October

I've gotten a bit lazy about my posts since I had been down to one post a month, more often than not, these last few years. When you get out of the habit, you lose track of a lot of the little things that you meant to record but can sometimes barely remember, which is a big point for these posts in the first place.

We've been spending a lot of our free time taking Christian's new truck down 4x4 trails. We've been exploring the high desert in and around Joshua Tree and 29 Palms.

The kids get to drive a lot out here. Some of it has been really fun and some of it has been a bit stressful for them, depending on the situation. 

Christian needs to get away to relax a bit since work has been pretty stressful with all the lesson planning, grading and frustration with his lazy students.

One of his students writes for the school newspaper and did an article on him.

They did a feature on new teachers. It was nice.

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Our kids finished their first quarter. Both are doing fairly well in their classes but I think we will need to make some changes next semester...especially for Caitlyn as her school work is killing her. She is buried in AP US History work constantly. The amount of work that her teacher requires from them is staggering. When Emily took it (and did poorly), we knew that her teacher was pretty strict and demanding, but we also knew that Emily was being lazy and didn't want to do a lot of the work, so it was hard to get a really good feel for the class. Caitlyn does all the work and she even likes aspects of the class, but it is just too much. She has no life. She doesn't have a very much time to spend with her family and is always stressed out...sometimes to the point of tears.

She really wants to complete the class. I think it is a point of pride for her or just some challenge she wants to complete but I think we are going to demand that she drops the class at the end of the semester....have her just take Honors US History or at least take the online course. Many people we know dropped it early to do just that. It is too late at this point to have her drop it. She will fail otherwise, so she needs to make it to the end of the semester.

The sucky thing about that is that her teacher will have covered all but two chapters of their textbook by then. I'm not sure what she is planning to do with them with the remaining time, and although Emily doesn't remember, she assures us that it does not get any easier. Anyway, we told her what we think and expect and hopefully she will take some time to get used to the idea and accept it. Hopefully, it will bring her some relief.

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On one of our 4x4 trips into the High Desert, we got a hold of some guns to take the girls out to do some shooting. 

Emily is actually a fairly good shot. Caitlyn needs some work. Mostly, her arms get too tired to hold it up and aim properly. We need to have her work on her spindly little arms. She doesn't have PE this year and we have not gotten that much back into climbing, so all she does all day is sit at her desk and work on her homework.

We went up some pretty spectacular and crazy trails.

I don't think any of the pictures does any of it justice. Unfortunately, as we were returning towards the end of the day, we put a couple of gashes into the tires on the right side of the vehicle. Even one of the wheels got a bit chewed up.

Christian isn't too happy with the giant wheels that the truck came with. Although the truck is a 4x4 vehicle and we have some nice all terrain tires on there, the giant 20 inch wheels are strictly for the city. We are undecided about what we are going to do about that. But for now, we will probably have to get an extra tire or two depending on the condition of the tires. We are thinking that maybe will replace the gashed tires and even get an extra rim to put the old tire on to use as a ready to use spare if we keep coming out here...we'll see.

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We didn't do much for Halloween. The kids didn't dress up. We stayed home. I made a meal in a pumpkin for dinner and we watched Transylvania 6-5000 on Amazon. I bought a handful of candy just in case anyone came by. One person did...only because they are friends that live in the area.

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We did manage to finally get everyone out to the dentist this month. We are all a bit over-due for our check-ups, especially Christian and I. Both the girls got through with flying colors. Christian only needed a bit of extra cleaning, but I think that I am going to have some problems that will need to be fixed soon. I have gotten to that age where a lot of my old fillings from my childhood are failing and will need work, so I am not looking forward to any of it.

Rocktober

The young men in our ward go every year to the Rocktober in Lucerne. They camp out and set off rockets in the dry lake bed. They usually invite the young women over on the last day to join them. The girls wanted to go last year but it got rained out. The boys got stuck in a muddy mess there. Luckily, the girls found out before heading out there.

This year, as a Laurel advisor, I was asked to go along with the girls. Emily wanted to go but Caitlyn was hesitant as she is under so much pressure with her homework in her AP US History class. It is quickly becoming a bane in all our lives. But in the end, we all headed out to the Lucerne dry lake bed. We were also driving a friend of theirs from church.

When we got there, it was a lot more crowded and chaotic than we had anticipated and couldn't find our group. They put the engines in their rockets that they made and signed up for their rocket launch.

The line is pretty long, so it took a while to get up there.

Caitlyn's rocket went up but Emily's ended up to be a dud. We think it was the launcher. Here's where it gets ugly. While they were waiting for their rockets to launch and to get the all clear to retrieve their rockets. Christian heard a bunch of kids with foul mouths joking around and trying to get Siri on their phone to say vulgar things in different languages. They started off using words that "sound" like perverted words they wanted to use and then got bolder. Of course when Christian turns around to see who is doing it, we find that it is some of the younger kids in our own church group. The group comprised both the girls and the boys. Our girls heard a little of what they were doing and had moved off a bit.

Christian was livid and went back to their camp to ask the leaders there who was in charge of the eldest ring leader of the nefarious little group. The leader proceeded to ask the boy about what was going on, and of course the boy just boldly lied and feigned ignorance. At this point, Christian knew this approach was getting no where. Christian stepped up as his accuser and witness and called him out on his lie and walked off in a huff. The leader then called Christian back and actually accused him of "bullying" the boy. The boy went off to play some more.

Christian and the leader continued to have a heated discussion on the matter. Apparently, it was no surprise to any of the young men leaders that this boy was causing problems as this was not the first situation they have had to deal with concerning this boy and apparently, it will not be the last as he faced no consequences, yet again, for his actions and leading the younger kids in his group in his examples.

Later, he had all the kids in the group give a lame "apology" to him about their behavior as if they weren't really doing anything that wrong but regret that they hurt his sensitive sensibilities or something. Not one of them would own up to what they were actually doing and the leaders. By the way, a couple of the leader's kids were among the group.

Christian wanted to leave, but as I had responsibilities there and we had brought one of the other girls, we decided to stay but Christian went off for a walk as he couldn't stand being around these people any more. 

I was sitting with one of the other Young Women leaders and she was asking me about what was going on. The mother of one of the other girls in the group was there and pulled her chair over to hear and the girl freaked out and ran over to her mother to pull her aside so she could put her spin on what happened. That it was all some kind of misunderstanding or something. Her mother clearly wanted to believe her daughter and I didn't waste my breath correcting her. I merely told her that there was no misunderstanding and that if she really wanted to know what was being said, that I would tell her and left it at that. Of course, she declined to find out what that really was. The mom seems like a pretty decent person but definitely has blinders on when it comes to her little girl because we have subbed for her class when she was in primary before and she has a horrible attitude and struts around like her shit don't stink.

Anyway, this post is getting longer than I had intended. The girls tried to make the best of it by socializing with the older girls. They tried to get in one last rocket launch since Emily's never went off. They waited in line and got assigned as the next group to go up and then because some people took too long and lingered out on the field, they cancelled the last launch and the girls waited for nothing. 

They took a dinner break and said that the would resume at 7:pm for the night launches. Christian came back when the sun started to go down and we had dinner and considered leaving. But the night launch was said to be really spectacular. The kids attached glow sticks to their rockets and they were supposed to set up this big rocket full of glow sticks. They said that it was like fireworks. So, we decided to stay a little longer. The kids got in line with their glow rockets so that they could be nearly first in line to get one last launch in before leaving. They did not launch at 7. They did not launch at 8. And when they finally did launch, they didn't let the kids in line launch, they launched the big rocket and it took like 3 tries to get it to go. When it went up, it was totally anticlimactic as you didn't hardly even see any glow sticks at all. Just a big rocket launching in the dark. Pretty lame. Then everybody ran out to get the glow sticks and they still couldn't launch the kids' rockets because now they had to wait until all the people cleared the field again. We just left at that point, completely irritated and disappointed. 

We let the three girls drive a bit off road just so that they got to do something before coming home.

And of course, the next day at church, the young man behind all the trouble at Rocktober, was out there passing the sacrament, with his leader, without ever admitting to his wrong doing. We are beyond appalled and deeply disturbed.

Joshua Tree

We headed out to Joshua Tree this past weekend for two purposes. To take Christian's new truck out to explore some 4x4 trails and to do a bit of climbing. The truck works great out on the 4x4 trails, although, we didn't really get anywhere. The kids got some practice behind the wheel, so that was nice.

Afterwards, we headed into the park to find our climbing route. The park was a bit crowded, so that kind of sucked. We had a bit of a problem identifying our route. It was a neat multi-pitch route, but a lot of people thought that the rating was kind of sand-bagged. Christian climbed up and around the whole area on his own and didn't think that it would be difficult at all. In the end, we decided to save it for another day as it was already into the afternoon at this point and we didn't know what exactly to expect.

We didn't want to try to fight for another parking spot with the tourists, so we just looked around the area we were already in to find something we can climb. In the end, we made our own route up the Dire Straits Rock. The kids called it "Kick-Ass Crack."

They rated it as somewhere between 5.4 and 5.5, but I thought it was harder, mostly because I was too short to use any of the holds everyone else did. I almost gave up. The crux is shortly after you get on the route so I didn't make it very far, but after several attempts at trying different things, I finally found something that I thought might work. I did still fall off of it on my first try, but it felt different; it felt possible. So, I tried that move again and finally made it up and was able to continue up on the route to the top.

Special thanks to Caitlyn for pictures of Christian and myself. She gets to play with Christian's climbing camera in exchange for letting me steal some of her pictures, so it is a win-win!