast version of GalleryOneTen's website.

Although it was raining to start with, we went camping up in the Uinta Nat'l Forest next to Payson Friday night. There was snow at our campground and it was definitely much colder up by Payson lakes than it had been down in the valley. Yet, at night, it didn't get much colder. I thought we were going to freeze to death, so I was glad we were wrong and it wasn't too cold. You can see our pictures of the campout here and Karl took some pictures which are posted here. It was a beautiful area and a good way to start off our camping season. Good thing we didn't let the rain and snow scare us off!

Saturday, we tried to recooperate from our campout. It always takes us a day to get back to a normal schedule because we loose a lot of sleep. After some long naps, we were ready to get started. But it was a bit late for that. So we had a restful Saturday.

I like monkeys.
They are cute.
Riding on horseback
in their purple suit!

Funny little fellows,
climbing all about.
We could be playmates,
If they let you out!

I always have hated radio stations. I can't stand TV either. Both threaten me by pushing their horrible material on me while harassing me with neverending advertising and consumerism, polluting my mind. I've always been a fan of searching out new music and never had enough money to buy the cds I wanted. Worse yet, my musical tastes have always been so obscure that I can never carry on a conversation about what bands are near and dear to my heart because no one I know has heard of them.

It's not that I'm a music snob, I just have very picky tastes. I like certain things very much; the music I listen to inspires my artwork, so I have to be controlling about it. Anyways, lately I've been really starved for new music (I'm a poor married college student, what did you expect?)...enter: pandora.com

I've been fascinated by large music databases since I became a teenager. They used to have MUSE booths at the record store where you could punch in what you like and see everything by that artist. I've been a fan of www.allmusic.com, but this post isn't about that site. Pandora.com is a radio service which (unwittingly) follows Nicholas Negroponte's ideas of end-user-demand service; instead of a DJ playing the same five tunes over and over again, the service narrows your search for new music by allowing you to decide what songs they play you like and which you don't. Ideally, it should reach a point where every song it comes up with fits your category, but it's all new music. Ah, heaven.

If only I had the money to buy all the new cds I've found.

That's what this week felt like. I've worked pretty much all day all week on my thesis, trying desparately to get better results than what I'm getting. But it looks in the end like I just need more data (examples of paraphrases) to train my models better. I guess 4000 pairs of sentences just aren't enough examples! I should have my survey up tomorrow or Tuesday (I need human eyes to tell me how awful my paraphrases are, really), and if I need more participants I will be sure to let you all know. :) In light of how weird my sentences look, I am adding questions to the survey asking them to rate how natural the sentences sound, so I can blame it on lack of data rather than lack of a good idea. I know for a dissertation this wouldn't be a good enough solution, but this is *just* a Masters, right? This type of data is just really hard to come by....

This week I will start writing up my thesis while the survey is going, and Wednesday afternoon and Thursday I will head to San Jose for an interview with TellMe. It should be interesting...I enjoyed the phone conversation we had a little over a week ago. In the meantime, I will keep looking for other possibilities too, just in case.

We've been dog-sitting for our upstairs neighbors. They always take care of Star when we leave town, and it's finally our turn to return the favor. Although, one night I woke up thinking a *bear* was trying to eat me, and it was just Roxie with her paws on our bed breathing heavily and whining, trying to tell us she wanted to go outside. Hehehe. She prefers to go out in the middle of the night, because then no one will make her stay out there. Who knows why she doesn't like to be outside like a normal dog? And it's funny, because Star cat just wants to trade places with Roxie! She wishes she could be outside *all* the time! More than we want her outside, that's for sure.

Wayne has kept himself busy this week working on paintings and art projects. With a little bit of homework and class thrown in there. He only has three weeks of class left. And then (well, after my defense on July 7) we'll be off to our next adventure! San Jose, or bust! [I finally got a letter of rejection from the last school, MassArts. They told me they'd highly recommend me to re-apply next year because they look really favorably on waitlisted candidates from the previous year, but I just don't think I can wait that long to finish my Masters. However, we've been looking at the alternatives for after I finish my MFA at San Jose State and a few people do a second Masters programs at multiple schools. There also are lots of artist-in-residency programs that I want to apply for over the next five years, so we definitely have our hands full when it comes to finishing our goals. No time to waste in waiting around for a "possible" better school. -Wayne]

Loves,
Becca and Wayne