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.