Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.

-Jean Michel Basquiat

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.  read more »

Last night, I wanted to do something special for Rebecca, for when she returned home from girl's camp. She's spent the past four days up in the mountains. I cleaned the house, got everything ready and even went to buy the cat litter mat that we always talked about purchasing but never did. Everything was ready for this morning.

Then I woke up to find that our cat, Star, had eaten through the rubber mat.  read more »

Robin McKinley once stated that every author has one story they are trying to get out and all their works can be traced through that story line. Although I hadn't noticed that before, after reading these two books (and several discussions with Rebecca on the topic), I'm convinced that many authors follow this pattern. Dan Simmons has an obsession with taking literary genius and bringing a reincarnation to a future science fiction conflict. And his grasp on making an interesting world definitely convinces me that there are volumes of backlog notebooks he's written for his story.  read more »

"This idea of a talking stick (Pinocchio) becoming a boy, it’s like a metaphor for art, and it’s the ultimate alchemical transformation."

-Jim Dine

I really can't remember what, if anything, we did this week. Neither can Rebecca. But she's too stressed right now because she's all that's left of the young women's presidency. The first counselor suddenly moved, the secretary has been release this past month and called as Primary president and the president just had her kid 3 weeks early. So while she's preparing her lesson to teach all the young women (and will be for the next month), I'm exhausted because the heat last night wouldn't let me sleep at all.  read more »

This piece I started a couple days ago, and since the progression of a work still fascinates me much more than the final piece, I will continue to take pictures of this work in progress.

• View album

While living in Seattle, I did a large amount of these figurative ink paintings. To capture the vibrant quality of life and metabolism, the restructuring of life, I painted with natural elements, using twigs, leaves and stones for brushes.

• View album

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

-Andy Warhol

So a lot of this week was spent working on editing my thesis once I got comments back from my advisor and second committee members. I even spent a good chunk of the 4th just working on that. It was hard to fall asleep at night a couple of nights, trying to turn my brain off on what else I wanted to add and include. I almost have a final draft now...just a few more comments that my advisor sent yesterday that I'll wake up bright and early tomorrow to work on. Now the trick is getting the defense scheduled when my whole committee is in town!  read more »