Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

School is moving into forward motion. While my first lecture breezed through a wide arc of our mission for the semester, both Tuesday and Thursday lectures took the entire time permitted and I was barely able to give the required information for the students to complete their first paper. I hope that this coming week we will actually be able to work on visual material instead of theoretical concepts. It is a shame when we have to spend two weeks listening to lecture and theory before we can work with the ideas in a more concrete sense. But I needed to provide a conceptual premise for the rest of the semester.

And ultimately, I have my good days and my bad; sometimes they get it and sometimes they don't. I've never seen a group of 19-21 year olds where none of them blog or do youtube. In researching, I have found that the current college generation is the first which doesn't actively participate in social web as a response to its novelty: they have always had web 2.0. Instead, this group only uses it as it integrates into their physical life, which makes for a group of people who have never thought about how these things function. It has made for interesting discussions.

On Monday, Paela and I went to our weekly storytime in Billerica. The crowd was smaller than most storytimes we have gone to and the group was mostly children her approximate age, however she was still very reserved in doing any of the activities, except the craft project. We made a little "farm" crown out of paper and she enjoyed gluing everything down. It is good for a two-year old to make her own decisions.

A few nights we watched an amazing film on monolithic England. I'm grateful that I've had a chance to visit some of these sites and I can't fathom how we have lost knowledge of such a captivating culture.

In order to celebrate receiving my published thesis, we ended our "eating out fast" by meeting Camilla and Victor at a Brazilian restaurant down by Tufts. Afterwards, we all came back for cake. You have to celebrate with cake, don't you?

And Paela has been the recipient of a doll house via freecycle. A doll house which consumes her every living moment. It is what she eats for breakfast -- she'd rather starve -- and it is what she requests instead of naps. This doll house is a pain in the neck. [but oh how she loves it! -bec]

And then there was Saturday. We woke up early and visited the Isabella Gardner Museum. This place is a fascinating display of the excessive wealth of one individual. However, I have to admit that I like her tastes and if I ever had that much money, I might find myself drawn to purchasing such exquisite medieval artworks as well.

Apples. I wanted to see an apple orchard again. If we're going to live in New England, then there are a few things which I believe we need to do. One of them isn't "seeing the fall colors." One of them is getting some good fresh apple cider, hand picking apples in orchards, and eating fresh cider doughnuts. Unfortunately for us, that was the idea everyone else in the area had on Saturday as well. But I suppose a 30 minute wait in a line for a couple of caramel apples was worth it, if only to watch Paela struggle with the caramel. The temperatures have been getting colder and we're trying to get ready for the winter.