Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Rebecca and I need to learn a few things about throwing parties. First thing: we should invite more people. Not that having two people come over for a 'party' isn't fun - we had fun for our "Halloween Party," but I feel a bit guilty calling it a party when there are only four of us.

With that said, we had a Halloween party Monday night. It was good, even though all we did was talk and play one game of Atmosfear. Tuesday night (which was the real Halloween), Rebecca hoped to get some Trick-or-Treaters at our house: but for the third year we had none. Someday we'll live in a place which is "child friendly." But I don't think that kids go to apartment complexes to get candy.

Other news of the week: linux. I've been attempting to convert one of our computer systems to linux so I can force myself to learn it and the opportunity presented itself last week when our Windows desktop suddenly decided it no longer had a system file. Note to viewers: the smartest thing Rebecca and I ever did was to get a second hard drive for our storage needs. Every piece of data that we create (pictures, documents, etc.) we store on the second hard drive, which is NOT our operating system hard drive. Why, you ask? Because hard drives with operating systems on them eventually crash or get corrupted and then need to be wiped to repair them. It would be horribly tragic to loose all the information we store on our computers because operating systems are notoriously fallible.

Anyways, this is just the start of a pile of projects I've been wanting to struggle with to teach myself some new things. Like, what does one do with a perfectly functional laptop screen when the laptop itself no longer functions? Well, you have to figure out how to make that into a desktop monitor. Friends of mine at school have done it, why shouldn't I?

There are few things more disgusting to me than stepping on a snail with your bare foot in the dark. One of them has to be fleas and despite our efforts to quell the flea revolution with a flea collar, we have retreated and regrouped. And now it's time to vanquish our foes with some recommendations that our friends gave us. Unfortunately, living in a "non-cold" environment doesn't kill the fleas during winter time. So we have to dish out 40 bucks for a three month treatment. What is most upsetting about this whole disgusting experience is that we don't even let our cat outside. She's a completely indoor cat. Did this apartment complex sabotage us? I believe so...

Speaking of sabotage, that's how we felt at Home Depot on Thursday. We got to HD early in the morning so we could pick out all the wood I need for an upcoming show (over $300) and rent a truck to make our drop off at home and school before Rebecca needed to be at work. Before we bought the wood, I made sure with the customer service department that they did indeed have a truck around for us to rent. They assured me they did. They lied. Someone from that store had made a "quick run" to pick up some materials and after 15 minutes waiting for them to unload that truck, the customer service rep decided to make an executive decision and give us a free delivery. Sounds good? Well, how do you explain to the Home Depot delivery guys to deliver a huge pile of wood to room number 304 in the Art building on the SJSU campus (which has NO visitor parking, I might add)? So they delivered it to our house. And we took the wood to campus in our car through multiple trips over the past couple days. Everything turned out alright.

Last thing I learned this week: a promise is a promise is a promise. It was late one Thursday night when we saw a show and someone was eating a slice of pizza. Rebecca promptly said, "I like pizza," to which I responded by describing every wonderful thing about pizza. We then went on a 11 o'clock at night hunt for pizza, which is apparently a doomed hunt. So I promised that the next day we could have pizza - I didn't want her crying over pizza ;) [or spilled milk...whatever the metaphor is... -bec] . Well, the next day she held me to that promise. [i hold that wayne did promise, after all, and it's certainly not my fault he went on and on about the splendid attributes of pizza in minute detail! -bec] So for date night, we curled up and watched Nacho Libre. It was an okay film, but definitely not of the caliber of Napoleon Dynamite.

That's about it for our week - a bundle full of laughs. Until next time...