Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Another Terry Pratchett. But not a Terry Pratchett.

This book was a serious fantasy novel. Even poignant. Even touching. Not comedic. I chuckled once. In fact, the only thing which ties this novel into the previous Discworld series books is that it takes place on the same planet [okay, so maybe there's a little bit more than that]. So imagine a series of novels about New York City and using the same characters, and then you pick up one about Tibet.

Which is a decently accurate comparison for this tale. Brutha is a lowly monk in an extremely oppressive religion which has completely lost it's way from the god it worships, Om. In fact, Om comes back as a tortise, can't figure out why no one can hear him until he realizes that the religion which has evolved from belief in him has nothing to do with belief in his existence, but more belief in the structure of the religion. But Brutha is a humble and meek person - the type which should be a great prophet, but obviously not to everyone else.

In fact, I did like this book, but I can't see any motivation for the author to have included this in the Discworld series other than to have people seduced by the acclaimed success of the rest of the series and pick up this novel thinking it's apart of that genre (at least that's the reason why I bought it). I do admit that there are certain arguments in the book which would be lost on someone who didn't know the Discworld geography or belief systems. So, it's a built in belief system which doesn't need to be explained in one novel because it has been relayed through 13+ other stories.

Although this was a serious novel, not comedic (at least nothing that I could trace as comedy or satire), I felt that I cared for the main character - probably more than I've cared for some of the other characters in Pratchett's works. I'm really confused by the wikipedia entry on Small Gods because they claim that this book as "cheerful cynacism." Perhaps more books in the Discworld series are like this and less like the first few books. If so, I think I might not be as interested in them. My advice is to pick this one up long after you're comfortable with the Discworld experience and you want a break from quips, satire and laughing.

There are only two more weeks of this semester left, so naturally that means procrastinating things until the end. Half of the nights this week, I got home at around 9, which meant making dinner, talking with Rebecca and then going to bed. Between that, and reading books until late, and watching more movies than we have all semester...

Wednesday night, Rebecca's old roommate Erika went to dinner with us. While we wanted to go to St. John's Grill (because of their wonderful burgers), the place was packed with people because it was a San Jose Sharks hockey game and St. John's has a few large screen HDTVs. We got there, stood around and waited for a seat to open up. None opened. And then someone scored and the whole place erupted in a scream and we bolted for the door. I think I'll take my meals in quiet, please. Thank you.

After a quieter meal at a different restaurant, we chose to wait outside in the bitter breezy cold in a line that was much too long to get some small 31 cent ice cream cones from Baskin Robins. Rebecca tells me that BR used to do this annually with free ice cream, but they have since started to charge 31 cents (which is still a good deal for ice cream) - I guess I only mention it because it was 10 pm and we were in a long line for ice cream. Who stands in line for ice cream? [we do, as it turns out, because it was an adventure! :) plus the money goes to local firefighters, right? -beck]

Thursday I had a good chat with the head of my department which made me feel better about being here in this school. I'm not sure it encouraged me enough to work really hard - I'm hoping that will come during the summer when I have less distractions from school. But nevertheless, I feel more hopeful about my prospects here at SJSU than I did before and now I understand better why things are in a state of disarray in our department. It will get better. It must get better. I will be a part of making it better.

Mostly Rebecca and I read books in the evenings. But I go to bed so early (11pm), so I don't get enough hours at home to work on things. Perhaps I need to change that. We had a lazy Friday evening and watched Return of the King at home. Saturday was lazy as well (and once again, I haven't touched my 10 page theory paper due next week) and we watched another movie, cleaned house and then played games at Kate and Robi's until late. Rebecca managed to squeeze in going to a baptism for one of her Primary students while I was busy cleaning and running errands.

While it sounds like we didn't do much, I swear we did: it's more that we can't remember it all.

My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.

-Alexander Calder

There's not really much to talk about this week. We played games with friends Sunday evening. Rebecca worked during the week days. Wayne worked on school projects pretty much whenever he wasn't sleeping. Rebecca met Wayne on campus several nights and read while he worked on projects. There really wasn't too much else to the week. Even Saturday most of the day Rebecca took care of errands while Wayne worked on school projects.

I suppose somewhat noteworthy, we renewed our rental agreement on Saturday. So I guess we're staying put in the same apartment for another 12 months, but after that I put bets on us moving; this apartment complex is "cutting us a deal" to renew this time around, but the "going rate" is easily 14% more than it was 9 months ago when we moved here! That is crazy inflation, I tell you what. Fortunately we'll only be paying a little more (comparatively speaking) to stay put -- less than we figure we would pay in getting a moving truck and piano mover at least.

We're designing some enhancements to our cat scratching post/pedestal for Star cat. We're trying to give her some more puzzles because she loves them so. Mother's day was good here...Wayne made a delicious breakfast of french toast (with cheese! call me crazy...) and an impressive salmon dinner with crab-breading and red potatoes on the side. Mmm.

This week we look forward to Wayne finishing the last week of the semester and final projects, and Rebecca will have long work days Tuesday through Friday commuting to San Francisco with a coworker for a training class. At least she's looking forward to the topic of the training class, so hopefully that makes up for the long commute.

This is the second book in the Percy Jackson series; which Rebecca and I both think is almost an exact copy of the structure of the Harry Potter series. Just in a mythology setting. But that doesn't make this a bad book: instead, the story keeps itself under control and poses some interesting plot conundrums which make this story a well written children's tale.

For all Harry Potter has going for itself, I have one soapbox that I never fail to raise: there are more tangents in those books than there is in the Pirates movies or in Spiderman 3. Good stories aren't told by giving you the kitchen sink and expecting you to sort things out, but by controlling the rhetoric of the piece.

That said (this isn't a Harry Potter rant page), Sea of Monsters is a good continuation of Percy Jackson's story, although I remember being a little more attached to the first story (read: on edge) than this one.

Percy meets his new friend, Tyson, who also happens to be a cyclops. They end up at camp half-blood and things are bad back at camp. Thalia's tree has been poisoned and someone needs to save it or there won't be many heroes left. So, naturally Percy leaves with Annabeth to save the day. And try and figure out what Kronos' (read: Voldemort) plans within plans are.

The San Jose public library system doesn't let us keep books for very long so we always have to chew through them quickly, without much of a chance to digest. Overall, this book was fun and entertaining, without being obsessed with itself.

We're having a kid! Rebecca is expecting our first child on the 15th of October. We'll keep people posted. If you want to know the sex, you have to make a guess first.

Every time the end of a semester comes along, we have a week like this one. Assignments pile up and end-of-semester presentations need to be cleaned up and polished off. Add to that a unique twist: even though Rebecca is out of school, she was put into a week long training class with a design firm in San Francisco by her company.

We got one decent night of our usual scheduled hours of sleep Sunday evening. Monday morning, instead of racing off to work, Rebecca and I went in to the doctor's for a check-up. It was a nice opening to a long week. But at this point, I need to interject a side note which exemplifies many other events later in the week. We show up at 8:45. The appointment starts at 9 am. They told us that having an appointment so early in the day would help us have a prompt visit; there isn't much of a reason to be late at that time of morning. About 9:15, we start our appointment. This is key to understand why the rest of our week unfolds as it does.

The rest of Monday flew by normally. Rebecca went to "normal" work, I worked on my interview portfolio for teaching (it was for my teaching class) by updating my CV and cleaning up the practice assignments I had written. Essentially for that class, I have had to prepare a semester's worth of assignments, syllabus, etc. for a foundations course. I believe I am a "difficult" grader compared to my colleagues. I am not a believer in cajoling students; I wish teachers hadn't done that to me.

But Monday night, Rebecca went to bed at the uncanny hour of 9:30. In order to get to San Francisco by 8 in the morning, avoid traffic, park and walk to the design firm downtown she had to leave our house at 6:30. Which, of course, means waking up at 5:50 at the latest. I stayed up finishing my project in Second Life for a presentation in my public art class. For those of you connected to Second Life, the link for viewing our data is here.

Tuesday morning, Rebecca left early and I followed suit, trying to help out on my last day of TA'ing for a 2D design class. Rebecca's first day of design school didn't feel so long, because it was mostly introductions and the company employees explaining why working for their company was the greatest thing since sliced bread. My presentation went well. It was one more event to hurdle before the end. Once I was finished with that, I started on my first year review presentation. At the end of the first semester and then again at the end of the first year, the MFA students have a review with professors to look over their progress. Ultimately it is a look to see if the student has been doing anything at all, since the school has stopped truly failing people. Apparently they got burned a couple times because they (the art faculty) failed someone who then went on to show at the Whitney. If that isn't a poignant jab at the criteria of the school, I don't know what is.

I timed my presentation. It ran at 20 minutes. And that was the barest minimum I needed to get the smallest cross-section of my work across, just for the past year. The presentation was supposed to run for 10 minutes. So I hacked away at it some more and was really nervous Wednesday morning when I gave the presentation. I talked really fast to try and get everything in the time limit I was given. I believe I have been told by three different professors that I talk too fast during my presentations. I have decided this is ultimately due to over-preparation, not under-preparation.

For example, I had another presentation to give Thursday afternoon on the 10 page theoretical paper I had to write. And I didn't prepare much of anything (other than some unique and interesting examples). And it went smoothly. I thought I was only going to talk for five minutes and then be done, but I gave a fantastic presentation which lasted almost 20 minutes. The most difficult part of that assignment was writing a ten page paper on "whatever you want, as long as it somehow relates to what we talked about and read over the semester." Could we write a fictional narrative story? Sure. Could we write about our own work and relate it to the concepts? Fine by the teacher. So, what exactly are we supposed to write about? Whatever.

Don't do that to your students. It drives me crazy.

Thankfully, that meant I was almost finished with the week, and since Rebecca practically went to sleep by the time she got home around 6:30pm and had dinner, it was turning out to be a long week. Friday morning was everyone's last day. I went to the final critique for the class I TA for. I finished my editing for the current issue of the Switch Journal for New Media. Rebecca's final day was the first day they actually did any product design participation. [we had other activities and examples throughout the week, basically learning their approach to research and preparation for design work. Since they focus on user-centered design, for them the research is most important because if they do that wrong, there's no way the design will be right. Still, it's funny to go so long in the training before we even talk about applying the research to a real design! -beck] So we went to dinner in the evening to relax. Maybe we should have gone to dinner in the evening just to eat, because I don't think we were ready to relax the way they thought we should relax.

We arrived at the restaurant at 7:00 and there was only a few couples scattered in the restaurant. We were seated and given our menus. And then we waited. For a while. But we had bread so we were at least content. Eventually, someone noticed us and our orders were taken. Then we waited some more. We lost track of time. In fact, we began to wonder if we were getting our food. In perfect non-sequitur fashion, a waiter came up to us and asked if "everything was good." I stared at him a bit confused and said, "Well...we're still waiting for our food." He looked at the table, a bit confused himself, and then went to go get our food.

Think that's funny? Well, it gets a little bit worse. We ate, the food was fine. But then we waited for our check. And Waited. The waiter came over and asked us if we had our check yet. We didn't. He apologized and said he'd go take care of it. This repeated three times. By the time we left the restaurant it was 9pm. 2 hours in a restaurant. That is unheard of for us. There was only one other time we took longer, at the Whiskey Creek Cafe in Oregon - but the food there was unbelievably good. No such luck for our Friday night attempt.

Then, Saturday, we truly celebrated by driving down to Santa Cruz to "sit on the beach and play frisbee." Except that the winds were flying by at amazing speeds (not to mention cold) whipping the sand into our faces and stinging our skin. Good thing we both brought jackets. Fine. So no water, no frisbee, no looking. At least the sound of the waves was nice. It was just nice to be someplace relaxing. Except for the naked guy who then started to patrol the entrance/exit to the beach. We were TRAPPED! Eventually, we hiked the steep exit in the back of the cove, but it was definitely a weird, strange day at the beach.

Lastly? We watched The Fountain. And I was right, I did like it. It was so refreshing to watch a non-linear film which uses the capabilities of film often put aside for the money-making qualities of the entertainment industry. Rebecca and I are planning on watching it a second time before returning it. Which is a rarity for us with movies.

If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change

-Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

It is finally summer time and what that means here is time to destroy paintings. We have a second bedroom full of works of art that will either go one of two places: to your house or to the fire. Literally.

So, I have compiled a gallery online of all the works of art on death row along with their sizes and materials. Please take this opportunity to look through and claim anything you want. We can talk about exchanging/pricing details once I hear from you about which ones you want.

Obviously this is a limited time thing. Please contact me at wayne(at)waynemadsen.com. Thanks.

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On October 15th, a new girl will join our family!

"Meet me in St. Louis."

We met the rest of my family in St. Louis for a family un-reunion. The weekend was filled with playing in the swimming pool, running around after kids, museums, zoos, and laughing.

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Balsamic Salmon with Walnut Rice Pilaf
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For the fish:
1 lb. salmon fillets (1/2 lb. each)
1 TBS olive oil
Cajun Seasoning

For the sauce:
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup bacon, thinly chopped
1 TBS. chopped green onions or shallots

For the rice:
1/2 cup Rice
2 tsp. Cajun seasoning
1 tsp. chili powder
Salt
Walnuts

Begin the meal by starting the rice, cooking per instructions from the rice manufacturer. Add Cajun seasoning and chili powder to the rice before cooking. Turn on the rice. Then prepare the salmon fillets by coating both sides liberally with Cajun seasoning. Let the fillets sit until the rice is 10-15 minutes from being done.

Turn the pan you plan on cooking the salmon in onto medium heat. Put in the bacon pieces. In a smaller saucepan, put the balsamic vinegar on medium heat until it begins to boil. Then turn down to medium-low and stir slowly and consistently, to prevent burning on the bottom. Balsamic vinegar boils at a low temperature and you are trying to coagulate the vinegar. Watch it closely. Shortly before the bacon finishes cooking, toss in the green onions. When the bacon finishes, remove from the heat and set aside.

Put the olive oil into the pan you used for the bacon and then fry the salmon fillets on medium to medium-low heat; covering the pan to make sure the salmon cooks all the way through. This should take about 10-15 minutes to cook: blacken both sides.

When the vinegar is thick, add the bacon and onions and turn off the heat. Set the sauce aside to cool.

When the rice is finished, top with salt and crushed walnuts. Serve with the salmon on the side, add additional Cajun seasoning as desired to the fillets and drizzle the balsamic sauce on top.

Serves 2.