We celebrated Chinese New Year at the beginning of the month. Emily wanted to fly back for it but we did not nail down our exact plans with the rest of the family early enough. Several months ago, when she was considering it, the airfare was only a hundred bucks but by the time we made plans, it jumped up to be triple the price.
Caitlyn ended up working on Chinese New Year and could not come with us to visit with the family. She had just started working and was not getting her schedule much in advance and it didn't seem like a good idea to ask for a day off already.
So Christian and I went by ourselves to visit with my family. We made dumplings as per usual. My sister was able to get into town early to help out. One of her boys made it in that afternoon, but the other one's flight got cancelled due to the weather. My brother and his kids made it but wore double masks through out except when they went outside to eat. His wife decided to just work instead and didn't come by.
Yeah, so it was nice to get together but it just wasn't quite the same with all the missing people and changes. We are not sure how many more times we will even be able to attempt something like this since it is getting harder and harder for my mom to help out.
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Christian spent every free moment working on the TJ. He originally set up to take replace the heater core as the heater was not working in the Jeep when we got it and it smelled of radiator fluid. But in order to get to the HVAC box, you have to take the entire dash apart. So he basically ended up gutting the entire interior of the Jeep. He found many broken and missing pieces (bolts, nuts, clips and other small accessories). They basically stole or lost everything that wasn't bolted down and half the things that were.
In cleaning up the brake petal, he found that the brake booster boot was torn and needed to be replaced, so he ended up having to take that out as well, along with the brake master cylinder. We needed to bleed the brakes anyway, so we got it apart to clean but also found that getting all these miscellaneous replacement parts were nearly impossible. It took a lot of time tracking down parts for it and having to make modifications to what we could find to make it work or having to outright make our own replacement pieces. He had to clean, make repairs and check on electrical problems on the electrical system inside the cab.
Christian also had the radiator out to flush it along with all the air conditioning lines since we had to get into there to fix the heater.
The repairs were snowballing and we ran out of space to even store all the parts we took out of the Jeep. We are storing most of the bits and pieces in the back of Christian's pickup and all the seats that Caitlyn cleaned were sitting in Emily's room. It is becoming completely nuts and have taken over our lives. Even Christian is getting burnt out on this project.
But we hope we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel at this point and will be able to start putting it back together now and see if it all still works or is fixed.
He was also really sick for about a week. He got tested for Covid but it came back negative.
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Marian finally made it over to visit with us so we had dinner and exchanged presents from Christmas as well as celebrating Chinese New Year.
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Caitlyn finally heard back from BYU Provo near the end of the month and they did not accept her stating they got too many good applicants this year. We were honestly a bit shocked and taken aback by it. She graduated early Magna Cum Laude with Highest Honors with a total GPA of 4.26 weighted and 3.85 unweighted. I mean, BYU isn't some Ivy League school here. The school wasn't even accredited when Christian and I were going to college! I can't believe they had that many students applying that are doing that much better than her.
I don't think Caitlyn was quite as upset about it as we were. She only decided to apply to it at the last minute. We all had reservations about the school because they have become very liberal over the years and we did not agree with many of their policies. But with all the hard work that Caitlyn put into her school work and being a member of the church, we figured that it should be her choice of where she wanted to go.
So, apparently, she will be joining Emily in Idaho in the fall. She got her acceptance from Idaho back in December only two weeks after submitting her application. She is mostly dreading the weather there.
Meanwhile, she is taking an online World History class at RCC to get some more college credit in. With this class and the dual enrollment classes she took in high school, she should have nearly a whole quarter/semester of classes done before she even heads over to BYU.
