Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Sorry we've been a bit inconsistent for family emails the last month or so. We've been all over the country and having fun, but internet/computer access was a questionable at best. So to recap, we spent Christmas and New Year's in Virginia with my family, stopping briefly in Michigan to visit Wayne's family and in Pennsylvania to visit a school Wayne's applying to.

Visiting family is always fun, but never long enough. Oh well, at least we will always look forward to the next time since we don't get our fill. :)  read more »

Take a flashlight to Hawaii. That's what we learned. More than once we wanted to go exploring but failed because of a lack of lighting. We explored the lava tubes (interesting cave-like formations made from lava cooling in stages), but after a certain point in the tube, they stopped putting up lights and you couldn't go farther without a flashlight of your own. [I'd like to point out that more than 3/4 of the first cave we visited was unlit. -Wayne] We tried exploring some caves near a waterfall, but failed because there were no lights at all in the cave. Next time we go to Hawaii, we'll know to BYOF -- bring your own flashlight.  read more »

Delta didn't call my Grandfather or anything, they just cancelled our flight. None of us in our party were let in on this trick until the day of the flight. Apparently Delta used to make daily flights from SLC International to Kona International, but they cut back to two flights a week...without telling anyone. I guess this is how a company going into bankruptcy treats its customers. Or maybe this is how they got to bankruptcy? So after a nice lunch with Grandpa and Uncle Max, we came back to Provo and played games with Jayson and Felicia (upstairs neighbors) until much too late. But we were on vacation, right? That's what you're supposed to do on vacation.  read more »

Merry Christmas to everyone and we hope that everyone is having a great holiday season. We decided to take a quick break from everything today to tell you about our travels and what we've been doing this holiday season.  read more »

Just one more week. Just one.

Although this semester is coming to a close and Rebecca has two of her three finals first thing Monday morning, the next worst thing is MFA applications for me, for which I feel completely unprepared and overwhelmed by the competition I'm up against. I'm applying to seven schools; honestly, I don't expect to get into any.  read more »

We can't think of anything we did this week. At all. :) I mean, besides work and school, of course. We even worked on class projects and my thesis proposal on Friday night, which is usually date night. Oh, we rented Madagascar and watched that, but we were working on other things while we watched. But the good news is, we're almost done with the semester! Yay! We've almost officially survived. For what that's worth.  read more »

Two more weeks of school. I don't know how we're going to finish what we need to in that time, but at least then it will be over and we can look back at everything, instead of feeling its weight on our shoulders.  read more »

This week we've worked on survival. For today, we each prepared a lesson for our classes and a talk for Sacrament meeting, and were glad to hear they didn't need us to speak in the East Lake care center after all. I guess they have a branch in the local care center, and each ward in the stake alternates who is responsible for providing people to talk, pass the sacrament, and help the folks to the meeting room (down the hall from all of their rooms). They had booked two sets of speakers accidentally, so I just attended with the young women and got to listen.  read more »

Rebecca spent most of this week programming and finishing her project at the last possible minute. It was especially tricky because she had mutual on Wednesday evening. For mutual, they did a "cultural heritage" night and each girl brought in something that related to thier cultural heritage. Rebecca decided to bring in a buttercreme cake and talk about Germany. The cake was a huge success (one of the girls wanted the recipe) and I only got a piece by luck.  read more »

It's amazing how just one short weekend can set you back so far in school/work. I think it's a combination of not working on homework and work projects for 3 days, plus falling behind on sleep due to 2 15 hour drives. At any rate, one of my professors on Tuesday asked me how I was doing (since I got to the classroom a few minutes early and he likes to chit-chat with the early birds), and I replied that I was tired. He didn't think I should be tired because "you got an extra hour of sleep, didn't you?" Ha. Ha. Very funny.  read more »