Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

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.