Happy October!

This was the image for our calendar for this month. Pretty awesome, right? I can't remember if I ever told you about this calendar. Its pictures are the covers from old comic books. Each image is perforated so we can frame them if we so choose. It hangs right in our kitchen. We like it.

We went on a Haunted History Tour this past Saturday out in downtown Watkinsville. It was awesome. Our guide dressed in Victorian era widow's mourning clothing which is pretty creepy stuff. Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about. The funeral museum in Houston has mannequins displaying the attire and I couldn't stay in the same area without getting thoroughly creeped out.

Anyway, since I was little I've been intrigued by the paranormal. It was a terrible relationship-- I read as much as I could on the subjects of ghosts and aliens during the day and had nightmares at night. As I grew older and became less of an impressionable child, I was able to read about these subjects and not get too scared which made going on this tour a possibility for me. I've always wanted to go on a haunted history tour so I was excited to finally have the opportunity to go. Our guide was excellent and knowledgeable. It was obvious she enjoyed divulging the spooky tales of the places we visited. The chill fall weather and almost full moon simply added to the experience. It was a fun night.

This was the only picture I took while actually on the tour and it's not even of one of the places we visited. This is a really quaint picturesque chapel in downtown Watkinsville. On a haunted tour with the green glow it looks kinda spooky.

On Sunday, Brenden and I went out for a walk to look at the changing leaves. The orange, yellow and red leaves seem like they're everywhere when we're driving around town but when we went to the park on Sunday we actually saw significantly more green than we'd been anticipating. Even so, the autumn leaves were there.

One of the best parts of the autumn season-- stomping on crunchy leaves!

A few other things we did this month:

• Watched General Conference. Conference is always so uplifting. I've been listening to some of the talks over and over again since first hearing them at conference. There were so many good ones I can't really list which are my favorites but the ones I keep listening to are Pres. Uchtdorf's Of Regrets and Resolutions, Elder Cook's Can Ye Feel So Now?, Pres. Eyring's Where is the Pavilion? and Elder Bednar's Converted Unto the Lord.
• I finally finished a little decoration project I made for Stef and her roommates in Hawaii.
  
• Brenden made the front page of the local newspaper, the Athens Banner-Herald.
  
• Brenden and I finally ordered and hung up some of our wedding photos. Yippee!
• And between the two of us we attended 6 recitals and 5 concerts this month. I guess you could say we enjoy music. At one of these concerts we heard a steel band arrangement of Everlong by the Foo Fighters-- that was pretty exciting.

We hope your October was fun and spooky! We are very much looking forward to these next two months!

Tuesday Tunes - Gillian Welch

Hello! This is Brenden speaking. For today's edition of this prodigious periodical, I'm going to introduce you to one of my new favorite artists ever - Gillian Welch. If you've never seen the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, you probably should so you'll know what it takes to be a bonafide genius, or at least a Dapper-Dan man. Also it has one of the best soundtracks ever, made up of Bluegrass and Gospel music.The movie, to be short, is a setting of Homer's Odyssey in the 1930s deep south.

So to make a long story short (too late!), I had the idea a little while back to find more music like what I enjoyed so much in the aforementioned soundtrack. To do this, I looked up all the artists featured on the soundtrack and hit up the UGA Music Library for recordings. They had 11 CD's of music by these artists, including the soundtrack and a live concert version of the soundtrack. The first CDs I checked out from the library were two albums by Gillian Welch: Harrow & Harvest and Time (the Revelator). At first, I was only going to share two songs for this post. Then I decided it had to be at least three.....

The first song I'm going to share today is one of my favorite songs from the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack: I'll Fly Away.

This next number is from Gillian Welch's 2001 album Time (The Revelator). It's called I Want to Sing that Rock and Roll.

And here's Down Along the Dixie Line from The Harrow & The Harvest (2011). When I first heard this song, it was one of those experiences where everything stops and the only thing you're aware of is the music. For whatever reason, this song hits home for me in a way that is really rare. It reminds me of all the people and experiences I've moved away from over the years and of how sweet it is when you get the chance to go back to where you came from.

To complete the set, here's one that's more upbeat: Six White Horses.

This music has soul, even though it might not be super-bad (see James Brown). There's a kind of immediacy to it that makes it unique. From the two CD's of Gillian Welch's I've heard, there isn't a single song that wouldn't be worth posting for Tuesday Tunes (that's why I couldn't just post one or two or three songs today). It's all really solid stuff. I hope you enjoy these songs. I certainly do.

Tuesday Tunes: Andrew Bird

It's that time of the week again. It looks like the Tuesday Tunes is barely keeping our blog alive.

At least this post has something to do with what we've been up to lately.

This past Friday evening, Brenden and I made a second trip to the Georgia Theatre. We arrived at the venue entrance at 7:20pm. We thought the doors opened at 7pm and that the show started at 8pm. But we discovered that we were off by an hour (on the early end). Even so, there was already a line forming outside the building. So we got in line and got to see a parade with balloons and dogs and children in wagons pass by as we waited to be let in!

So anyway, we went to another concert. And it was amazing.

Andrew Bird, "an American musician, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist" (see Wikipedia), was our main entertainment for the evening. Here We Go Magic opened for him and they were good but memory of their performance has been overridden by the awesomeness of Andrew Bird. Something notable about Here We Go Magic's performance was that it was Brenden's first time hearing and seeing a live guitar solo.

I don't want to make this post too long and it would be good to actually post one of these things on a Tuesday. So here is a YouTube video of one of my favorite songs from his album Break It Yourself (that he played at the show) and some pictures from Friday evening.



Andrew Bird opened his show by himself, playing "Hole in the Ocean Floor." When you listen to the YouTube recording, it sounds like he's got a string section playing with him the whole time, but he actually did this solo. He used instant playback and looping to make this work. It was pretty awesome. He continued using this for the rest of the show but he also had an actual band to help out with some of the other instrumentation.

Here's a picture of him performing "Hole in the Ocean Floor"

He plays violin.

And guitar.

In this picture you can see his guitar slung on his back as he's playing the violin.
He also used that glockenspiel in front of him.
And he whistled.
And he sang.

It was pretty great.

Tuesday Tunes - Episode 2. And it's October now!

Well it's just past that time of the week again! This here is episode 2 of Tuesday Tunes, brought to you by me (Brenden) this time. Natalie's music sharing initiative has broken my long blog silence. So for those of you who have come to love and expect Natalie's voice on this blog, I apologize if the change is jarring and I sincerely hope not to scare away any of our readers (even though Halloween is coming).

As a matter of segue, I happen to be a big fan of October. I like to read scary books in October and I like to listen to scary music in October and I like to eat scary food in October (see our post from 11.8.10) and I like to put up scary decorations in October. I love the changing of the leaves and the crisping of the air and the glorious combination of melancholy and ripeness. Oh, what the heck. Here's a poem:

To Autumn

BY JOHN KEATS

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

For my scary book last year I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and it was AWESOME. The book is completely different from the pop-culture version in a refreshingly philosophical kind of way. This year I'm reading Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Natalie and I have also checked out some books from the library including an illustrated guide to the paranormal and a book of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

(The illustrations by Stephen Gammell are a zillion times scarier than the actual stories)

So, anyways. October is fun and Halloween is also fun. And can you guess what else is fun? Music. Which finally brings be to the impetus for this post: Tuesday Tunes. Early in the summer I had the exciting idea to make a mix of songs with Halloween-related themes and you will find below the end result of my efforts. I wanted to make a playlist of songs on horror and/or paranormal subjects that people might not automatically associate with Halloween. I knew there had to be more out there than "Monster Mash," "Thriller," and "Purple People Eater." I also wanted to make a list of songs that might be worth listening to all year, should one be so inclined to celebrate horror/paranormal themes beyond the month of October. It was really hard narrowing the list down to 80 minutes (the arbitrary length of CDs originally based on Beethoven's 9th Symphony) and there were some honorable mentions that might possibly grace some future Tuesday Tunes episodes for your listening pleasure and overall edification.

Halloween Mix 2012 on YouTube

UPDATED: Halloween Mix 2012 on Spotify
Unfortunately a few of the songs on the YouTube list aren't on the Spotify list because those songs aren't available on Spotify. Sorry for the inconvenience. Any complaints may be submitted in the comments section below.

Enjoy! Please comment below with any songs like these that you'd like to share!

Introducing Tuesday Tunes...

...on Wednesday. Whatever. I haven't fallen asleep yet (due to a combination of excess caffeine, thinking too much, and a stomachache) so it's still Tuesday for me.

Music is kind of a big thing in Brenden's and my lives. Not sure if you were aware of this.

I kid.

Anyway, I decided we'd share this aspect of our lives with you a little more by starting this blog thing called Tuesday Tunes. This is both an effort on my part to discover more music and to get Brenden more involved in our blog.

The gist of it is we share a musician, composer, song, or piece that we've been listening to recently. We'll publish these posts on, you guessed it, a Tuesday (except for this post, of course.) We probably won't do this every week but we'll try to do it enough to make it a pretty regular thing.

I'll start with Cat Power's song "Cherokee."

Cat Power (Chan Marshall) released her latest album Sun earlier this month and I've been listening to it basically every day since I purchased it. I listened to her a lot back in high school and into college, particularly her albums You Are Free and The Greatest. But since The Greatest came out in 2006, she hadn't released any new original music until this month's release of Sun.

Sun is different from her previous albums and the direction she's taken it works so well. She's incorporated a lot of electronic sound into this album but her somewhat jazzy voice is the same (though the style in which she sings on Sun is a lot more upbeat than previous albums.)

"Cherokee" (the song I'm sharing with you) is the opening track to Sun and probably my favorite on the whole album.

I hope you enjoy it!

Discovering the Athens Music Scene

There's this free magazine published weekly here in Athens called Flagpole. It provides a nice calendar of events for the week, including concerts and shows downtown. I've lived in Athens for over a year now and I just recently discovered this magazine and, with it, the awesome music scene in Athens.

I'd heard of the music scene in Athens but I ignored it because, well, I've kind of become somewhat antisocial since moving to Georgia. (Bad. I know. I'm working on it.) Because of my antisocial tendencies, I generally tend to avoid places where there are a lot of people (duh)-- including downtown and various events. But after discovering Flagpole magazine and their website, I realized I'm not allowed to be a hermit anymore because then I'm going to miss all of these awesome concerts. Just recently I missed concerts by Explosions in the Sky and Azure Ray. It kills me to think of the shows I may have missed this past year I've been living huddled up in my house.

Well, on Thursday last week, Brenden and I grabbed lunch at this awesome burger place called Stuffed Burger where they literally stuff your meat patty with food. It sounds a little gross but is actually really delicious. Anyway, at this burger joint, the latest Flagpole magazine was sitting in a stand near the counter. I grabbed it to flip through while we waited for our food. I quickly discovered that there was going to be an Album Leaf and Tycho concert on Saturday night at the Georgia Theatre. I didn't know who Tycho was but I've loved the Album Leaf since high school and I told Brenden right then and there that we were, in fact, going to a concert on Saturday.

And we did.

We sat on bar stools in the balcony to avoid the bulk of the crowd on the main floor which was standing room only. The music was so good. It was loud and I never really thought about listening to the Album Leaf at such a high volume but now that I have, I'm not sure how else to listen to him. Tycho was pretty good too. The crowd seemed to be more familiar with Tycho than Album Leaf, which okay, I'll admit, I'm really behind in discovering new music. New music for me, lately, has been the most recent albums of artists I liked in high school.

I'm sort of on a quest to rediscover things that once made me really happy but I pushed aside for one reason or another. This concert was a stop on that quest.

I determined I still really love live music shows despite the crowds.

Thank you Album Leaf and Tycho for bringing me back.

Here are two Youtube videos of songs from Tycho and The Album Leaf. The first video is Daydream by Tycho, which they performed at the show and the second is Into the Sea by The Album Leaf, which is a track I just really like (for some reason this video's length is seven minutes but the song is only about four and a half minutes long so the rest of the track is silence.) Enjoy!

So...

It's been two months and two days since my last post here.

Sorry about that.

A lot of things happened during those two months. My parents and my sister came to visit at the end of July and then Brenden's mother and sisters came to visit right after. Brenden started school again and did so well in his auditions that he made both the top band and orchestra for the year. Brenden celebrated his twenty-third year of life. I celebrated my twenty-fourth. I got more blood drawn and an additional diagnosis (what are we on now, like, six?) Some of my hair has started to grow back. We discovered some fun hiking trails on UGA campus. And sadly, Brenden's dear great-grandpa Vern Nelson passed away. We were saddened to hear of his passing but so grateful for the life he lived and the lives he touched, especially our own.

Each of these items deserve posts of their own. And I might get to them some day. But for now I just wanted to say hello. We are here. I'll try to be better about this blog thing.

During these past two months and two days I've been absent, I've thought a lot about what it means to be an adult. I've thought about how much I miss my carefree days of childhood. I've thought about what independence entails. I've thought about the importance of maintaining family relationships across the miles.

And I came to a profound realization: I worry a lot. Probably too much.

I worry so much I literally get sick from worrying. And then I make Brenden sick of my worrying. And then I worry that Brenden isn't worrying enough. And then I worry that our lives are ruined, we'll be poor forever and die alone.

But at least I'm sane enough to recognize this is a problem.

I'm going to work on it. In fact, I'm currently working on it. For my birthday, I got roller blades.

Let me explain how those two previous sentences are related. I miss those carefree days of childhood and while I will never be able to completely return to those days, I can revisit them on occasion. And I will revisit them by rollerblading up and down my block, across park sidewalks and around a roller rink.

I'll revisit those days in jokes with my husband, free sporting events, ice cream scoops, and movies. I'll revisit them by not cleaning the house and saying out loud, "MY HOUSE IS A MESS AND I'M GOING TO BE OKAY WITH IT RIGHT NOW AND NOT FEEL LIKE A FAILURE."

I'll revisit those days by trusting my Heavenly Father has a plan for me and Brenden.

Today Brenden and I were told our car would need close to a thousand dollars in repairs. (We're taking the car to another mechanic tomorrow to see if that quote holds true.) I worried about that all day today while I was at work. The worrying accomplished nothing except giving me an upset stomach.

Would you like to know what I did when I came home? I decided I'd stop worrying about it.

And then I put on my roller blades and skated throughout the house doing laundry and putting away dishes. (Brenden was a little annoyed to learn that I was handling stacks of plates while rollerblading.)

I've learned (and am still learning) that being an adult comes with a lot of responsibilities I never had to deal with as a child. But it also comes with a lot of freedom I never had as a child. Sometimes I feel I would gladly trade this freedom to avoid those responsibilities. I know that's not an option and I suppose when I really think about it, if I did have that option, I still wouldn't choose it. I have a lot to be grateful for right now and I wouldn't trade it for a few more days practicing softball or winning spelling bees (because I always won spelling bees.)

When I think too much about what the future may entail, I get overwhelmed. But, you know, I don't have to figure it out all at once. I can take it step by step, rollerblading glide by glide.

And really, who would want to be a child again when, as an adult, you can rollerblade throughout the house and no one is going to yell at you?

And for some spiritually uplifting words of wisdom I recommend listening to/watching this video. A friend shared it with me a couple days ago and I loved it. It's an audio clip from a devotional Elder F. Enzio Busche gave at BYU in 1996. You can find the talk in its entirety HERE.

Some Stuff

Firstly

Brenden leaves for Austria TOMORROW! Sorry we didn't keep you guys updated on that gig. Anyway, exciting stuff. His competition is on Sunday and he'll be in Austria for the duration of the entire conference. I'm kind of a little bit really jealous since Austria is kind of a little bit the main country I wanted to study abroad in and never got the opportunity to. I made Brenden promise to take lots of pictures. And buy me socks. (I really like socks so whenever someone offers to buy me a souvenir, I request socks.)

Secondly

A little update on my illness since people have been asking. I'm doing a million times better. I can actually wake up in the morning and stay up all day. No fevers since April. My finger joints, wrists, and elbows are still achy every now and then but I can actually use them. A new and interesting symptom is that my hair is falling out. It started shortly before I came back to Georgia and I originally attributed it to stress but it hasn't stopped since then and my hair is now visibly thinner (at least to me.) It's made me think a lot about my physical appearance and what it means to me in regards to my personal identity. Like, if I lose all my hair will I still be okay with who I am? It seems silly but it's never been something I've had to worry about before. Anyway, I decided that if this hair loss keeps up, I'm going to shave my head before it gets gross looking and cross my fingers that my shaved head isn't too gross looking. Head scarves and wigs FTW.

And Lastly,

Monday night Brenden and I babysat for a couple who is soon leaving our ward. He passed his dissertation defense that morning and they wanted to go out to celebrate. While they were out celebrating, we made cards with the girls for their dad. I brought over some colored paper, glitter stickers, and fancy markers. When you're a kid, other people's stuff is always exciting and fun to play with. This proved true with these kiddos. They were coloring for about three and a half hours and refused to sleep.

Anyway, the oldest daughter is about seven years old and she was determined to write her dad a letter on the back of the picture she drew him.

The letter went something like this:
"Congrats on the test Dad. I love you so much. I hope your students like you. Did you like the test? I am very proud of you. I think you did very good on the test. I think you worked very hard on the test. You are very smart. I think you will make a good doctor."

And she drew a picture underneath with big balloons and two students sitting at desks while her dad wrote 2+2=4 on a chalkboard.

It was completely adorable.

"Sleep is overrated." *

At 12:30am Saturday night, Brenden and I had the brilliant idea to rearrange all of our bedroom furniture. Yes, genius idea. Let's wait until it's really late at night to lift and move heavy furniture. After finishing a little less than an hour later, we discovered our new arrangement granted us more floor space than our previous arrangement. So the next logical step to discovering this floor space was to utilize it, right?

Brenden went to one of our closets, pulled out his tent and started assembling it.
In the middle of the bedroom. Nearing 2am in the morning.

I kept asking him why he needed to assemble the tent right at that moment and his only answer was, "Because there's room."


"Just don't put up the rainfly."

"But I have to."

* As often quoted by Brenden's dad. Happy Father's Day!

Yesterday Morning

Six AM: We left my parents' home on 77th Street and took Seawall Boulevard down to the ferry. We watched the sun rise over the Gulf and I took a mental picture to hold me over the next few months until I can see it again. It's quiet and peaceful. We could see people walking on the beach, running on the Seawall, doing Tai Chi all against the backdrop of a purple, blue, pink, and orange sky brightening over the water. I like early mornings on the Seawall. This is when the locals come out and reclaim their land. These are the people who belong here. Some people don't appreciate Galveston's beauty, but some people are blind. I thought about how much I'm going to miss this place. 

We took a ferry ride to the Bolivar Peninsula at six-thirty. We saw fishing boats and cargo ships bringing in their haul for the morning. Once our car got off the ferry, I turned around in my seat and took one last look at my island, her buildings grey in the distance. It was just me and Brenden on the little two lane highway bordering the Gulf of Mexico. We like taking this route to get to I-10 rather than battling the rush hour bumper to bumper traffic into Houston. 

Bolivar is a small quiet town. Houses are still missing from when Hurricane Ike roared ashore four years ago and the remaining houses are empty, awaiting their summer visitors. There are locals that call Bolivar home and we could see them walking out onto their wrap-around decks to watch the sunrise over the water while they sipped their coffees. There were flags dancing in the gulf breeze from several of these decks, signaling a friendly hello and good luck. We remained quiet to take it all in.

It was a good start to the long drive back to Georgia. 

"Inspiration at Dawn " by Rene' Wiley (a Galveston artist)

An Old Update

This is an old post I wrote at the end of March shortly after my mom left Georgia after staying with us for a week to take of me. It was a great week. I had my mom in town, Mom and Dad McQuay also made a short visit to see/hear Brenden's first master's recital, my fever went away, and I was feeling well enough in the evenings to see Brenden's four performances that week.

When I was writing the blogpost (which I didn't actually finish,) I didn't want to post it because I didn't think it was that big of a deal: I got sick and then I got better. I realize now that wasn't the case.

This post should give you a succinct description of the first month I was sick with histiocytic necrotizing lymphadenitis, also known as Kikuchi's disease which is a lot easier to remember and spell.

3/31/12
Brenden said I should title this blogpost "I Miss My Mommy" because that's all I've been saying since she flew back to Texas Thursday afternoon. And it's true. I miss my mother terribly. She stayed with us for almost a week and she left her magic touch on our home and our hearts.

I really cannot express the gratitude I feel towards my mom right now. I know some people saw my facebook status when my mom decided to fly out to Georgia to take care of me but I'll provide a little more background and explanation about what's been going on these past few weeks.

At the beginning of the month, my body began feeling really achy and sore. I didn't know what was wrong and I attributed the aches and pains to my desk chair at work. The aches got worse and spread across my body more and I was just exhausted and totally worn out by the time I got home from work each day.

The week of the 11th, we finally bought a thermometer and discovered that I did indeed have a fever and was more than just achy. I missed work that Tuesday so I could stay home and just get over my fever. It was Brenden's spring break week so he stayed with me and helped me recover. I woke up the next morning with a low fever and went to work. My fever would get worse throughout the day but that first week of fevers it never got above 102 (and it spiked in the evenings when I was already at home) but each morning it was a really low-grade fever so I just kept going to work. (I really hope I didn't get anyone sick.)

Since I simply couldn't seem to shake this fever, I went to the Urgent Care Clinic that Saturday (St. Patrick's Day!) The doctor prescribed me antibiotics which did nothing except make me more sick. I was told that if I wasn't feeling better in a few days I should go ahead and go back to the clinic so that's what I did that Tuesday. My fever had been getting worse. It would only go down after I took Tylenol or Ibuprofen but after the medication wore off the fever would be back full force. The doctor I saw that Tuesday was pretty sure what I had was mono so she ran some more blood tests. I was told to go ahead and stop taking the antibiotics, which I gladly did, but I wasn't given anything else to try to treat my actual illness. The doctor wanted to wait until she got the tests' results back before she prescribed me anything.

I waited miserably at home each day, waking up in the middle of the night with fevers of 103-104, taking Tylenol and waking up seven hours later with a fever just as high. I had no appetite at all. Everything tasted bad; I didn't even want to drink water. Brenden was back at school trying to work on papers, exams, and get ready for his upcoming four concerts/recitals the next week. While Brenden was at school, I was helpless at home. The day before my mom flew out to take care of me, I was too weak to go downstairs to get myself food from our kitchen. My arms hurt too much to even carry my own mug.

Friday morning of the 23rd, the test results came in and the mono test was negative which meant I still had no idea what was wrong with me and I just seemed to be getting worse and worse. When my mom found out the doctor needed me back at the clinic to get more tests done because they didn't know what was wrong, she called up my dad and told him she was flying to Georgia to take care of me. My dad agreed that that sounded like a good idea. So while my mom was calling airlines and getting everything in order to fly out that afternoon, my dad called me back at my house where I was desperately miserable and frustrated and told me my mom was coming. I immediately started crying because I was so grateful. My spirit was boosted and just knowing my mom was coming to see me made me feel better already.

When my mom arrived that evening, I greeted her from the bottom of my stairs, wrapped up in a blanket, shivering, because my fever was climbing back up to 103. I know I looked like a pathetic sight. That night she made me homemade soup and even though I could only eat about 5-7 tablespoons, it was so wonderful to have my mom taking care of me. That night when I woke up at 2am with my inevitable fever, she sat up with me for the next two and a half hours and let Brenden sleep (poor Brenden hadn't been getting time to sleep or focus on much schoolwork while I'd been sick.) My mom took me to the clinic to get more blood tests done and Brenden was able to spend the day at school, practicing and working on his paper without having to worry if I was going to die alone at home. My appetite had been so bad that week that I'd actually lost a couple of pounds from Tuesday to Saturday. My mom made it her personal mission that I always have some food available at all times to eat whenever I felt the tiniest bit hungry. Brenden and I woke up to a hot breakfast every morning she was in town. I would go back to sleep after eating and my mom drove Brenden to school so he wouldn't have to take the bus.

(I just added this last paragraph to give some kind of close to the post since I didn't originally finish it.)
The doctor I saw at the clinic who was sure I had mono was still sure I had mono and prescribed me some steroids during our last visit. The steroids worked wonderfully, my fever went away, my body wasn't as achy, and I was able to do things again. After we were convinced I was healed (no fevers for a few days,) my mom flew back home. I finished my five-day pack of the steroids that same day and that evening I got another low-grade fever.

A Friend Returns Home

Yesterday a long-time family friend passed away. She'd suddenly had an aneurysm the week before and had been struggling to hold on for the past week.

I don't feel it's right for me to write about her because I don't feel that I knew her well enough to give her a proper tribute. She was close to my mom and had been dear friends with my grandmother but for a good portion of my life I just considered her another one of my mother's Filipino friends (of which she has many.) I knew that she cared for me but I don't think I realized how much she cared for me until I got engaged to Brenden and she told my mom she wanted to give me a bridal shower. I was surprised. I thought it was very generous of her. It was very generous of her.

She held the shower at her home and we had a Filipino feast. She insisted we use her fine china and I was terrified I would drop my plate. She had her husband in the kitchen cooking up food almost the entire evening to keep the table full. Her gift to me that evening, besides the shower itself, was a beautiful crystal vase from Mikasa so that I would always have somewhere to keep fresh flowers. I don't remember exactly what each person gave me for my bridal showers and my wedding but I remember that she gave me that vase because the evening I received it she'd decorated her own home with fresh flowers in vases all over the house. It was a thoughtful gift. It was obviously something that meant a lot to her. It wasn't something to simply make my life more convenient, like a fancy appliance. The entire purpose of the vase was to help beautify my home. She just wanted to help me make my home a little more colorful, brighter, and beautiful.

I think my life and the lives of my family members are just a little more colorful, brighter, and beautiful because of her.

Thank you, Catherine, for your friendship, love, and beauty.
We love you and we miss you.

In Case You Didn't Know

Brenden plays the tuba.

He plays the tuba with his Grandma Binns.

He plays the tuba with his friends.

He plays the tuba by himself.

Hopefully, he will get to play the tuba in Linz, Austria.

This week we found out that Brenden has been selected as a semi-finalist for the Artist Solo Tuba Competition at the International Tuba Euphonium Conference this year in Linz, Austria. He has been invited to compete against 30 other tuba players from around the world. Brenden is 1 of the 12 American semi-finalists. I'm incredibly proud of him. He's been working so hard this year on his audition tapes and his hard work is paying off.

In the music performance world, your depth of experience is generally more important than how many educational degrees you have. A lot of auditions for performance positions only look at your resumé for the first round. This means in order to even be considered for the actual audition you need to have certain things on your resumé: competitions won, prestigious summer festivals attended, and professional-level performing experience.

Competing in an international competition counts as really good resumé material. Being selected as a semi-finalist is already good resumé material, but we want to make his resumé really stand out.

This means we need to find a way to send Brenden to Austria which is hard because it's rather expensive since it's over an ocean in another country on another continent and he has to bring a tuba (which can cost hundreds of dollars each way.) In addition to this, he plans to sleep somewhere and eat food the week he'll be in Austria which, you guessed it, also costs money. (Although he could sleep in a drain pipe in the park. Seriously, check out the link.) He's applying for grants and foreign travel aid from the school. We're cutting our budget down to the bare minimum (we're amazed that there's anything to cut since we're already living pretty cheaply off of one meager income.) And I've talked to my supervisor about getting overtime. We're looking into new and exciting ways to save and make money. We won't tell you all of the things we've considered in case anyone who reads this works in some form of law enforcement. We're open to any suggestions and ideas for earning additional money.

That's the news on our end. Brenden also has his first solo recital as a graduate student coming up at the end of the month. Mom and Dad McQuay are flying over to hear him play and we're very excited to see them.

If you want to learn more about this year's International Tuba Euphonium Conference click on the image below!

New Chairs Kind of!

Brenden and I now have a working computer (many, MANY, thanks to Dad McQuay) which means I recently uploaded a bunch of our pictures from the last few months of our lives. This means we can share some of those pictures and experiences with you. I suppose we could've always shared those experiences with you minus the pictures but it's so much easier to be lazy in blogging when you have a decent pseudo-excuse (e.g., no pictures.) I need to stop apologizing about not blogging more often. It's getting on my nerves and I'm sure yours too right? I know you're thinking, "JUST GET TO THE BLOG POST ALREADY" or maybe you're not. Maybe now that I've said that you're thinking it but before you weren't and now I've planted thoughts of annoyance towards me in your head and my entire efforts at trying to make you think we're maybe cool a little bit are now in vain. Anyway, time to redeem myself!

NEW CHAIRS...kind of

Brenden and I inherited a set of three lovely chairs from my parents. I don't think anyone knows what happened to the fourth chair but we don't have it and my parents don't have it and it may not even exist anymore.

It's a pretty, sturdy, nice chair. (The other two look the same.)
The fabric on the seats isn't really our style. It's a little more formal and fancy than we'd like and the color actually blends into our carpet so it makes the dining area really tan and bland (our dining area is carpeted.) We wanted to give that area a little more personality and, though we have some ideas for bigger projects fluttering around in our heads, we figured we could do a simple fix to bring some of our personality and color into that space.

We looked up a few DIY reupholstering videos online and after we felt comfortable enough to tackle this simple project we set out to JoAnn's to look at fabrics. After much deliberation, we decided on this lovely pattern (found here):

We bought the fabric on sale and since we only had three chairs, we didn't need a ton of yardage. We cut the fabric into the sizes we needed and got to work.

We wanted to keep this project as simple as possible. The chair padding was still good so we didn't replace it and we just stapled the new fabric right over the old fabric.

(Quick side-note about that blue corner shelf in the background of the first picture: We have no idea how to decorate it. We put stuff on there when we moved here that we never meant to keep there permanently at all but those items have stayed there since the day we placed them there. We have two pictures, an empty picture frame, Brenden's old, lumpy (but beautiful, Brenden, really!) pottery projects from when he was a kid, and a large white pitcher. Ideas for decoration anyone?)

We repeated the stapling process with the other two remaining seats, screwed the seats back onto the chairs, and there you have it:

New chairs kind of

To compare the before and after:

We really like how the bright green brings out more of the cherry color of the wood. If we ever get around to beginning/finishing other projects, we'll share those on here too.

One more picture. This is a picture of Brenden with the cardboard tube the fabric came on (we had to special order it and the extra shipping fee bought us a huge cardboard tube!) After we unrolled the fabric, I had to beg Brenden to please remember we were working on a project because he wouldn't stop playing with the tube of cardboard. It was pretty funny and I think I had a brief real-life glimpse into what it was like to raise Brenden as a child. I think he figured out all of the noises you could possibly make with that piece of cardboard.

A Few Things

Brenden, inspecting and opening a box of Girl Scout cookies, "I need to eat these before September."
Brief thoughtful pause.
"That's the real reason they put those dates on there. So that you eat them all and then you run out and have to go buy more."

Also a few quotes from my Sunbeams:

• Randomly, in the middle of class, "I love Santa!"
• Handing me back a white crayon, "This one doesn't work." Same child a couple weeks later after coloring on a piece of blue construction paper, "It works now!"
• Learning about Samuel the Lamanite, "Is he a superhero?"

Also also, a picture because I have one. Look closely:

Brenden is actually holding two books in his hands there. The titles of these books are, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Guess which one he's actually reading.

Reflections: Gariby Family Fun

My mom was recently asked to give a lesson for a Relief Society activity and she asked me for some help. Her lesson is about wholesome family activities and she wanted to know what were some activities I had enjoyed and appreciated while I was growing up. It's been a lot of fun to reflect on my memories of those things and I thought I'd share a few of my thoughts here.

I love books. As far back as my memory extends, I have always loved books. This is because my parents, especially my mother, fostered a deep love of books when I was very young. Our local library had a wonderful children's department with activities each week and during the summer reading program, multiple activities every day. My mother took us to library all the time. I still remember the joy of climbing down the steps into the children's department and looking at all of the new books displayed on the shelves. I remember when it came time to check out and we'd literally have stacks of books in our arms, we'd place them on the counter at the checkout desk and the lady behind the counter would place them in the special Rosenberg Library bags. It was always a good day if it was a library day. Library trips were always exciting for me because they meant new adventures were waiting for me, there were new places to read about, new art projects to learn and create, and new characters to meet and become friends with. My trips to the library in my youth have had a huge impact on who I am today. My personality and my hopes and desires have been shaped by the books I've read and by the love of books my mother cultivated in me at such a young age.

While I was growing up, my mother worked full-time and for her job she had to go to conferences about once a year. She'd always select an available conference during our summer breaks so we could make her conference trips into mini family vacations. The conferences she attended took place in Texas and we became familiar with the fancy schmancy hotels (her employer put us up in nice hotels) in Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi. This meant that while she was attending her meetings during the day, my dad and my siblings and I would go explore all of the hotel's fancy amenities, most often ending at the pool and spending hours there. Then during the late afternoon and evenings we'd visit the Riverwalk or see family friends in Dallas or go driving around town. Those trips were very low-key and relaxed. We'd road trip to each of these cities and I always looked forward to the drive. The drives were probably about half of the fun of the trip. I loved being with my family sharing stories, talking about the fun things we were going to do or had done on the trip, sleeping on each others' shoulders, reading books, and listening to my dad's music. We also had specific restaurants we'd always visit if we were on a certain highway or in Austin for another conference. And it was fun to have these places that were ours in cities that were both strange and familiar to us. These were things I shared with my family and no one else and that's what made them special.

Every year right before Christmas, my family has gone Christmas caroling. This has been a family tradition for years and despite the fact that we sometimes resisted ("It's too cold outside." I'm tired." "I'm a whiny teenager.") my mother always made sure we visited our friends. And of course, she'd make plates of treats to give the families we visited. These plates often consisted of a variety of sweets though sometimes they were simply a plate full of her signature eggrolls. It was sometimes a bit of a stressful process because my parents would come home straight from work and my mom would immediately make her way to the kitchen, preparing the goodies to share with our friends. Sometimes these things wouldn't be done by the time we were planning on leaving, then when everything was finally ready to go, someone couldn't find their shoes or hadn't changed out of their school uniform yet so we'd be a little late getting out and we'd worry that people would go to bed before we could see them. Nevertheless we'd set out, climbing into our suburban or in later years, multiple cars, singing our little hearts out, my dad the one to start us off and usher us into the song, always ending with "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and never quite knowing when to finish the song, while older friends sometimes quietly cried happily- glad to know people were thinking of them, and we gave away plates and hugs and smiles and laughs, and created years of happy Christmas memories.

These are just a few of the many memorable things my family did while I was growing up. We also took road trips across the country-- Florida, Illinois, Utah; flew to various places-- Hawaii, California, Philippines; cruised to Mexico; hosted big parties in our tiny home; invited the missionaries over for dinner all the time; fed seagulls old bread while we rode the Bolivar Ferry back and forth; did the whole fishing shebang with my cousins and uncle and grandpa-- catching, cleaning, and cooking the fish; went to city parades (a fond memory this Mardi Gras season, don't worry we avoided the Strand); held barbecues; visited museums in Houston; made homemade holiday decorations; etc. My family is very close. And though we have done many things together ranging from big once-in-a-lifetime adventures to weekly library trips, the things I cherish the most are the feelings of love and security I have when I'm just with them. It doesn't matter if we're in Florida or the Philippines or our backyard, we take that love for each other everywhere we go and that's what makes our memories memorable, that's what makes me look back on my past with fondness-- the feelings I felt being with the ones I loved.

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!

My New Job: "Please pay ___ by this date"

I have a full-time job. This past week was my first week at work and it was fairly unremarkable. This is what I was hoping for. I'm working at Pettigrew Medical Business Services in their Small Practice department. I do a lot of printing, data entry, filing, faxing, copying, and other generic office tasks that everyone generally finds dull and tedious. Basically, we do the billing for doctors' offices that pay us to do their billing. And while the job itself isn't particularly thrilling, I have some really friendly and kind coworkers. I even have my own office which is pretty fun.

I found out about this job on our anniversary while we were driving to Galveston. I was driving and Brenden answered my phone for me and then handed it to me. On the other line was the woman from HR who had interviewed me for a different job with their company in the beginning of December. The interview had gone very well but I decided I didn't want that job because it would entail calling people and answering calls from people regarding their Emergency Room bills. I once had to deal with a student who was incredibly angry about getting a B+ on one of her papers I graded (very accusatory, shaking her paper at me, raised voice, devil eyes, etc.) I handled it calmly but was feeling sick for the rest of the day. I don't handle angry people very well and taking calls from people upset about their bills just didn't sound like my thing. The HR woman mentioned that another position may be opening up in another department and she would keep me in mind for it if it did. I thought this was kind, kept my fingers crossed but also accepted that this might've just been a kind way to let me down. Needless to say, it wasn't a kind way to let me down because she was serious and offered me the job on the phone while I was driving to Galveston. Yippee!

So I finally have a job. It only took several months, several applications, several rejection letters, several tears, and one job interview. Yeah, out of the many, many applications I submitted I was asked back for only one interview and that was largely (perhaps solely) related to the fact that one of my visiting teachers was the person who recommended me for the position (her office is next door to mine!) Thankfully, it only takes one good job interview to land the one job that you need.

I apologize for not mentioning this job to basically anyone except family over Christmas break. Even though I found out about it before we arrived in Galveston, I didn't really want to tell anyone in case it somehow fell through. I felt like talking about it before beginning it or filling out any paperwork might jinx it. That's how hopeless I had become about this stupidly long and difficult job search. I was so worried about not having a job I couldn't even celebrate being offered and accepting a job because I was afraid I would JINX it. Also, shortly after I had been offered the job, I had a nightmare that I went to work for the first day and found out I hadn't been offered the job yet but was there, along with three other applicants, for another interview. After hearing this, I realized everyone else was dressed up and I was wearing my Rainbow Brite t-shirt and jeans. I woke up from this dream very stressed out and had to remind myself that I had actually been offered the job and that I had accepted the offer and was starting on January 9th.

I've worked a week now. I enjoy it. I especially like the part where I get a paycheck. And I hope I haven't jinxed the job by mentioning it here.

And here's a picture of me in my Rainbow Brite t-shirt with some of the McQuay and Ludlow fam. How absolutely not business casual is that?!