Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

The main event of the week happened Friday night. Most of the rest of the week built up to that event. Wayne worked with a couple of other artists on a project to be shown at the Montalvo Arts Center for their Starry, Starry Night show. Montalvo has this event every year celebrating art and astronomy with lots of activities and art projects and guest speakers, ending with a sleepover under the stars on the front lawn and a pancake breakfast. They also had telescopes set up for people to do some star-gazing. We heard lectures on sun-spots and saw installations in the trees; we listened to people (mostly kids) singing karaoke for popsicles. There were movies and hands on painting prayer flags and story-telling. It was quite the event. We didn't end up staying the night after all; we opted to drive home really late and sleep in a real bed where we would actually sleep instead of tossing on the ground.

Wayne and his artist friends created a program to download images from a Nasa website that has real-time photographs of the sun (they use a satellite in space so they can always point at the sun). The program blended from one ultraviolet image to another, pulling occasionally from archive images they had downloaded already, and projected the images on the ceiling of the "Love Temple" [which is called that because it is where people get married...I believe it is actually the Apollo Temple, which is why the reference to the sun made sense]. It looked pretty cool in the end, especially at night. You could see the whole temple glowing different colors from quite a distance, depending on which filter lens was being downloaded.

I got to help some with the project too, since Wayne decided to code it up in Java. We worked on code several late nights during the week, trying to resolve issues that arise from running the same program all night long with limited internet connectivity. The team lead even bought us pizza one night to encourage us to all work on campus together.

Mostly we had late nights with the code not because it was terribly complicated, but because we didn't let it slow us down the rest of the week. We still ran up to San Francisco Wednesday night to hang out with one of my old roommates, Christy. She was in town for a sign language conference, and had the evening open. We drove around a huge park I didn't realize existed in San Francisco (the Golden Gate park...we'll have to go exploring more in the daylight!). We also visited a garlic restaurant called the Stinking Rose. Talk about an overload on garlic. We ate more garlic that night than we did at the garlic festival a few weeks ago! One dish had 40 cloves of garlic in it. It was impressive. And delicious. Not a place we'd go to all the time, but definitely an experience.

We had the second of three childbirth classes Thursday night. We did learn some. I think the biggest help is that it gives us an opportunity to discuss questions one or the other of us has, it gives us a starting point for making sure we're both on the same page. And for defining vocabulary words. Anyway, one more class to go and I guess we'll be "all trained" for the big event in October, right? We'll be experts, right? Everything will happen just like we're expecting, right? Hehehe.

And Saturday we slept in a bit to recover from so many late nights this week, and I hung out with my friend Kate all afternoon. Before I left home, Wayne and I made a silly "pizza bet." These pizza bets are generally short-term excuses for getting pizza for dinner, since if I win, Wayne "owes" me pizza, and if he wins, I "owe" him. It's a win-win situation in my mind, a silly way to agree to get pizza. He won last night, but I still think I'll win the next one!