Caitlyn turned 18!

 Caitlyn turned 18! She had to celebrate her birthday away from home. 

I made myself all weepy, going back through the years, looking at all our old photographs and realized that I don't have as much in the last couple of years.

I sent Emily up to Idaho with a little birthday banner and I held back a present so that she would have something to open on her birthday. While Caitlyn was in the bathroom in the morning, she was able to put it up to surprise her. 

Emily's friend Amber made Caitlyn some birthday brownies. Caitlyn is a weird kid. She doesn't ever go crazy with junk food. When she was a little toddler and all the other kids were eating hot dogs and stuff, she would refuse to eat it and take what all the mom's were eating instead...namely, salad and stuff. That's not to say that she doesn't eat junk food now, she does. But she will want some real food first. She has two weaknesses though: brownies and salsa. She will sit and have a whole pile of brownies and she can eat her weight in salsa. I guess salsa isn't really bad for you at all but all the chips she eats as a vehicle for her salsa is more of the problem!

They went for a walk and went out to eat afterwards to some Hawaiian joint there in Rexburg. I tried to get some pictures from them without much luck. 

April

The girls got up early to say goodbye to their dad before he had to leave for work. They packed up the car and had breakfast before heading out. The car seemed to be running well. Christian had topped off their gas the night before when he was out test driving it.

The shovel was secured with Emily's test 3D printed brackets. We know that we need to print it again with better filament, but hopefully what they have will last until they get back in the summer. Caitlyn's radio had died while it was sitting in our driveway. Luckily, it had a year warranty and we got our money back. We ordered another one for a few more bucks with a more established brand. It has a few drawbacks from the other one but for the most part, it seems to work much better. We will see if it outlasts the previous one though. Christian had the same radio in the TJ which died before the end of last year. That was when I found out that I could get a replacement or refund on them. We have not bought a replacement yet as we want to see how her hold up in the short term. Anyway, we were not happy with how the bracket held the radio in. While Emily had started packing, she designed a support piece to print on the 3D printer to fix the crappy design and it seems to work well. She didn't have a whole lot of time to get it done, so we will see if it holds up in time.

The girls headed out. Their first stop was to visit with their Aunt Aron in Mesquite, NV. She wanted to see them and decided to take them out horseback riding since they only had a little farther to go that day to get to their cousin's house where they would spend the night.

While it was cloudy and drizzling when they left Riverside, it was a perfect day in Mesquite. They got to help bring in the cows. They were very excited to have that experience. Aunt Wendy had gotten them a lesson when they were quite little, but basically, they went around in circles in a little pen with old nags. As teenagers, they got to go again with the young women in the church, but again, they went on old nags on a designated trail which the horses probably mostly go blindly. So, this was definitely a step up in their experience.

After their visit, they headed to St. George where they got to visit with their cousin and have dinner before turning in for the night. They decided that they would leave very early the next morning since they will have to travel the longest leg of their journey and get to Rexburg in time to check in at their apartment. They only stopped occasionally for gas and made it up to Idaho in good time. They were able to unpack and Emily went to get some of her stuff at the storage facility. They had the weekend to settle in, get books and find out where their classes were. 

Meanwhile, the other drama going on was that Emily got selected for jury duty this exact week. Although, she is not registered to vote, apparently having a driver's license now gets you into the system. She tried to get them to postpone it but since she won't return until over the six month window they allow you, she couldn't do anything about it. The guy told her to just wait and see if her group gets called in or not. If not, then she will be done for the year. But if her group gets called in then she will get a notice of not complying and she will have more options in how to move forward from there. It is really stupid. Her group was on stand by all week up until her last day. Her group was called in to report on Friday. She was already in Utah so now we have to look out for some letter in the mail threatening to send a notice for her arrest before we can do anything about it. The guy at the court told her that there were several steps before this would happen and not to worry. What an idiotic system.

Anyway, we were able to breath a slight sigh of relief when the girls arrived safely back at school. Christian spent the next couple of weeks trying to recuperate from the mental and physical fatigue of working on the XJ and trying to heal all the cuts, scrapes and burns from trying to get her new sensor in.

There was only one hiccup with the vehicle after they left. The bolt for the track bar shook loose was lost when the girls went out to the dunes so that Caitlyn could take pictures for her new photography class. We think that Christian was so exhausted working until midnight every night getting it together that he forgot to torque it. We had to order and send another one up to them. Of course, we had to spend extra to get it there quickly so that they could put it back on. Otherwise, they could not drive it. Emily had MacGyvered it back up with her shoelace so that they could get home from the sand dunes!

I spent most of the month trying to hack through the mountain of weeds that grew up in the backyard in the last couple of months because of all the rain we got this year. Emily helped me one day before she left but there is still tons of it all around the property. It doesn't help that the gophers seemed to have built a major metropolitan city under our yard making a mess of everything! They even killed my lemon grass in the front of the house.

Christian lost a tire on the freeway while driving to work one morning. Apparently he ran something over that cut the sidewall of his tire. He has no idea what it was. He put on the spare and barely made it to work before the last bell.

Easter, Caitlyn's Birthday and XJ Woes

It seemed almost an impossibility, but we finally got Caitlyn's car back together with much agony and suffering. We tested it out by driving down to San Diego to begin breaking in her new gears. We met up with Christian's dad and had an Easter luncheon to celebrate many things including Caitlyn's birthday since she will be back at school when it comes around. 

The car ran very well. In fact, after Emily and Christian cleaned the throttle body and gave it a top engine clean, the misfires that plagued the vehicle went away. We had hoped that her engine stalling problem would go away as well, but more on that later.

When we came home, we had our own little birthday celebration with her with cake and presents.

We didn't do much else since Christian was absolutely exhausted from too many nights burning the midnight oil trying to get her car back together in time for them to leave for school. At one point, we thought that they would have to take my car back to school as we were afraid that we would not be able to get it up and running in time.

On Monday, I took the girls out shopping for supplies at the asian markets and so that they could visit with my mom one last time before they left. We still had to put many more miles on the new gears so that we could change the differential fluid before they left. All went well until we headed home and ran into a bunch of traffic. We got off the freeway to take the streets but ended up running into a lot of traffic and stop lights that didn't seem to work anyway. After sitting for several cycle of lights with our hot engine because the lights would not change for us, the car started stalling again. Once the car cooled down a bit, we can get it started but every time we had to idle for a length of time, it would stall again. It took a good 10 minutes or so for it to cool down so meanwhile, we were stuck in the middle of a road blocking traffic. We stalled a couple more times before we made it home.

Christian was home from work before we finally made it back. So once again, he had to burn the midnight oil trying to diagnose the problems with the XJ. We have tried many things thus far in trying to figure out her hot engine temperature problems. On top of cleaning carbon deposits in the throttle body and top part of the engine, he had spent a couple of evenings wrapping her fuel lines to prevent heat soak that we thought was causing the stalling issues.

After staying up late researching and using his pico scope to test her sensors, he found that the crankshaft position sensor would stop working when it got hot. It worked fine normally until it got hot. Luckily, he was able to find and quickly order a new sensor and had to pay extra for them to ship it out overnight.

On Tuesday, the girls spent some time packing and then regardless of the condition of the vehicle, we needed to attempt to put some more miles on it to finish breaking in the gears. All went well at first but eventually, we ran into more traffic and it began, once again to stall when we got behind the long lines of traffic. We eventually made it back home, but we were pretty frazzled and was not able to get as many miles on the vehicle as we had hoped. Most of the traffic went around us and did not have too much of a problem but Emily noticed that the only cars that had a problem and got mad at us were all the shiny new cars who just sat there in back of us even though our hazard light was on and wasn't moving.

On Wednesday, the girls finished packing. The new sensor arrived and when Christian got home from work, had to work again until nearly midnight, taking off and installing her new sensor and then testing to make sure that the problem was fixed. It was very stressful and exhausting. But basically, hours before the girls had to leave, the car was finally fixed.