Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Back to school. The first week of school is always the slowest. Maybe it's because all the teachers are waiting for students to figure out their schedules. Maybe it's because we haven't figured out how to fill our time yet with school projects so all our time feels so empty. Maybe it's because most of our free time is spent doing errands, but this week was slow, despite how much we got done.

Monday was the first day of classes. And like the first day of classes, all our classes got out early and we spent a great deal of time staring at the walls wondering what to do. We tried reading ahead, but since most of our assignments were too confusing to figure out, it was a mostly wasted day. I need to find a new job. We learned that.

I went into my previous employment to ask for my old job back. I really wanted to work there again because of the people I worked with and the creative things I was paid to do; I didn't want to work there again because of my employer. Who wants to work in an office where your boss threatens to fire the whole team every month and never follows through on his threats? When I spoke with the front secretary, she told me that I couldn't have my job back. Since I need money to help support our family, it was time to go on a job hunt. So we started searching the ads, hoping and praying to find something decent.

Tuesday was a bit of a stressful day for Rebecca, mostly because of me. My sculpture class went well, if not really slow because the professor has to talk the whole three hours on the first day of class. But I have a couple other friends in that class, so any art class with people I know in it goes well. Our first project is stone carving and my teacher told us that if we wanted to drive to a rock quarry down near the city of Nephi, we could get some free honey onyx stone. It's a beautiful white marble stone with rich honey colored stripes in it. I got a map and was planning on going. More on that later.

My evening psych class was cut short. Very short. It turns out that only 8 people showed up for a class that requires 12 in order to continue that section. Our professor told us that they'd probably have to close the section. Rebecca and I didn't want to have to reorder my schedule because I really needed this class to graduate in August. Lucky for us, we got an email that evening from the professor informing us that he's going to continue the section regardless of the rules. [yay for not having to change the schedule!!]

Since that class went so short, we decided to go get food and then drive down to Nephi that night to find the stones. I learned that following a geological map isn't an easy thing to do, especially up in the mountains where trails that aren't on the map look the same in person as the roads that are on the map. Without much more explanation, we got lost. After wandering around on foot [a lot of the "roads" we saw weren't drivable unless you happen to own a 4-wheel drive, which we don't. Hence wandering on foot in the mountains -beck], looking for a quarry, for about an hour, we decided to give up. The trickiest part was that neither Rebecca nor I knew what a quarry looked like. Right as we were about to leave, I glanced further south down the road and saw a big white area in the mountain a short distance off and I said, "You know, that looks just like what a quarry should probably look like." We had driven down a false road [silly false road that looked just like the real one...]. After taking the correct road, we found the quarry and got 6 nice sized rocks of beautiful honey onyx. The whole time Rebecca kept saying that an axe murderer was going to kill us because we were out in the middle of nowhere [it was SCARY I tell you!! and Wayne didn't even believe me about the axe murderer threat. I can't imagine why not. -beck].

I spent an hour on Wednesday talking to one of my professors about the paintings I did over the summer. You can read about that here.
As a result, it took me until Friday before I felt confident enough to go back into the studio and get started on redoing everything. Thursday was much the same as the rest of the week, except that I learned that the honey onyx we picked up was some really hard stone and I spent 2 hours trying to cut one piece of it on a diamond saw. Ouch!

The rest of the week was pretty slow. I had a job interview at the MTC on Friday. They need a design specialist for their computer aided language learning exercises for the missionaries. I'd be perfect for the job, but that doesn't mean that they will hire me. Rebecca has started her T.A. hours, and is still trying to settle a few additional R.A. hours. Saturday we went to see Star Wars with Karl and Angela. Yay for the dollar theatre! We've seen more movies here in Utah in the past two weeks than we did the entire four months in Seattle and we've only spent 1/12 the amount of money.

Karl wants us to hike up Mt. Timpanogas with them tomorrow, but since we're such slow hikers, I don't know how far up the mountain we'll get. I like to stop and do artwork along the way and look at things, so I'm very slow at going on hikes. [besides, it's more fun to go off the beaten path, isn't it? -beck] But after this holiday, we should have plenty of school work to do.
Love,
Wayne and Rebecca