The Big Black Crow

When I was a child, my mother read a Chinese newspaper article to me. The article was about a little girl and how she despised practicing piano. She described its appearance as a black crow with giant white teeth. Eventually, they got rid of the piano and she stopped playing. The day the piano was moved out, she did cartwheels on their front lawn to display her joy that the crow was gone. She reflected back years later about how she wished she hadn't taken lessons with such disdain and that she actually missed her big black crow.

My story is similar. I really disliked practicing as a child. It was so hard to fork up 30 minutes to an hour of time to sit and devote toward practicing. So when I quit lessons, it was such a relief to not feel the pressure to force myself to sit and play. After a few months of hiatus, I realized I found myself choosing to go back and sit and play. Not necessarily for long periods of time. Maybe 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there. But I continued to play, no longer for myself but for others. I continued accompanying at music festivals for friends and through referrals. I continued to play piano at church for Sunday worship.

In college, I even continued to do so to the extent that I would drive home on the weekends solely for the purpose of rehearsing with students or playing at a festival. The money I was spending to drive home sometimes wasn't even made up by the money I earned. But I did it because there was something about it I loved. I loved playing music. I loved hearing the music and how the notes I was playing were flowing together in such a way to make melodies.

My dad never sold our big black crows. Thank goodness. And instead of watching mine be taken away and doing cartwheels on the front lawn, I stood watching it as the movers carefully maneuvered it down the front steps of my dad's house and rolled it into my very own living room while trying not to pass out from fear.

My 7'6" (not so baby) baby. 

I'm not the pianist I used to be, but I've slowly discovered to love the talent I possess. Six years ago, a friend asked me while on break, "Do you play piano a lot in your spare time?" At the time I responded, "Sometimes." I didn't have access to a piano very often, and it didn't occur to me to play when I had the chance. Things always got in the way. Here's what he said next.

"If I were you, I would spend hours playing."

That was the first time it really occurred to me that I had a talent not easily earned. And I've spent the last six years keeping my skills alive however I can. Now, with my piano in my very own living room, I hope I can continue practicing and revive some old classical favorites I used to so easily master.

And I hope that I can share with my own future kids, and that you can share with your children as aspiring musicians, a different story. My big black crow was moved into my own house in my own living room. And I still continue to play on it, (almost) every day.

Two Years a To

I wanted to get married as a young child because I wanted to change my last name. At the start of every school year, my teachers would always struggle with pronouncing my last name. I was more thankful for the ones who just waited for me to say it first before trying.

When I got married, I legally changed my name rather quickly for a number of reasons.

1. I was unemployed and had time to wait at the social security office on a weekday for 3 hours.
2. My driver's license expiration was coming up in a few months so it would make it easier to get that changed in one swift motion as well.
3. I always wanted to.

After legally changing my name, I realized that To wasn't necessarily better than Aur. Growing up, chances were I'd end up with a longer last name, because you know, the phonetics of the English alphabet don't allow for many words, much less last names, shorter than three letters. Somehow, I ended up defying all odds there. 

Then, I realized that To was "easy" to pronounce, perhaps too "easy" for most people. Being that it is an actual English word in the alphabet, people get overly confident and pronounce it to͞o. Usually I don't bother correcting them because it's a one-time interaction. I've gotten pretty used to it now, but every now and then if you catch me in the wrong mood, it'll irritate me more than it should.

One time when I was calling the doctor's office for information, I called before office hours so they gave me the option to type in the first three letters of my last name. Well, I typed in my WHOLE last name and hit # and got an error message....so I had to wait and call again after they opened to speak to a real person.

I haven't changed the name on my passport yet because at the time we got married, I had almost 6 years to go until it expired. So whenever we travel out of the country, I just have to remember to book the ticket under my maiden name. The only downside is that sometimes we don't get assigned seats next to each other and have to ask to switch. I've got just under 4 years left, and then my identity as an Aur will only remain in those who knew me as one.

Sometimes when I really think about my name, it' strange that it is what it is. Do I miss my last name? Sometimes. Would I have kept it the same without changing it? Probably not. I remember intentionally asking my students that summer before I got married to call me Ms. Aur instead of Ms. Cathy because I knew it would be the last time I could use that name.

Just before we were Mr. and Mrs. To

I was an Aur for over 23.5 years. I've been a To for 2. Perhaps we will revisit this topic again in another 21 years and I'll tell you how I feel then. :)

HGTV In Real Life: Kitchen Facelift

We thought the kitchen was going to be one of the first projects we would tackle and renovate as homeowners, and we got halfway done....but we ended up waiting over a year. It started out as an aesthetic problem, and we were able to compromise on the aesthetics of the kitchen to put it off and save money. However, when the dishwasher wasn't secured any longer to the underside of our crumbling wood-bits-smashed-together-and-covered-in-plastic counters, it was no longer an issue of aesthetics. Every time we wanted to put dishes in the dishwasher, it would tip forward and make my heart skip a beat.

One of my favorite parts of renovating has been that I can truly make it my own. I'm not overly particular about aesthetics to begin with, but when it comes to the biggest purchase and investment (probably) of my life, coupled with the fact that we bought an older house knowing it needed some renovating, I'm going to be picky. And having seen the results of our kitchen facelift, I am confident that no house we saw with renovated kitchens had one that came close to being my dream kitchen.

Before:



After round 1 of facelift:





During phase 2 of the facelift:





And finally, I present, my dream kitchen:





So...I wish I could say nothing was ever on our counters, but that would be a lie. So this is what our counters actually look like:

We're pretty clean...at least in the kitchen :)

I was in awe for a while after we finished our kitchen. Having lived with the outdated materials for so long, I got used to it. And then, I watched the contractors install pretty much every detail, so it wasn't a big reveal for me. To be honest at first, I wasn't sure if I liked it. Jonathan and I took FOREVER to pick our backsplash (like....almost a year if not more. Yes, we had been looking at backsplash for a LONG time) because I couldn't decide whether it was worth it to splurge on a fancy shmancy design or just to keep it simple and low-budget. In the end, we went simple and low-budget, and I'm more than pleased with how it turned out. I learned that visualizing an end product with just one representative piece is really difficult. Super props to interior designers who can figure this all out in their head instantly.

If you're curious on the materials we used, I've made a list below of every item we bought for the kitchen. I didn't include any of the appliances. All the current prices listed on the links are higher than what we paid for them.

Kitchen Sink - Kraus

Kitchen Faucet - Kohler

Backsplash Tile

Quartz Countertops

Cabinet Hardware

Range Hood Vent

Cabinet Paint: SW Pro Classic Satin Pure White 7005

Wall Paint: SW Marshmallow 7001

Jonathan and I don't splurge on fancy meals or new clothes on ourselves very often if ever, but we do spend the time and money to have a nice house, not only for ourselves, but to share it with others. One thing I've enjoyed most about having our home is being able to open it up to others and have them come over for dinner, host friends who are in town for the weekend, and to share our lives with others. We hope you can enjoy our house as much as we do :)

An Unexpected Water Feature

It started on a Thursday evening. I had just gotten home from a long day, about 8:15 pm and saw that the garage door was open - hubby was working outside. After I parked my car, I walked with my stuff to the front of our house to say hi and saw him talking to our neighbor who was in the middle of walking his dog. I greeted Allie and was letting her lick my hand and was in my own little world of relaxation when I heard the words, "You've got a leak." Suddenly, my attention left Allie and immediately focused on the problem at hand. We had a water leak, and water leaks are pretty high up on my list of "worst things that can happen" list.

To make things more complicated, the leak was at our water shutoff valve in front of the house, AND, our meter shutoff by the street was so snug that none of us could turn it off. So, being a Thursday night, and that the leak was still rather small, we let it slowly drip and went on our evening as usual. Our neighbor joked with us, "You've got your very own water feature now in your yard." Yup, I always wanted that landscape fountain...

On Friday morning, I walked outside to check on the leak before heading to work. The water had risen almost to the top of the valve box. Trying to make the most of my situation, I grabbed a cup and scooped out the water, pouring it around the flowerbeds. (If you don't know, we have a broken sprinkler system, so any kind of watering our lawn and flowerbeds can get is a good thing.)

That's a nice little pond there we had.

Once I got to work, I called the city and asked them to come out and turn off our water at the meter. They told me there would be a $20 service fee (as stated on their website), and I tried protesting it. I told the lady, "We are not trying to be lazy. We've tried multiple wrenches and even tried our neighbor's water meter key. It didn't budge." She then told me that if their guys went out there and found it hard to turn, they would waive the fee. Thank goodness.

Friday afternoon, Jonathan got off work early and went home. He and our neighbor tried to find the problem and fix it if it was easy enough. However, we realized yet another problem - there was still water leaking from the valve. And yes, the water was supposedly shut off at the meter. I called the city once again and asked them to come out and shut off the water a second time, because clearly it wasn't shut off. About two hours later, he came out, unhooked the entire meter because he said the angle stop was bad, and then told us to fix our leak first and then he would come back and fix the meter.

By then it was almost 7 o'clock, dinner was half cooked, and we had no water in the house. We made the call to pack up dinner, wash whatever dishes we could with reservoir gallon water (which is saved from our shower every evening while waiting for the water to heat up), and spend the night at my dad's house. After arriving at my dad's, we finished cooking dinner and ended the night with a movie.

Despite the chaos, we had stuffed bell peppers for dinner. It was pretty tasty!

The next morning, we called some plumbers to see if anyone could come out that afternoon. We had a plumber who said he could come out early afternoon, which worked out great because I was supposed to cook lunch for my dad as a late Father's Day lunch. After we ate and cleaned up, Jonathan and I packed up our stuff again and headed home, not sure if we could stay at our own house again, but hopeful.

Once we got back to our house, the plumber arrived shortly after and came out to look at the leak. He was very puzzled why the city had disconnected our meter and was rather annoyed. He said he had to have the water on to see where the leak was coming from in order to fix it. So he reconnected the meter, looked at the leak, tightened one nut, put the valve back together, and called it good. I was almost in disbelief as to how easily it was that he had fixed the problem. And on top of that, he didn't charge us anything. But it wasn't all fixed yet.

Our water was back on at this point, but there was still water leaking....now at the meter by the street. On the one hand, it was leaking water that shouldn't have been leaking. On the other hand, it was leaking before the meter so we weren't actually being charged for it. Once again, I called the city and told them about our situation and asked them to send someone out to fix our meter. In the mean time, rather than sit back and relax, Jonathan and I took advantage of the water that was overflowing at a rather fast rate out of our water meter box. It very easily could have just overflowed into the street and drained into the sewer, but he and I worked outside for an hour before the city guy came to fix it. One of us sat on the curb and scooped water out with an empty salsa jar into two 5-gallon buckets as well as our watering pail while the other carried the water and watered the flowerbeds, lawn, and wherever else needed it (which was pretty much every square inch of our property that wasn't our physical house.) Every so often we'd switch roles and do the other task. Yes, we did this for an hour.

Once the city guys came, we finally took our break and let them do their thing outside while we lay in our hammock inside and perused Facebook on our phones.

So there you have it. The most unexpected water leak that was resolved in possibly the best way ever...with a complimentary 20-30 gallons (at least) of water from the city that we conserved and reused.

Garage Art

Who's lucky enough to have a husband who's willing to let his wife compromise his coveted garage walls? Me. :) Because they're actually not his coveted garage walls.

He came home 45 minutes late one evening after work because he saw a Craigslist post for free paint on his way home and took a detour to go get it. The guy who was giving them away had used them for art, probably as a side hobby. But he was moving and wasn't going to take it all with him. So of course, my husband went and picked up about 20 gallons of paint. The guy said it was old, but also said some of it was probably still good, so we went with it.

This paint sat in our garage for quite a few months, and lucky for us, we have a rather large garage so this wasn't really taking up that much of our storage space. Over time, we realized that some of the colors we actually needed....weren't the ones which we had. After going to the store and buying two gallons of discounted, mis-tint paint on our own, we decided we probably didn't need the 20 gallons of paint. I do have to say though, the two gallons we bought were exterior paint and so those are harder to come by for free, and since we were painting part of the exterior of our house, we were more picky on color choices.

The husband proposed we just donate all the paint or give it away, but I wanted to do something fun with it. So he let me paint the garage since the inside of our house is pretty much done the way we want.

We started talking about ideas of what to paint. We joked about painting mountains and oceans on our garage walls so we would have some scenic adventures at our fingertips, but let's be real here. Our artistic skills aren't good enough to cover multiple large scale walls. So instead, I looked for some more practical solutions. This website gave us some really good inspiration.

Our first art project didn't quite turn out to what it was supposed to.

Humble beginnings of the first art piece.

The finished product!

So these before and after pictures seem to be in sequential order of each other....but there was quite a disaster that happened in between. I don't have a picture documenting it because I was too in shock. After painting with all the paint tape lines there, I prepared to pull the tape off, because as an experienced painter, I know that you're supposed to remove the tape while the paint is still wet so you don't risk the paint sticking to the tape after it dries.

Well, I pulled off the paint anyways. Yes, I really did. The whole top third of my artwork came down with the tape. Somehow, the tape had stuck on so strongly, (or the top layer of paint was so worn,) that it removed the whole top layer, revealing perfectly smooth, brown drywall. Of course, that's not what I wanted to see. With the top third of my artwork now exposed drywall and the bottom two-thirds still intact, I was freaking out.

After regaining my composure and figuring out how to amend this issue, I quickly found some light colored paint to match the wall color and repaint the exposed the drywall. After that dried, I taped the same design to the top portion of the artwork and finished painting it for a second time. If you look really closely, you'll actually see that the two are not exactly the same. The finished artwork is done slightly differently than the first taping even though it is modeled in the same fashion.

Needless to say, I was very hesitant to continue painting the walls of my garage after this. What if every piece of artwork I painted was going to peel off with the tape? There was definitely no reason in putting myself through it a second time.

Well, I still wanted to paint fun designs like #11 from the inspiration website, so I did. And this one turned out much better, but I ran into a different problem.

After taping up the design, I began painting each wedge. I started with my lightest color and added darker paint to mix in to create the various shades. After I mixed it pretty dark, I decided to open the cans of darker paint and just paint those colors straight instead of mixing. However, when I opened up the can of dark blue that I wanted to use, it had gone bad. Paint smell + sour smell = bad paint. I really wanted to continue trudging through...and then decided it really wasn't worth it. So that can of paint went into the bad pile.

I had a second can of dark paint so I opened it up and tried to use it. Nope. Same smell, maybe even more potent. Those were definitely bad, hence, the new dilemma I had created for myself halfway through starting the project. I originally thought I would have five cans of blue paint to use and mix. Now, I was down to three, and the two that were taken out were my darkest ones. What was I going to do?

I just had to get really creative with my three cans of paint and my well-learned color mixing skills. I think I did fairly well.

I made 10 colors out of 3!

There's still a couple other walls that I want to fill, and I know for sure one of them is going to peel, so I will definitely be scraping that wall clean first before I paint. There's also a can of hot pink paint that I really want to use, you know, since my husband won't let me put it on the walls of our bedroom ;)

Oh, and design inspiration #33 is definitely happening. We have the blue and the yellow. we just need some red....!

Blooms

This week of a seven day period has not been a good one for the news. But in light of that, there are still the tiny joys to revel in.

Today, one of our cannas bloomed.


Back in early/mid-March, our neighbor asked us if we wanted some flower bulbs. They were taking over his backyard and he was cutting back. We thought about our own yard with plenty of greenery but a lack of flowers and gratefully accepted...without quite thinking through where to plant them. On a whim, we decided to pull out the holly bushes in the front of our house that hadn't been trimmed over the years. We borrowed a farm jack from our neighbor and set to work.

While digging out these hollies, we also encountered the underground entanglement of a root system from old trees that had been chopped down which we now had to deal with since we uncovered them. It was quite a bit of work and took a few nights to complete. Let's just say Jonathan and I both proved our muscles to the other and got our strength training in for the week.

After clearing the space of the old bushes, we were able to plant these bulbs. For the last couple of months, I would water every afternoon after work with recycled water. And then the storms would come and the winds would tear the leaves up. And then we had our roof redone, and as careful as the workers were, some more leaves still got torn up.

But here we are today with our first blooms :) I love nature.

♫ Raindrops are fallin' on my house ♪

All this rain we're getting in Texas is probably making most people miserable. It's hard to have outdoor parties and plan events, all the amusement and water parks are probably losing revenue because of low attendance, and in general has probably made traffic a lot worse than it usually is when it's simply dry summer heat. I didn't really think about it last year when we bought our house, but all this rain has really been a blessing for us and the house. 

The sprinkler system at our house is broken. We knew that from the get go. After buying the house, we spent a few months trying to fix it ourselves and find the root of the problem. At first, we realized that there was no power cord for the system controller. Seriously?! So I went out and bought a $15 power cord. I really was hoping that was the extent of the problem, but of course, it wasn't. After that, Jonathan and I spent some weekend afternoons (with some help) digging along the course of the system. We found a broken wire that had been cut somewhere along the line and attempted to find the other side. We were pretty much digging aimlessly and called it quits after too many hours spent with no luck found. 

We I spent the rest of August to October watering twice a week after work by hand and by setting up an outdoor sprayer. After October, we mainly just watered the flower beds and around the foundation to keep everything settled properly. 

This spring, the rain has continued, and is still coming down as I write. Jonathan and I recently changed up our landscaping in order to fix a drainage problem our front yard used to have as seen in Exhibit A, displaying my amazing skills via Paint. The inner side of the "U" used to fill completely and rise all the way up to the edge of the paver stone. That's almost kiddie pool status, guys.

Exhibit A: A before (left) and after (right) of the front landscaping in our house. The green represents paver stones to delineate flowerbeds. Please excuse the tree on the right. It started slipping down. 

After changing up the pavers and shrinking the flowerbed, we needed to re-sod and re-level the part of our lawn that was altered. We definitely underestimated the amount of sod we needed. Twice. 

Exhibit B displays what we currently have. 

Exhibit B: Pavers moved, sod placed down, and the tiny little spot that we failed to level correctly and/or put sod there because we ran out and we're amateurs. But look at that wonderful green grass!

Our neighbor who's lived next door to this house for 20 years, paid us the biggest compliment we could ever expect to receive having been through what we have with our house. "This yard has looked the best it ever has right now." But really, we can't take most of the credit. We mow almost every weekend and try to pull some of the larger weeds when we can, but most of the credit has to go to the rain and what a blessing it's been.