Spring Break this year was pretty messed up. Christian had the third week off and Caitlyn had the fourth week off. That pretty much made it all but impossible to really do anything. At the start of Christian's break, Emily and her dad decided to take off for a bit of an adventure. Their plan was to do Steel Pass in Death Valley with Caitlyn's Jeep. Of course, as usual, as soon as it starts, we get a weather system in.
Regardless, they said most of the towns they went through was super crowded. They got rained on which turned to snow at some point. A lot of the roads were messed up but apparently, it was beautiful out there.
At one point the road gave way and the Jeep ended up in a pretty precarious situation. As before, Christian ended up having to rebuild and redirect the road to get out. Emily tried to help him move some rocks and broke our camping shovel. We always bring a full sized shovel for these situations and that's what Christian uses to literally dig himself out of these situations.
Because their camping gear got wet the night before, they decided to cut the trip short and head home after their long ordeal.
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Christian spent the rest of his break working out in the shop mostly. He has a bunch of welding projects lined up. Emily worked on and off. When Caitlyn finally got her Spring Break and Christian had to get back to work, we planned a few afternoons out. Emily only had a few days that week that she wasn't working. On one of the days, the girls and I drove out towards LA to do some shopping (and eating). Emily wanted a few things before heading back to Idaho. We planned to have lunch out there and the girls were excited but we had trouble with most of the places we picked out. Some of the restaurants were not even open that day. We wasted a lot of time driving around and around.
We finally settled on a little Chinese restaurant. The food was pretty good and we were adequately hungry by then but we didn't want to stuff ourselves because the girls wanted boba afterwards. We did some shopping in between. We had actually intended to stop by to see my mom while we were out there but we took too long and decided to head back and come see her another time. We didn't want to run into the worst of the traffic going home. We had a good time though and it was nice to spend some time with both of the girls. Sometimes Emily and I would go out but Caitlyn was usually in class or home doing homework or whatever.
Emily and Caitlyn spent one of their free days going to the beach. They had a great time but came back fairly sunburned. Caitlyn put some sunscreen on but her coverage was not that great. Emily didn't put any on at all and got it the worst.
The girls spent a lot of time this past month trying to relearn their organ songs. Their teacher wanted them to play during church which we were supposed to start back up. The organ was mostly put together but they were still putting some finishing touches to it and we kept having problems. We had to keep pushing back the date for them to play because the organ just was not ready yet. It was very frustrating.
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We did manage to get together with what is left of Christian's family this past month in San Diego. It was nice to see everybody for the most part.
We spent the rest of the month sanding the XJ down to bare metal so that we can paint it. It is a lot of work. We are starting with the roof as that is where there are the most rusty spots.
The girls went to another youth dance. The youth are sick of being isolated and basically missing out on the last of their childhood and have decided to get together with others who aren't afraid to get out and live their lives. Before all this, I tried to get the girls to go out to official church dances but they scoffed and refused to go. They never did too much with the other kids from church except once in a blue moon or during special holiday get togethers. Now, they have a group chat going and they get together every few weeks or so for a dance or to play games or whatever. It's kind of nice.
After a full year of being away from school, Caitlyn's school started re-opening at the end of the month for in person classes a couple days a week. Of course, because of "social distancing," they have the kids who signed of to go back to school split into two groups. Group A goes Monday and Tuesday and Group B goes Thursday and Friday. They are still online on Wednesday which is a minimum day anyway so they really only check in to all their classes. But because the teachers are stretched so thin, they pretty much reduced the amount of work the kids had to do by half. It's all pretty pathetic. None of the kids are getting much of an education. It's all a joke and the teachers are tortured with all kinds of useless red tape.
Caitlyn wanted to take the CHSPE and just test out of high school at the end of this school year but because of "COVID," they kept delaying the test date. Once it was finally announced, we found out that there were no test sites in the Inland Empire this year and the cost went up more than double.
She only needs two classes to graduate and is trying to figure out some kind of loophole to get around it but it doesn't look good for her as her district won't let her take anything less than 5 classes so that they can be sure to get the funding for her attendance. They offer nothing in the way of electives that is worth taking so she is very frustrated.
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