March Madness

The month started out pretty normal. Caitlyn finished her current piano level. She is doing the Alfred's Basic Piano Prep Course. She just finished level D and is moving on to level E. It has been a slow and somewhat painful process but she is slowly moving on ahead.

Emily is nearly done with her current level as well but seems to refuse to practice more often than not and has not bothered to pass off any songs in quite a while, so Caitlyn is ahead of her again.

Emily turned 17, which I covered in a previous post and started her official driving lessons.

We finally got to go back down to San Diego to visit with Christian's father after his ordeal in the hospital. He had to go back in after he was released for about a week after his initial surgery. After he had gotten some more rest and recovered a bit, we spontaneously decided to just go down to visit him on a Sunday. Church has been closed for a while with the outbreak of the CCP Virus so we went down to do the Sacrament with him and Jackie and visit for a short while. He is doing pretty good, all things considered. He lost a bunch of weight but it is starting to get better and he is figuring out what he can eat and not feel sick. He is still working some of the drugs out of his system from the hospital. I guess it is supposed to take quite a while, depending on how long you were under the anesthesia.
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Christian finished his third quarter of teaching and finalized the grades for his students right before his Spring break. Unfortunately, his Spring break will end right before our kids will begin, so while the girls went off to school, Christian and I took off to Yucca to take a 4x4 trail up to Big Bear. The trails were a bit more muddy than snow covered, so we were a little disappointed as we had hoped for more snow. We only hit snow when we got nearly to the top. It poured rain as we came back down out of Big Bear. We passed several schools on our way through Redlands and got grid-locked every time. It was pretty nuts.

We had planned to be back in plenty of time to pick up the girls, but with all the traffic we ran into, we barely made it back in time. Right before getting to the back of the school where we pick the girls up, the police were there, closing off the road. Apparently, the road flooded again and we had to find our way around the closure. It was total chaos.

Later that evening, the rain started to flood our backyard. We have always had some flooding issues on the porch when it rains hard but we have not had it this bad since the year we moved in. The entire porch was flooded and the water level was rising up to the house. The water was seeping into the garage from both the back door and the front garage door. Christian ended up going out there in the pouring rain to dig a trench around the porch and had to continue the trench out to the back of our property so that it had somewhere to go. The yard is a mess. It looks like it has been hit with a tornado.

I'm thinking that this might be a good time to redo the yard and just get rid of the grass but I have not been able to come up with any ideas yet.

I think that it will remain a muddy disheveled mess for a while.

The next day, the girls went to school as normal but we got notice that afternoon that the Board of Education would be closing the schools due to the Coronavirus risk until after what should have been their Spring break.

I had gone to the market that morning and all hell had broken loose. For some reason, the market parking lot was filled to the brim. I could not find a shopping cart anywhere. Normally, they have a whole entryway filled with carts waiting for customers but that morning, it was empty. I had to walk back out halfway down the parking lot in order to retrieve a cart. There were only a couple more available. The store was packed with shoppers, the shelves were empty. The line to the register went all the way to the back of the store. It was scary. I got what I could and waited in line with the rest of the mob. I figured that I must have missed something because I had just shopped there the week before and all was perfectly normal.

When I finally got back and found out about the school closures, we knew we were in for it. Had I known the girls would be home for three weeks, I would have shopped a little differently as well.

They were going to let us know before the end of the month, what was going to happen with the schools, but not two days had gone by before they extended the closures until the end of April!

Christian did not know for a while whether he was supposed to return after his Spring break or not as his district did not say anything for a while, but it became a statewide closure at this point.

Amid all the craziness, Marian sent us some pizza for Pi Day. Apparently Domino's had a special, so she ordered them for us and we just had to swing by and pick it up. That was a fun and unexpected surprise. We were mostly all just tinkering around in the garage. Christian had planned a ton of maintenance work on our vehicles while he had time over his break. Apparently, he will have more time than he thought, although, getting parts and supplies might be a problem at some point.

He replaced one of the U-joints on the XJ and some other things. There seems to be no shortage of parts to replace on that thing. Of course, in doing so, we ended up having to get a new tone ring for the ABS as well, as it was damaged in the process. Everything seems to be like that, or we end up having to get some new tool because you need a special tool or other to get it off. So a job that you think may take a day or two at the most, turns out to take two weeks.

Meanwhile, Christian changed some fluid in the F-150 and he started to take apart the Ranger with Emily. We need to change to gasket for the timing cover because it is leaking and apparently, you have to rip out a ton of stuff to get to it. Of course, Amazon send the wrong gasket for it and then we have to wait another week or so for them to send another one.

By the end of the first week, the kids were already getting a bit of cabin fever and Christian wanted to test out the repairs on the Jeep. We picked up their friend Lily whom, we have already had a lot of exposure to since I normally pick her up after school and took her out with us on the 4x4 trail (Burns Canyon) that Christian and I went on the prior week.

Emily drove the XJ and I sat with her until we got off the public roads. Then the girls got to take turns in the two vehicles. Lily got her license a month or two ago. Emily only has her permit now. When we got up to Big Bear, we drove up and around a bit to find more snow.

We had some sandwiches that I made for the road so we made pretty good time. On our way back, we took a little detour on 1N12 (the Santa Ana River Trail). We finally got into some good snow there. It was a beautiful drive.

On the way home through Redlands, I noticed that there seemed to be some extra vibration on the XJ.  Christian checks it out and finds out that the pinion yoke nut was loose. While checking it out, he noticed that the drive shaft in the back was a little bent as well. Unfortunately, we also found out that no one really makes a drive shaft that directly fits into this model vehicle. There was one possibility but the company that makes it has contradictory information on it. We retightened the loose pinion nut and it drove as well as before but we recognized the smaller vibration we normally feel in the vehicle is probably the bent drive shaft. We still really love the Jeep and it feels better than it ever has but the constant problems on it is getting old fast. We find something new that needs to be fixed after most trips. Although, we are very grateful that we always make it home okay. 

There are also some other things we wanted to upgrade or just fix in the vehicle that we have just not yet been able to get to. It just feels like the XJ is a bit of a money pit at this point. 

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In the midst of all the madness going on around us, our oven stopped working again. It wouldn't light. Since we have already replaced the igniter before, we thought that it must be something else, but after Christian took half of it apart, we found out that it was indeed the igniter that has gone bad. Luckily we were able to order a new one on Amazon as the appliance store we bought it from last time is no doubt closed.
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A few weeks into our "self-isolation," Emily started getting bored or a little crazy and wanted to cut her hair. She's always just insisted on a straight cut. This time, she thought she would try a few layers and some long bangs. She figured it would grow back enough by the time she got to go back to school if she didn't like it anyway. It didn't quite come out exactly as I planned but it was still cute. I don't have a whole lot of experience cutting stylish haircuts...but I saw some people do it on YouTube!

She also heard from BYU-Idaho that she got a small Thomas E. Ricks Grant for the 2020-2021 school year. I believe it amounts to a quarter of her tuition. Now we just need the university to actually open in the Fall!

Emily's Birthday

We just celebrated Emily's seventeenth birthday. It seems so weird that she will be off to college shortly. I don't know if I had mentioned here that she got accepted to BYU Idaho. That was pretty exciting. She also got her drivers permit, so we can legally drive around the city now. She has to wait six months to take the behind the wheel test. She will have to get her DMV appointment and pass the test as soon as the waiting time is over because she will have to leave for college the next month.

Christian took her out for her first driving lesson with a manual transmission. Her Ranger from Christian has a stick shift. Christian said that she did pretty good but she didn't think so and was a bit daunted by the experience. Her behind the wheel instructor thinks that she is a natural though. She was a bit apprehensive when they first took off because she just had another student before coming to pick up Emily and apparently, he should not be behind the wheel. When they came back, she already made plans to take Emily on the freeway for her next lesson. We scheduled her next appointment to be at the end of her spring break.

Marian surprised Emily by coming out to visit her on her actual birthday. She came early while the girls were in Seminary and went to pick them up. When they got back, I had fresh cinnamon rolls ready for them. They were still hot out of the oven. After breakfast, Marian took the girls to school.

We had our breakfast and Marian did some work. She is currently able to work remotely, so that was really convenient. I finished wrapping a few gifts and prepped some things for dinner while she worked.

For lunch, Marian took me out for a poké bowl.

It was really good. After lunch, we came back for Marian to do some more work. I worked on Emily's cupcakes. Pretty soon, it was time to pick up the girls. Marian got us boba drinks. Christian came home but had a dentist appointment.

Emily's request for dinner was a Chinese soup for the winter solstice. We only get it once or twice a year usually, so it's somewhat special to have. Marian calls it 'gumball soup' because there are white chewy balls of glutinous rice in it. I can only assume that that is what she compared it to as a kid. The name kind of stuck. 

After dinner, we opened gifts.

Marian's main gift was a little something for her college fund. 

Afterwards, we had Emily's favorite angel food cupcakes with pomegranate whipped cream. It has become a regular request for her now. 

Marian mostly came over on her actual birthday so that we can go visit with Christian's dad over the weekend since he would not be able to make it over for the party but he wasn't quite up to having visitors just yet. He has a few local visitors that pop in for a few minutes. Some church members bring them meals every few days. He has to go out for check ups with his doctors and pick up more medicine, but those little outings just wipes him out. He doesn't want us to spend two hours driving down to visit with him for only a few minutes. So we will wait until he gets more of his strength back to have a better visit.