But by the end of the month, we finally got the results and he passed! Now we just have to hassle Brandman to forward all the necessary information to his district. Hopefully he will be working with his preliminary credential at the beginning of the fall instead of the emergency credential as he will still have a lot of work to do to proceed from there.
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After Christian's test, we had a small gathering for Emily's graduation. Terry, Jackie and Marian came by for a small celebration.
She got a giant toilet paper roll diploma from Marian! Emily also got a laptop for college.
It's pretty nice. She's pretty happy with it. Grandpa Terry gave her some money for her college fund.
We used it to open her checking account. Unfortunately, because she has no driver's license or California ID, I am still on the account with her. Hopefully we will be able to remedy that soon...one way or another.
Marian also brought some early Christmas presents for the girls. She said that they could open them if they cleaned her car...so they did!
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When Terry came for the party, he brought back his Trooper for Christian to continue working on it. He needed new wheel bearings in the back and some control arm bushings in the front and a few other minor things. Christian agreed to do it to help his dad and Terry got him a tool to do it that we also needed for the XJ wheel bearings which also needed.
The wheel bearings took at least a week of serious work but we got it in and we were pretty happy and relieved. We test drove it for a bit and the noise in the back seemed to be gone. We pretty much started the next maintenance issue on the Trooper right after we completed the bearings and everything became complicated and was pretty much a disaster. We found something wrong with everything that someone tried to fix. It was totally ridiculous. We got problems from stripped bolts to missing washers and just general shoddy and unsafe practice with the wiring. On top of that, the engine bay and the undercarriage was totally filthy. Christian easily used another 5 gallons of Purple Stuff and spent hours and hours spraying and washing off filth.
We found that leaking oil and some unknown substance that was poured down the passenger side of the engine bay had corroded a lot of the wiring and disintegrated a lot of the bushings. We went in to replace the control arm bushings but we could not get them out with out taking out the entire front end. When the front axle came out we found those bushings were toast as well. We could not find replacements so Christian had to fabricate some himself. Everything was this complicated and we found some kind of obstacle every step of the way. We had to stop to research and order more parts during the whole process. Meanwhile, the rest of us helped out where we could. We scrubbed all the grime and some rust off the parts. Emily helped chase most of the threads on the bolts and tap all the holes.
Every waking moment for the rest of the month was consumed with getting the Trooper out of our driveway.
Putting the Trooper back together was almost just as complicated. Christian could not get some of the parts back in without removing even more parts. It was just ridiculous.
Just when we thought we would be close to completing the thing, we found out that Christian's youngest brother Garth was back in the hospital and the prognosis was not good. We planned to go down to San Diego without the Trooper to be with the family. Even Christian's mom drove back down from Oregon. He passed away the night before we had planned to go down. It was actually during the early morning hours of June 27th.
