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?!