Monthly Blog Posts

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

What a month this has been - filled with abounding joy and heart-wrenching sorrow - a true Irish month of March. This post is being written from an English garden while on quarantine in Nottingham. March has a lot to celebrate for both of us…

On March 1st we celebrate Chris’ Aunt Colleen’s birthday. On March 9th we celebrate Chrissy’s Uncle Bernard’s birthday and remember Chris’ late Grandpa Jack on his birthday. On March 15th we celebrate Chris’ Uncle Pat’s birthday. On March 17th we celebrate Chrissy’s Uncle Reuben’s birthday and of course celebrate St. Paddy’s Day! This year St. Paddy’s Day was extra special as Chris’ original song was featured on Global Irish Radio multiple times throughout the days leading up to St. Paddy’s Day and he got a special shoutout on the LIVE from Ireland morning program live on the air!!! This March 19th marked Christina’s 19th anniversary of being crowned Miss Body Beautiful (a major subsidiary title from the Miss Malaysia Pageant) at 19 years old. March 22nd marked the 19th anniversary of her being crowned 1st Runner-Up Miss Malaysia - no easy feat for an Indian living in Malaysia!!! As 1st Runner-Up Miss Malaysia, she was also crowned ‘Miss Tourism Malaysia’ and this year was featured on their Instagram story celebrating International Women’s Month. Chris is madly in love with Chrissy and can confirm that she is still stunningly gorgeous with a super brain and a heart of gold!! Closing out the month, we celebrate Chrissy’s cousin Charissa’s birthday. As the math would have it, she will celebrate her Golden Birthday on the 30th Day of the 3rd Month of the 30th year in the 3rd Millennium of our Lord!! That’s a mouthful…

Amidst all this joy and celebration, we were humbled in our hearts this month with two crushing deaths in Chris’ family. On March 2nd, 2021 Chris Uncle Pat passed away 13 days before his 71st birthday after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease and various other ailments. Uncle Pat once achieved notoriety for being Arnold Palmer’s caddy at the 1967 US Open climbing a tree to find a golf ball that Palmer lost - the ball never was found, but the moment got Uncle Pat the spotlight in the papers and created a lifelong bond between him and Palmer.

On March 30th, 2021 Chris’ Grandma Murphy passed away at the age of 91 after a long life filled with more portions of hardships and moments of deep love than most of us get. She was cared for by her children to the very end and died peacefully. We already miss her deeply, but are left with more memories of her precious soul than we could hope for!!! One of the most cherished is having her and Chrissy’s grandma (affectionately called Amma, which is Indian for ‘mother’) as the witnesses for our wedding.

Amidst all the sorrow and celebration, we were hectically getting ready for an overseas trip to the UK (during a pandemic nonetheless). We have too many inside jokes and funny stories to tell from this time - we won’t include them here, but if you want to take us out for a lavish dinner, we’ll entertain you with them! For now, I think the day of travel sums it up best....

On March 26th we went to bed at 1:30am. Chrissy woke up for a 9-hour online workshop at 4:30am. Chris slept in till 7:30am and then started on final preparations for the trip. Chris’ Dad let us know around 9am that Grandma Murphy was given hours to live. To spite the naysayers she held out 3 more days (after all, behind September, March was her favorite month!!). After knocking down some errands, Chris got hot on a 3-hour recording session to lay down vocals for a new song - All I Have To Give - so he could get it mixed and ready for release while overseas. Chrissy’s workshop was scheduled to end at 2pm, but ran till almost 2:45pm. We were already cutting it close and had to put finishing touches on packing and then get the car to a storage facility in Jamaica, Queens during rush hour. Once that carnival was done (sparing the juicy funny parts of the storage facility), we caught a Lyft to JFK and arrived at about 5:20pm for our 6:15pm flight. We were alerted that Aer Lingus had already closed for the day, but Chris, ever the cool cucumber in a hot oven, sauntered to a different attendant and got them to check us in for the flight. As we entered the security line at 5:33pm, Chrissy pointed out that on the boarding pass Gate 11 (our gate) was scheduled to close at 5:30pm. We got through security as fast as possible and did a ‘quick mall walk’ to Gate 11 just as they were calling our rows to board!!! Crises averted…or was it… Chris forgot to cancel our internet service and did so over the phone just before the plane started it’s taxi to the runway. We were finally able to rest easy, have some laughs and enjoy and surprisingly delicious airplane dinner - thanks Aer Lingus!!

Well if you’ve made it this far, we trust you’ve been entertained by our memories and we hope life is treating you well! We have learned in so many ways this month how truly precious life is, so do something fun today and call someone you love to tell them what their life means to yours so that if they die tomorrow you can look back with tears of joy instead of tears of regret.

Sunday, February 28, 2021

Well it’s been a cold, snowy and rainy February in Sunnyside, Queens. We’ve both been busy bees pretty much working throughout the entire day into the evening (and some days late into the night) on our various ongoing projects. Our reprieves have been a 30 minute lunch break together watching Supermarket Sweep on Amazon Prime. We love the people watching and cheesy 90’s/early 00’s game show banter. At night we choose a show to watch with dinner as well. This month we finished up Boston Legal and then watched the 3 seasons of Goliath on Amazon Prime - a dark, but addictive show. We just started up Bosch next.

In addition to her law firm work, Chrissy has been busy with her ICLS work in her roles as tutor and tutor manager she’s also been studying for an exam (shhhh…it’s a secret) and been an active participant in the South Asian Bar Associations (one of the NY Bar Associations she is affiliated with). We’ve upgraded her home office with a new L-shaped desk and various other enhancements and it really brings a fresh new energy to the apartment. Another enhancement to the apartment has been Chris’ Berklee Degree! Due to an administrative error back in 2011, he never received the actual copy, but was able to finally obtain it and got it framed.

In addition to framing certificates, Chris remixed an original song of his - St. Paddy’s Day Morning - which will be available for purchase and streaming on all major platforms. If you want to give it a listen and feel moved to purchase a copy check it out here –> St. Paddy’s Day Morning. He also had all his guitars and bass properly set up and is ready to start recording for the album. In addition, to writing/arranging/planning for the album, he’s been writing new material, brushing up on his Irish repertoire for the upcoming St. Paddy’s Day holiday and lending a helping hand to one of his favorite bar owner’s in Manhattan Mary O’Halloran. Mary has gotten quite a boost in the public eye lately as her Irish Soda Bread Scones have gone a bit viral. Chris maintains her website (check it out here –> Mary O’s) and has been tracking down all of her various, radio, podcast, tv and newspaper spots to add to the Press Page of her website.

Chrissy’s brother Steven’s birthday in mid-February gave us the opportunity to get out and spread our wings a bit with a dinner at our favorite Upper West Side family-style Italian joint - Carmine’s on his actual birthday, which fell on a Monday this year. The celebration continued later in the week when we saw him perform is first live show of a new artist residency at Sour Mouse in the Lower East Side followed by a small party at his new apartment right around the corner from the venue the next day.

We are both looking forward to better weather in March and are excited to continue work on our projects!!

Sunday, January 31st, 2021

Writing a monthly blog is something we’ve always wanted to do and are starting 2021 off by actually doing it! This website was initially created as a landing page for guests of our wedding in 2016 and we’ve held onto it to chronicle our married life together - never too late to start! January 2021 was a good month in the Chelliah-Murphy household with challenges, opportunities, new experiences and blessings! We started the year by creating and praying over our prayer list/goals list for 2021. On the 2nd day of the year, we drove out to Long Island to have High Tea at Robinson’s Tea Room - it was a first High Tea ever for Chris and Christina’s first one in the US. It was amazing!! Currently, indoor dining is shutdown in NYC, so if we want to have a ‘somewhat normal’ dining experience, we need to drive out of the 5 boroughs. We had a couple outdoor meals at some favorite local spots - Omonia in Astoria (Greek restaurant with an amazing brunch) and Rasa in Manhattan (Malaysian spot), but even with heat lamps on blast, it gets pretty cold.

Chrissy is still working with the law firm that picked her up last March (right before the shutdown) and we are so thankful she has been able to work steadily from home since then. Her firm is one of the firms handling the latest class action lawsuit against Robinhood stemming from the GameStop debacle. She is also studying for an exam she will be sitting for in London this coming April. Fingers-crossed things get better and not worse. Chris has been spending a good deal of quality time learning much more about music production - a silver lining from the world been flipped on its head due to COVID. He is currently recording an album of 8 original songs, but in the meantime, you can have a listen to the funny original Christmas song he produced here –> Santa Pooped in My Stocking.

In another interesting tidbit, Chrissy was a hair model for a shampoo treatment at a swank Manhattan salon and it turned out that the girl doing the shampoo is married to none other than Keita Ogawa (renowned Japanese percussionist with the band Snarky Puppy.

Well the wind is howling outside as we hunker down for a brutal winter storm - Chris has cooked up some homemade chicken noodle soup and we are excited for what February holds in store.