Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Who knew hand, foot, mouth disease was a real thing? Or that it was "fairly common"? I've never heard of it before...until Friday.

We noticed Paela had a fever Tuesday evening, and she was obviously feeling icky all day Wednesday. A pretty nasty fever of 103, but tylenol helped a little. Thursday the fever was gone and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief that we didn't have to figure out what a doctor visit without insurance would run us. Note to future self: move "figure out what we should do about insurance" a little higher up on the to-do list.  read more »

It was a busy week this week, but not a lot to report. I had several meetings: one with a "career transition counselor" and one with state unemployment folks but two different days. I don't mean to complain, but -- when the letter the state sent me said I had to come in promptly and that "late arrivals will not be accommodated" -- why did I have to wait an hour to be seen only to be told everyone was in a meeting and to please reschedule for another day? I ask you? All I can conclude is the maxim "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is what we're seeing here.  read more »

We were busy all throughout the week. Rebecca hasn't slept much each night because she has stressed about finding work. [By the end of the week, I found stopping job hunting tasks/thoughts an hour or two before bed helps tons in being able to sleep. Perhaps there's good reason for the typical work schedule of the salaried employee. -bec] Rebecca has gone to many meetings with Lee Hect Harrison and reviewed her resume. Most of the meetings are, oddly enough, supposed to help people find their way around the company's website for job listings. I am still trying to put my faith in this company and what they say, but if they are catering to the lowest common denominator and Rebecca has only gotten more frustrated and worried about job hunting since participating in their seminars, I am beginning to doubt. I doubt the economy will rebound as well as people think. I doubt people have any idea how bad it really is.  read more »

The show was up Monday, but attendance was light. I had three or four professors bring their entire classes by my pre-thesis project for quick demonstrations and participation, but a bug was rampant through the code and the performance was not ideal. All morning long I was calling Rebecca desperately pleading for solutions, however none came until after we shut down and could debug the issue. (It was funny that the bug seemed to disappear when Rebecca showed up after lunch. She was the good luck charm.) New media work is always broken, they tell me. Zero1 festival kind of proved that -- the percent of functioning pieces was well below 50%.  read more »

Some of you may know we've been signing for Paela since she was born. We don't know a lot of sign language, but what we had read assured us that babies know even less; that even "baby talk" sign language would be picked up by our child. And so we tried it, signing "milk" and "more" whenever we fed her from newborn age on.

Wayne can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was around 8-9 months that we finally thought she could understand what we were signing to her. We would do the sign while saying the word, so it is hard to know for sure whether it was the vocal or visual cue that clued her in. She started doing the "up" sign around then, when she wanted to be taken out of her high chair after eating. We were excited and were sure more signs would soon follow. We were wrong.  read more »

Mostly the week was filled with ATC prep work. There were a few other things throughout the week, but mostly it was last minute touches and setting up the show.

We got the shocking function added in early in the week, and Wayne made sure we bought/rented the equipment we didn't have already (projecter, thing to put the projecter on, thing to put over cables so no one trips, etc). Friday and Saturday were spent setting up in the gallery. It was the first time all the pieces were together at the same time, so of course it took more work than we expected. The good news is, even though we hit quite a few snags, we solved them all relatively quickly.  read more »

And a happy birthday to princess Paela, ruler of all at the Madsen household. Our little adventurer was busy with firsts this week.  read more »

Perhaps we should talk about all the things we didn't do this week. I didn't go to work. Wayne didn't make it to the free culture conference he wanted to go to on Saturday. We didn't make it to the beach. Paela didn't nap at Church again -- I think she is done with Church naps finally. It's asking a lot for a toddler to sit still long enough to sleep. And toddle she does.  read more »

Unemployment is a very common term around here. In the past half year, Rebecca's work has seen occassional layoffs. Then they took the plunge and dropped 20% of their remaining workforce on Wednesday, including Rebecca. With their stock at 3$ a share now, we don't expect the company to last very long -- or at least not without outsourcing almost everything to India. Which is already the direction they've been going.

So, Rebecca is unemployed. After a 700+ point drop on Wall Street, many companies here are jumping ship and eliminating their workforce. We see moving trucks all the time, people are leaving the area like rats in a burning building. On the positive side, Rebecca now has more time to spend with Paela and I can frantically try and get my pre-thesis defense finished in three weeks.  read more »