Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Now that school is out and Rebecca has been waiting for her advisors to get back her thesis draft (with comments), we spent this week working on our personal projects. It seems like almost every night I was editing my film and watching and re-watching it until late in the night, while Rebecca absorbed herself in writing a graffiti writing recognizing program, like what was used by Palm handheld devices. She was able to complete this project by Thursday evening, whereas I'm still working on my film. If you remember, my friends and I filmed this documentary about a medieval fighting society who practices at a park close to our house. I've finished close to a final draft, but there's always some work to be done on it. It's amazing how many people are really interested in this subject. I mentioned the film at work and now I've got a long list of people who demand to see this film when it's finished.

We really didn't DO much this week that took us out of doors. We finished some books. On Saturday we went window shopping at Bed, Bath & Beyond. They were having a clearance sale, but we didn't find anything worth getting, especially since we're moving soon. However, we DID notice that the George Foreman G5 grill would allow us to get rid of two appliances AND let us have the panini maker we so desire! :P

We also spent about an hour playing with kittens at Petsmart, only to come home and play with our own cat for another couple hours. Rebecca went to JoAnn's fabrics (they were having a sale on patterns) and picked up two patterns for pajamas. This coming week she'll make some pajamas for us out of the monkey fabric she found. And because of the sale, it will actually be cheaper than if we had bought them pre-made. And we'll finally have the monkey pajamas we so desire. :P

You would have thought that with all the extra time we had this week, we would have done something remarkable... but it's just as fun to work on our own projects.

"People can misinterpret almost anything so that it coincides with views they already hold. They take from art what they already believe."

-Stanley Kubrick

So a lot of this week was spent working on editing my thesis once I got comments back from my advisor and second committee members. I even spent a good chunk of the 4th just working on that. It was hard to fall asleep at night a couple of nights, trying to turn my brain off on what else I wanted to add and include. I almost have a final draft now...just a few more comments that my advisor sent yesterday that I'll wake up bright and early tomorrow to work on. Now the trick is getting the defense scheduled when my whole committee is in town! It looks like it will either happen this Thursday morning, or not until August 17th. I'm hoping for this week.

The 4th of July we didn't do much. I helped the YW/YM in the ward put up flags in people's yard early in the morning, and went right back to sleep until we had sadly missed the Madsen family breakfast thing we had been planning on going to. [somehow i slept through Rebecca waking up, the alarm and only woke up when she came back, dragged me out of bed and showed me all the hot air balloons outside. it was fun! -wayne] After that, we joined our neighbor for a picnic lunch and read a book together a bit, and working on my thesis.

Wayne worked with a fellow BYU art student, Jason, on a sound project. They wrapped paper around a speaker, and put a glob of paint on the paper, and turned the speaker up, filming the way the paint bounced around depending on the sound waves and whatnot. [bob marley makes the best splatter paintings.] This is a project that had a grant helping to fund it, so they purchased a tripod to use during the project, and once they were done with it, Wayne got to take it home! So we are now proud owners of a free-to-us, sturdy tripod [mmm..tripod]. Yay.

Yesterday we went up to Evanston, Wyoming to go to Wayne's cousin Adam's wedding. It was nice to be able to visit with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins we don't see very often. Well worth the drive. On the way home, we even stopped in SLC to see Aunt Sharla.

This morning we had a YW class presidency meeting. It was hard, because we were trying to plan activities for weeks I won't even be around, so I had to try and help suggest activities where I am not a crucial figure in the events. It's better that way anyway, because it puts them in charge more. The only trouble was they loved petting Star cat so much that they paid more attention to her than to our agenda! :) At least Star cat wasn't scared of them; she cozied right up to them on the couch.

It looks like we will be flying out to San Jose a week from Wednesday or Thursday for a job interview; Wayne will come too so he can make some arrangments at SJSU, and help apartment hunt. But we're waiting to buy the tickets until the company gives me a flight itinerary.

That's the latest in our world. Have a fun week!

These are pictures of my family on my mother's side. My cousin Adam was getting married, and I took some pictures of all the cute kids, etc. Since most of my immediate nuclear family (back east) haven't seen these cousins in a while, it should be nice to show some pictures of this side of the family.

• View album
• View map of album

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

-Andy Warhol

While living in Seattle, I did a large amount of these figurative ink paintings. To capture the vibrant quality of life and metabolism, the restructuring of life, I painted with natural elements, using twigs, leaves and stones for brushes.

• View album

This piece I started a couple days ago, and since the progression of a work still fascinates me much more than the final piece, I will continue to take pictures of this work in progress.

• View album

I really can't remember what, if anything, we did this week. Neither can Rebecca. But she's too stressed right now because she's all that's left of the young women's presidency. The first counselor suddenly moved, the secretary has been release this past month and called as Primary president and the president just had her kid 3 weeks early. So while she's preparing her lesson to teach all the young women (and will be for the next month), I'm exhausted because the heat last night wouldn't let me sleep at all.

But the good news is that Rebecca has more job interviews in San Jose next week; however, this time we will both be flying out. I'm going to go out on the premise of checking out the school and looking for an apartment while Rebecca is in her interviews.

I guess most of the week we spent just trying to stay out of the heat. Temperatures were in the upper 90s and even living in a basement with the fan on high made for some sticky days. About the biggest adventure we can remember from this week was packing up all our winter clothes. We have a list of things we've considered getting rid of and putting into deep storage for the next three years. But Rebecca didn't want to have us pack up too early, so we weren't staring at boxes for the next month. So we only packed away things that we had already put in our storage room.

I painted most of the week. Rebecca inhaled books, made pajamas and worked. Rebecca is all set with her thesis defense, but because she missed the July 7th deadline, she's going to defend on the 17th of August. Then we move the next day.

Well, next week we promise to have more entertaining things to say.

"This idea of a talking stick (Pinocchio) becoming a boy, it’s like a metaphor for art, and it’s the ultimate alchemical transformation."

-Jim Dine

Robin McKinley once stated that every author has one story they are trying to get out and all their works can be traced through that story line. Although I hadn't noticed that before, after reading these two books (and several discussions with Rebecca on the topic), I'm convinced that many authors follow this pattern. Dan Simmons has an obsession with taking literary genius and bringing a reincarnation to a future science fiction conflict. And his grasp on making an interesting world definitely convinces me that there are volumes of backlog notebooks he's written for his story.

Obviously from the titles, this pair of books follows the characters of the Illiad, throwing in a mish mash of Greek mythology from other literary sources. In the preface, Simmons acknowledges that he had a painful time keeping track of all the characters and couldn't stand to read these books (Illiad, etc.) himself so he relied greatly on a plethera of other authors' notes. I personally have never read much Greek mythology for this same reason (other than selections from my treasured Metamorphoses). But I didn't have that problem with this duo. I think I read all 1400 pages of these two books in about a week.

Well, scratch that. I read approximately 1300 of these pages. Dan Simmons is a very captivating author, but I always have to skip pages and pages of sex. Other than that warning, I have to say this story is amazing. Rebecca and I read The Lightning Thief right after this book and I didn't believe in those Olympian gods at all... but the gods and world that Simmons creates are truly the brutal, violent, selfish and destructive forces that ruled over the early civilized world. Maybe I should pick up the Illiad and read it.

Rebecca and I flew out to California for some job interviews. While we were there, we visited with some friends and of course Karl and Angela. We drove out to Santa Cruz despite the horrible traffic. Because it was in the 100 degrees this weekend, everyone wanted to get out to the beach. We went in the evening and most people had already left this little hidden beach. So we played.

• View album
• View map of album

Last night, I wanted to do something special for Rebecca, for when she returned home from girl's camp. She's spent the past four days up in the mountains. I cleaned the house, got everything ready and even went to buy the cat litter mat that we always talked about purchasing but never did. Everything was ready for this morning.

Then I woke up to find that our cat, Star, had eaten through the rubber mat.

Our cat is a regular billygoat. She doesn't do it because she's hungry, because I checked her food bowl. But the cat eats tape, rubber, plastic, twine, cloth and leather toy mice tails, window blinds; if she was physically able to, I'm confident she would eat her wire brush. She tries that everytime I brush her and fails.

I hate to rant about this, but I'm quite upset that my trash-eating cat ruined the surprise for my wonderful wife. Stupid cat thinks she gets nutrition from licking a plastic box and gnawing on wood. Grrr....

The past two weeks have been an adventure and a half. The first week we flew out to San Jose for a very productive trip full of interviews, beaches, visiting schools and apartment hunting. Then we quickly shifted gears and Rebecca went for a week up in the mountains to a church girl's camp while I stayed home and tried to stay sane without her.

Rebecca had three interviews this time in California. One of them was with the same company she interviewed with last time, but in a different department. All the interviews went really well and she's already received offers from two of the companies and waiting on the third. While Rebecca was in her interviews, I visited SJSU to get a feel for the place and the people. It just makes me so giddy to be going to grad school. It's like I'm finally able to dedicate myself to art and not be punished for it; instead of failing my classes because of art, I'll do well in school.

Saturday was a fun day for us because we spent it with Karl and Angela. For half of the day we were apartment hunting - they came along because if they decide to move out to San Jose next year, they will have to do the same thing for the same general area. Wouldn't if be cool if we were living in the same apartment building? Yup, that would be neat. Despite the great trip and the successes of Rebecca's interviews, the one shocker was apartments. The cheapest place we found costs 1295 a month, not counting any utilities, was a long commute and only encompassed approximately 900 square feet. Yup, money down the drain. You see, though, despite how much we'd love to buy a place at this time in our lives, the cheapest townhouse goes for a meager 600,000. So it's not like we're going to be doing that anytime soon.

After we wandered apartment buldings, we tried to escape the 100 degree weather by driving down to Santa Cruz. Because of the 100 degree weather, the freeways were like a parking lot, so we drove the winding backroads through Saratoga, etc. and it only took us a couple hours and everyone was almost carsick. But when we arrived, the trip was worth it. We have already posted some pictures online of our adventures on a nice secluded beach where we played in the waves and enjoyed the breeze.

So Wayne's done talking about our California trip, and now it's Rebecca's turn to talk about this week.

Monday we traveled home, and I kept my cell phone handy trying to get in touch with the parents of all the girls we were in charge of at camp. We had 15 in our ward, 12 that stayed in our cabins (yes, we had cabins) and 3 that were old enough to be youth leaders, so they stayed with the other youth leaders. The girls are 12-16 years old. Even with multiple phone calls, it was still hard to know whether the parents were really going to follow through with the preparations I asked of them or not. It worked out, though it wasn't until two minutes before we left at 6:30 Tuesday morning that I got the last of the gear and letters from home for a couple of the young women.

Camp was exciting to say the least. We had fun for sure, but I think something dramatic happened every single day. Tuesday we learned that one of our girls was ordered by a judge to come from juvenile detention to our camp (he thought it would be a good idea for her to make new friends at a church girl's camp...), so she was defiant and less than happy to be there most of the week. We were supposed to know *before* we got up in the mountains, but somehow she and her mom failed to tell us until we were already up in the mountains. Wednesday one of our four leaders left to go see a doctor to find out why she was having trouble breathing (she's fine...they decided it was altitude sickness). One of the four leaders was our camp cook, so that left two of us in charge of the young women for the rest of the week -- me and our ward camp director.

Thursday we were having some relaxing time, and the camp director and I decided to take a few minutes and read the scriptures in our "lighthouse". The goal for the entire camp was to read the entire Book of Mormon aloud before the end of the week, and they kept it in a tent decorated like a lighthouse to keep with our "Let There Be Light" theme. We returned to camp feeling uplifted, just to be informed by some of our young women that three of our girls had run away from the camp and disappeared in the mountains! Fortunately our camp director has a good head on her shoulders, and we immediately ran around the camp to find the stake camp director in charge of the whole shebang. We gathered leaders as we went, and split up in twos to go find our lost girls. We were lucky the girls hadn't been gone more than ten minutes, and we found them within a half hour. The stake leaders and our ward camp director talked to the three for an hour while I tried to convince the other nine girls to come eat dinner and help clean the biffy like we were supposed to. It was hard at the beginning of the week to get the girls to respond to me and do what I asked them to, but by the end of the week I was getting better at it. I learned a lot about leadership this week, I thnk. Wayne says my eyes look older [yup, older and wiser -wayne].

By Friday, the camp director and I were exhausted. We had another girl disappear during a scheduled activity, but she didn't leave the camp (and still got a good talking to about it). It wasn't all drama the whole week. We also had fun pouring water on each other and falling out of canoes and singing silly songs. We lifted 8-foot long tree trunks from one side of the mountain to another to build a nice ampitheatre. We played a game on our hike trying to find the prettiest thing ("Look at the purple flower!", "Do you see the deer?", and "What a funny pair of trees wrapped around each other!"). We sang "good morning" songs to the girls and lullabies to try and get them up in the morning and quiet at night. We made banana boats and smores and went on a snipe hunt. We sang beautiful songs around the lake to another camp.

Needless to say, with all the excitement of the week, we were glad to have the bishopric come and be in charge of the rest of the evening. They put together a lovely program that set the mood for our testimony meeting. What a wonderful way to end the camp. I thought afterwards that it would have been a nice way to start the camp, but the meeting would have been much different at the beginning of the week. I learned even more about our girls, and their life circumstances. So many of them have been through incredibly hard things in their short lives -- fathers with restraining orders because of how they treat their kids, divorces, sisters in juvenile detention, etc, etc. But through these experiences, so many of them have come to rely on the Lord to help them through and have strong testimonies of prayer, of the scriptures, and of how the Lord answers prayers through other girls. I could tell the girls had testimonies even before our meeting Friday night because of the love they showed each other throughout the week, because of how they reached out to each other and included even the new girls and the younger girls in their activities. Because of their love of Christ, they had love for each other. I was glad so many of them were willing to share their testimonies with each other, and it ended the camp on such a spiritual note. No wonder the general YW presidency says if they had to remove all other YW programs and keep just one, it would be girl's camp.

Saturday we left bright and early, without any excitement, and came home again. I crashed, took a shower, took a nap, and ate some food. Wayne had cleaned the whole house before I got home, and took care of me from the moment I walked in the door. We were very glad to see each other again, it's true.

Then we hung out with Chris and Katie and Davin in the evening and flew kites and a frisbee. Davin was adorable of course; I should have brought our camera. He laughed so much every time the kite crashed into the ground (it was a sport kite, and when the wind dies while you're doing a trick...). We had fun, and hopefully we'll be able to visit again before they go home to North Carolina.

This morning we're just being lazy. It's half past twelve and I'm just now going to go get ready for Church at one. Anyway, we've had a full couple of weeks. And there's lots to do now before we move mid-August.

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.

-Jean Michel Basquiat