Another month of busy nothings has passed us by. It's been nearly a year of covid shutdowns and I am so sick to death of all the bullshit. We seem to be just passing the time and waiting in limbo for something to happen.
The only significant thing we did this past month was celebrate Chinese New Year. It is the Year of the Ox. We normally get together with my family and make and eat dumplings until we drop. This year, we did manage to get together with some of my family but we just had a big luncheon. We planned to go visit with my mom and she ended up inviting my brother and his family. Surprisingly, he agreed but we would eat outside in the yard.
My sister did not expect that we would be getting together this year and did not make plans to come back, so it was a surprise that we kind of got together at all. She would probably do something with my mom in another week or two when she planned to return again.
We went over early to help my mom in the kitchen. Apparently, my brother also went early to help. Maybe he wanted to prepare the food himself for his family...I don't know. But shortly after we got there, Christian went to look at my mom's car, as she was having problems with the check engine light coming on and my mom sent my brother out to take him to the auto parts store as we did not know the area. One of the possible problems was a vacuum leak from the gas cap. Since that was the easiest fix, they decided to address that problem and see if it would fix the issue.
Afterwards, Christian noticed my mom's tires were not wearing evenly, so he wanted to rotate them but her car did not have a jack so they had to cobble together what they could find.
My brother's family arrived in time for lunch but stayed outside in the backyard. We ate but did not interact that much as we were all sitting at different tables. Plus his kids were sullen and not very social. It was all very sad. We tried to talk to them but they were not very responsive. The girls told us a little more about what was going on afterwards but I think their Covid isolation is getting to them in ways that my brother just doesn't understand.
Afterwards, Debbie and the kids left as the kids had homework and junk to do. The girls and I sat and visited with my mom while I helped her clean up. Christian sat out and chatted with my brother for quite a while before we all decided to call it a day and leave. Christian needed to come back to Riverside to help ordain a friend's son to be a Teacher in the Deacon's Quorum. Afterwards, we visited with their family for a bit as we had not seen them for at least several months.
Emily was disappointed that we were not doing dumplings this year. She had returned home from college excited for our normal traditions. We decided to make a small batch by ourselves at home. We have only done it once all by ourselves. We had to work out some details so we took some notes as we worked as we don't want the tradition to die off with my mom. But our family has been doing the majority of the work for years now at these get together's so it was not that difficult.
Anyway, the small batch that we made turned out really well. It was delicious!
We basically celebrated Chinese New Year on Valentine's Day so we didn't do that much for Valentine's.
The rest of the time was just spent slugging through school and work for Emily. She's doing okay but they don't give her that many hours. They have been increasing her hours slowly every week but it is just incremental at best. She's just biding her time and trying to earn as much money as they will allow her before returning to college in a month and a half.
And unfortunately, the new gas cap did not fix my mom's check engine light as it came back a couple of days after we left.
Christian ended up back in the Emergency Room. Apparently, he got another kidney stone. Because of Covid, I could not go in with him. We did not know what the problem was initially, so I sat in the parking lot for over an hour, waiting for some kind of status update. By the time I was allowed to call in to find out what was going on, they had run a CT scan and were waiting for the results so I just went home to wait because in trying to call in to get an update, my call got dropped twice. It was very frustrating. Christian did not grab his phone so there was no way to contact him directly.
After another hour or so, I called back in. They said that it was most likely a kidney stone but that the doctor had not reviewed it yet to say for certain. After the third hour, the doctor finally called to confirm that it was a kidney stone and was getting ready to release him with an order of drugs.
Christian was pretty doped up on pain killers which made him a bit groggy and very nauseous but they had already released him and he was waiting in line at the Pharmacy. Now that place was a freaking nightmare. We waited in line for about 30 minutes to get to move on to the line in the actual Pharmacy. Once we checked in, they made us go back outside to wait in line to get back in all over again. The line was even longer than before. There were so many pissed off irate people but they just treated us all like cattle. They didn't care if some could barely stand up. Anyway, the whole thing took nearly as long as his stay in Emergency. And they kept making us put hand sanitizer on every time we went in and out of the door so the skin on my hand was trashed for almost a week afterwards.
The whole hand sanitizer thing was such a joke anyway because Christian was telling me how filthy the Emergency room was. There was trash all over the floor and the bathroom was covered in urine and feces. He tried to get someone to clean it but no one ever bothered to do it in the 3 or 4 hours that he was in there. Luckily, the doctor and technicians/nurses seemed fairly well competent and helpful though.
In the end, it was a small stone and he was able to pass it fairly quickly after all that. He had a phone appointment with his Urologist afterwards and he has ordered some additional tests. Apparently they were concerned as his kidney was a bit inflamed and his uric acids are a bit high.
