Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I wanted to make a time-based project which would evolve visually and functionally. When we were living in Seattle, we went to a sculpture garden where an artist had built a "wall" of twine on a tree and over time the moisture had caused the taught twine to loose its tensile strength and sag. I felt that this was an interesting transition from a form that resembled geometric wire to a organic hair; I wanted to use a similar concept but instead of integrating it with another organic form, to use a geometric cold form. So I built a 5 pointed shape our of steel, but the shape is only loosely connected. Without the tensile strength of the twine, it will fall apart. Over time, I will photograph this piece as it changes and morphs and eventually falls apart. Special thanks to our friends Jayson and Felicia for letting us put this up in their backyard.

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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.

Well that's a short letter. :) Just kidding. I can ramble about something else for awhile. I'm excited to have my thesis proposal presentation scheduled. It will be the morning of December 15th, just a day or two before we leave town. Right before the end of the semester, which was my absolute deadline for getting this done. :) Nothing like burning the midnight oil, eh? It's just been tricky finding time to work on thesis stuff while in a more than full course-load - which is why I had wanted to get this done before this semester and before we left for Seattle. But change happens, and it's important to adapt to those changes. [It seems like we'll be doing a lot of things at the end, right before we leave. -Wayne]

I have the baseline system up and running for my thesis project. Now I just need to do the interesting stuff to improve it. :) It generates paraphrases that are mostly just a few words different, but hopefully I can improve on that. I just needed to get some preliminary results to talk about in my proposal presentation.

Wayne worked on an interesting project Friday night. He wrote about it here and yesterday we took pictures of the sculpture and some of his finished paintings with slide film. It was tricky because it was snowing off and on all day, so the sun wasn't very bright, and we couldn't take the slides out in the open because then we would get snow on the paintings. We're just hoping the slides come out well despite the lighting issues, but we'll find out on Tuesday either way.

Our two major concerns right now are getting applications put together for MFA programs for Wayne, and getting my thesis proposed. We're making steady progress on both things, so life is good. Busy, but good. Bring on Christmas break!! :)

-Becca and Wayne

I'm not going to lie to you: this book is the Cinderella story. However, unlike the Robin McKinley books, I completely forgot this fact for MOST of the book. That's a sign of a good author.

We read this book on our trip home from Oregon and really enjoyed it. The main character, Ella, has a unique curse put on her by a "benefactress" fairy; and if you didn't see all the horrible trailers for the movie that came out based on this book, consider yourself lucky. This book wasn't bad like the trailers made the movie seem. Ella is cursed from birth that she always has to obey any command given her. She wants to break this spell because who wants to always have their choices made for them?

Anyways, most of this book is hilarious and we really wanted to see how she would get out of the predicaments she was placed in. And until 3/4 of the book was over, we had forgotten that this was the Cinderella story; but along came the wicked step-mother and step-sisters.

Also unlike the Robin McKinley stories, this book's magical sense isn't overridden by a throw-away ending, explained by "magic can overpower all." I don't like endings like that. Instead, this book's magic was very concrete and suspended my sense of disbelief throughout. It makes me wonder what the movie was like, but I'm not sure that I want to stomach another Anne Hathaway movie.

Classes officially ended today, and I just turned in my last class project (yay for being able to just email in the final report). I'm very excited to be done with the hard part. Now I just have finals left. :)

We're going to celebrate by going to see Brothers Grimm again tonight, before it leaves the dollar theater. Studying for finals can wait until tomorrow.

Yay! Celebrate!!

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.

Classes officially finished on Thursday, but things weren't done for us until late Friday night. Rebecca was still working on her Thesis proposal paper (which was supposed to be finished on Wednesday, but her advisor keeps giving her new comments) when we got a call asking us if we were coming to the Ward Christmas dinner. Which I had forgot about. Which I was supposed to read something for. So we dropped what we were doing, ran over to the church from campus and ate a small amount of food and then left after it was over to go back to homework/projects/studying.

Stress is a funny thing. For some people, it pushes them to do better. For others, it causes them to shut down. I feel like stress is usually something that gets my energy pumped up and I do better. However, this week has really shut us both down. But both of us are resilient people and we'll be just fine and make it through this next week. And if I don't get into any good Master's programs, so what? Right?

Well, we just wanted everyone to know that we're still alive and kicking; hopefully weather will be good and we'll be able to make a safe drive to Virigina this coming weekend.

Another installment of work on my robot/symbol paintings. This is probably the last group of pictures I'll take of the paintings in progress. Most of them are finished now, so maybe I'll post them on my portfolio page. Hopefully this group of work is strong enough to get me into a good MFA program. Sorry for the poor quality, but I don't want people stealing my images! ;)

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I've been working on painting more portraits lately (do you remember those paintings I did of kids from my church last year). Painting people is HARD WORK. I'm so embarrassed to even post pictures of this painting in progress because it doesn't look good at all. But Emily asked me to, so I will. She is willing to sit staring at the wall for me, so I figured the least I can do is share my mediocrity with the world. ;)

I think that I have a great deal to learn about painting portraits. I was looking at some Rembrandt works last night and was amazed with the quality and life he put into his male portraits. What's interesting about Rembrandt, however, is that the paintings of men are vibrant and masterful while his female portraits are hideously ugly. I guess the guy didn't like painting women or something. He just never showed as much concern with that kind of work.

UPDATE: I finally had a free half hour to put some more work into this. Hopefully, I'll finish it soon.

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They approved my thesis proposal!! Yay. This means I can actually stay on track for graduation next spring term. So I'll be working on creating a paraphrase generation system with more variability in the sentences it can generate. Fun eh? I thought you might agree with me. Anyway, thought I would share the joy. Yay! I'm done! Just one more final and I will be done with the semester...then it's all about Christmas fun.

Ugh. long road trips. I think we're half way through this one. We're spending the night at my parents' place. The trip through Wyoming and Utah was the worst part, although it got a little scary in Nebraska as well. It's just so long. Three days of driving long 13+ hour drives isn't enjoyable to most people. I am one of those. Although we did listen to To Kill A Mockingbird on audio tape. Good book. How much have we learned from our mistakes as humans?

They were right about Virginia's commuter system. It is the worst I've ever experienced, much worse than Seattle, San Jose, San Francisco, Pittsburg or any other place I've been with "bad traffic."

Here's the run down. We left at 12:20pm to take a twenty minute drive to the Metro. We hit stop and go traffic and what was a twenty minute drive ended up being a forty five minute drive. We got to the metro and found parking in a lot that was "declared full." If it was "full", why were there four empty spaces in the lot? We went down to catch a metro; we had already missed the 12:47 train. So we waited in the metrorail that was there. And waited. And waited. It turned out that the train had mechanical malfunctions and we had to wait for the next orange line.

So we caught the next one. And spent $3.55 each on the trip. To arrive just in time for the show. After the show, we took another rail. $3.55 each again. That means we spent $14.20 on transit. Hardly cheaper than gas. However, we weren't finished. We tried to leave the parking lot, expecting an attendant; we were wrong. Instead, we had to go back inside, pay $10 bucks more for a card we are only going to use once; $5 allocated to parking and $5 dedicated to metro fares. These are non-negotiable distributions. So we spent $3.75 on parking and the other $6.25 is wasted money that the metro system stole from us.

Bad? How about the almost two hour drive home; which is only roughly 15-20 miles. That's what I call quality traffic time. I thought that San Jose was worse. I was wrong.

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.

We drove out of Utah on Saturday December 17th, believing that the weather should be fairly nice across the country. But as the snow storm hit us in Salt Lake, we realized this trip might be a bit more difficult that we thought. It took us several more hours than it should have going through the first 30 miles of Wyoming because of that snow storm; because the roads were slick ice and we were trying to drive through a snow storm in the mountains, we drove 25 miles an hour the whole way. There was one point in Evanston where we had to decide whether or not to keep going or turn back for Christmas. But with a prayer in our hearts we made it through the storm and the rest of the trip was beautiful weather, albeit cold.

We spent a day at Wayne's parents' house in Michigan and played with family. It was a nice rest from the drive. Then Wayne spent an afternoon talking with a professor at CMU. After their discussion, he wants to go to CMU even more, but the competition doesn't give him much hope of getting in.

Wayne had bought Rebecca tickets to see Les Miserables for their anniversary and they went to see that in DC. Traffic was horrible but the musical made up for all that [soooo cool!].

The holidays have been wonderful here in warm Virginia. It has been great to spend time with family and relax from our previously busy lives. However, up until Christmas day, it felt like we were still just as busy trying to get things done. But we're finally resting at Chris and Katie's house and the forest around us is relaxing.

We send all our love to those of you this Christmas/Holiday season. May you have a wonderful time and think on your blessings.

Check out some pictures of the festivities here.