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