Why it's been awhile & D.C. Adventure Part I of II!

Well, I've been working full-time for three weeks now. Work has been fine but you wouldn't think that working all day doing tedious, monotonous work would wear you out. However, by the end of each day, I've just wanted to come home and sit on the couch and catch up on missed TV shows on Hulu or go sit around in bed with a good book and laze about. Brenden's been doing most of the cooking lately, for which I'm very grateful. Weekends have been too short to get everything accomplished that I want/need to do. And I can't help but think of my mother who worked full-time since I started going to school and all the things she somehow managed to accomplish, with grace even. I recently read this article on Yahoo news about the duties of a homemaker and I realized my mom did ALL of those duties while working full-time-- going to work at 6am to get off by 3pm to pick us up from school and drive us around town for all of our extra-curricular activities, grocery shopping, getting a dinner on the table, going to my late night softball games and picking me up from my dance lessons and doing it all again the next day. But all I can do at the end of the day is sit around and wonder how my mom did it all. In short, my mother is awesome and I can't even set aside the time to update this blog.

I have not yet developed the super skills of my mother and I'm still trying to adjust to having only about an hour left of daylight once I get home. Since I've never been the best at updating this blog, it's kinda been sent to the back burner while not running out of clean dishes or clothes are taking up all the room in the front.

In other news, the CPU fan on our desktop computer died and while we get that fixed I have to use my old unfortunate laptop whose keyboard sometimes stops working and CD drive died out long ago. This will explain our lack of pictures in our posts until we get our CPU fan fixed. My laptop is really unfortunate and uploading pictures onto it is time-consuming and frustrating so I'm just not going to do it. I'll post a bunch of pictures after our computer gets fixed. I promise.

I wanted to blog about the trip we took to Washington, D.C. in December at the beginning of Brenden's Christmas break but I think I'll have to do that in two parts since I already took up so much time explaining my current blogging situation. So here's part one of our D.C. adventure:

From my limited understanding, if your goal is to do performance in the music world, you must practice and practice and audition and audition. There is a difficulty in going into music for performance: there aren't a plethora of full-time well-paying performance positions available so when one opens up, you seize the opportunity and practice and practice and practice so your audition goes well. Brenden's ideal job would be performing in a military band. The top military bands are the best in the nation and there aren't many other performing opportunities in the U.S. like them. We went to D.C. to try our hand at a military band audition.

There was one opening for a tuba player in the United States Marine Band, also known as The President's Own. Wikipedia gives a pretty good succinct description of the group so I will direct you there via this link. The band performs for the White House and gives about 500 concerts a year. It is the oldest professional music organization in the United States. So, you know, pretty cool.

Brenden learned about the audition earlier in the semester and had been working up the music for it. He had no idea how he would do auditioning against everyone else for this one position. These jobs don't come along often and since it was a really great opportunity people would come in from all over the nation to audition for that one spot. As the date of audition grew nearer, Brenden became more nervous and expressed his concern that maybe we shouldn't even bother going since he didn't think he stood a chance for the position. This would be his first professional audition ever so it was a little intimidating that it was with such a remarkable and noteworthy band. I encouraged him to just go for it, he would gain valuable experience from the audition itself (learning how they worked, what the judges looked for, etc.), and I really, really wanted to make the trip to D.C.

We stayed with a very good friend of ours right outside of D.C. in Silver Spring, Maryland. Missy was my freshman roommate and one of mine and Brenden's first friends at BYU. She had just graduated and was back at home. She graciously offered us her home and company while we were in town. We were able to come up a little earlier than the audition dates and see the National Symphony Orchestra perform the Messiah. Missy was also our tour guide and after the morning auditions we spent our afternoons roaming the National Mall and riding the Metro around the city, in the evening we went back to her house, ate dinner, and watched Miyazaki films with her brothers. Brenden was given a room in the house where he could practice which was very helpful for him and something we couldn't have had had we stayed in a hotel. Thank you Bethkes!

We arrived at the Marine Barracks early in the morning of Monday, December 19th. Even though we had arrived about an hour and a half before the auditions were even scheduled to start, Brenden was put in the third group of people auditioning (1 group = 10 auditionees). Because so many people had already shown up to audition, the first round auditions began an hour earlier (at 8am not 9am) and went on into the evening (ending around 6pm.) Brenden told me he just hoped that he would be allowed to play for the entire duration of the first round and not be excused early from the audition-- a sign indicating that the judges had heard enough and didn't want him. I just wanted him to be proud of his audition and feel that he did his best.

After everyone but one person had been dismissed from the first two groups and the people in Brenden's group had each finished their auditions, we were waiting to hear his results. One of the members of the Marine Band took his group out into the hallway, far from my view in the lobby. But as the tuba players emerged from the hallway with shrugs of "Oh well" to their friends waiting for them, Brenden wasn't among them. And I was dying to know what was going on. Did he make it? Did he just go to bathroom and neglected to realize I was still waiting to hear his results? I was waiting for about thirty minutes before I got word from him: "I made it to the second round! I'm doing an interview for security clearance for tomorrow morning's audition."

So, the judges didn't send him away early. They kept him instead and I was left waiting for another hour or so in the lobby before I could congratulate him in person. It was okay though. It was a good kind of waiting. And suddenly, the audition learning experience turned into so much more: he had a chance at landing a full-time job with the Marine Band!

Our touristy activities that day were made even more exciting as we contemplated what it would be like to actually live in the D.C. area. Also we knew we'd have an extra day to go exploring. Brenden practiced that evening and I told my parents we'd be coming down to Texas a day later than we had previously anticipated since Brenden was a semi-finalist for the Marine Band and would be auditioning the next morning.

We found out the next morning that there had been over 130 people at the first round of auditions from all over the United States, auditioning for this one open tuba position. And of those 130, there came only 11 semi-finalists. And Brenden-- right out of college, in his first semester of graduate study, at his first professional music audition-- was one of them. I was so proud of my tuba player!