Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

This was my last real week of break before school. I have been trying to take advantage of the last relaxing moments of my life by sitting around and doing nothing, but this week I sort of worked on painting at home. We stopped by campus late last week to pick up my paints and stuff so I could paint from home. And it worked, because I did paint from home this past week. I received a commission from some friends who wanted a monkey painting for their nursery room (they have it safari themed), so I took care of that early on and then dove back into some technical skills projects.

Although we worked real hard this week, we didn't do many interesting things. For example, instead of an action packed Monday evening, Rebecca gave me a hair cut. Wednesday night, we decided to use one more of our free video rental coupons and after wandering the Hollywood video for a long time, we finally chose to rent Over the Hedge, not because either of us wanted to see it, but because we couldn't find anything else in the store we wanted to see less. So, we're not good candidates for Netflix: our philosophy is that if we were to rent the movie twice, it probably means we should just buy the film. But since we don't buy many films, we try to only rent movies that we haven't seen before. And it is hard to determine if a film is worth renting without having a good recommendation (which matches our personal tastes). Over the Hedge was an alright show, very predictable though.

Mostly, this week we read lots of books. I had a meeting with a professor to discuss independent study credits (which I need to fill out a proposal for quickly) and stopped by the library to pick up a pile of books to read. So our evenings passed us by while I painted and Rebecca read stories to me. It's a pleasant and peaceful way to have the time pass.

Saturday, we had double booked service projects: one for Rebecca and one for me. I had originally wanted to drive up to Lehi Park and camp out Friday evening because the campsite manager had some projects that needed to be taken care of Saturday morning. But I was scared off because he kept talking about how cold it gets up in the hills in the evening. Sadly, we should have ignored his words of warning, because it turned out to be in the 70s during the day and not much colder in the evening (probably the 50s) so it would have been a pleasant campout. But now we know where the campgrounds are and instead of fumbling around to find someplace new in the dark, we explored the whole grounds in the daylight, so I believe we'll have to head up there some other weekend. For those of you not from the area, Lehi Park is a large campground owned by the church up in the Santa Cruz mountains. Nice place.

But back to the tale of the two service projects. Rebecca had signed up for helping with a primary kids service project for Saturday morning while I was signing us up for the Lehi Park service project. I guess this is bound to happen when they pass around sign up sheets while we aren't in the same room. So instead of camping out Friday morning (which we were too scared to do in the "cold"), Rebecca went to her service project Saturday morning (early) and then we drove up to Lehi Park to move many truckloads of wood and debris around in the afternoon. By the time we got home, we were exhausted and sore, but we still made it to Kate's potluck/birthday celebration. It was fun and we played too many hours of party games. We're not big party game people [party games are fun once in a while, and good for laughs, but not necessarily "challenging" :) -beck]. After two hours of Apples to Apples and Taboo, we were ready to call it quits.

Funny story about our game of Taboo. We played boys against girls. We were both tied. The last two players were me and Rebecca. Rebecca got three points, and then it was my turn. And I got the word Flamingo to start with. Granted, there could have been several possible approaches to getting my teammates to guess the word Flamingo, but I thought that the easiest way would be to give a visual image that wouldn't include any of the words on the card: I went with Aladdin. I quickly described the scene where Iago tricks Aladdin into leaving the lamp alone so he can steal it, and what was Iago dressed as? Well, apparently, it has been 15 years since anyone except Rebecca and I have seen that movie. And since my brain was dumbfounded by this shocking news - I couldn't think of any other way to explain "Flamingo." Oh well, you win some and you lose some. Was Aladdin really that forgettable of a movie? [just that scene, silly goose! -beck]