March

At the beginning of the month, Emily celebrated her 21st birthday...which seems so ridiculous, I don't even want to think about that. It is hard enough to not have the kids around during the holidays like Chinese New Year. It downright sucks when we are not able to be with our kids on their birthdays. We sent gifts up to her in Idaho. Marian treated them to all you can eat sushi in Idaho Falls.

I guess the food was good but the service was abysmal. I guess it took them two hours to get themselves enough food to eat. Luckily, their roommate and her boyfriend decided to join them and they at least had some pleasant company. I could not get any pictures from Caitlyn, however. She seems really reluctant to take pictures of people for some reason. It's bizarre. In fact, we have not even been able to get a picture to see what her boyfriend even looks like! 

It is Spring now, so flowers are starting to come out but the weeds in the yard is totally out of control from all the rain we had gotten. The backyard is not even passable again so I have been working to hack a path into the yard so I could start cleaning it up while the weather is still mild enough to work outside. We also have a pair of hawks that have settle nearby. I thought it was really neat at first and hoped that they would help take care of the out of control gopher population but now I am in fear that they have made a nest and if they have eggs that will hatch into tiny screeching hawks as they are very loud!

Not much else seemed to have been going on this month. Christian was just doing all he could to finish up and make it to Spring Break. He spent the first couple of days off just trying to relax around the house and tinker with his 3D printer since he never has enough time to do something fun. Not that it is really a relaxing hobby as we have had nothing but drama from that piece of junk since we got it. We've replaced or upgraded nearly every possible piece of it so far except for the frame. But the purpose of it was to learn how it works and print pieces for the printer that Christian actually wants, a Voron Trident. The Voron is a printer that you build yourself from pieces that you source on your own. Christian has had to troubleshoot and take apart the Ender so much that he is very comfortable about how they work now. The Voron is not a cheap printer to build, but we pray that it will work so much better. Plus, it is built to use more advanced filaments which can survive the harsh environments of engine bays in vehicles, which may no longer be available.

We had hoped to get further along with the build than we did, however, as we are waiting on parts that we ordered weeks ago but has yet to arrive. It is very frustrating.

Christian also got the time to put in my new oxygen sensors for my Trooper. Thankfully, the engine code went away but we wanted to test if the new oxygen sensors would also improve the fuel mileage. The Trooper gets the worst gas mileage of all our vehicles and has been declining over the years. We decided to test it out on a drive to the Mojave during his break. We headed out to the Cady Mountains. We stopped in Ludlow for lunch at a little cafe that we visited over 25 years ago on a trip to the Kelso Dunes. They had the best fries and still do! We sat in the same booth we had last time and Christian is convinced that we even had the same waitress! I'm not sure about that, but the food was still good (although it cost a lot more than it used to!

Afterwards, we went out to explore and hike Sleeping Beauty in the nearby Cady Mountains.

It was a nice day and a good hike, although, I do detest the slippery scree and talus fields in the steeper areas. I have fallen or turned my ankle too many times to be comfortable on them. We did pretty good considering we are very out of shape. Hopefully we will be able to make it a habit to come out more and be active outdoors again. There were also a lot of little wildflowers starting to bloom out in the Mojave.

Afterwards, we wanted to go investigate the Pisgah Crater nearby but was dismayed that it is now privately owned and not accessible. 

By the time, we gave that up, we found that we didn't have quite enough time to do anything else and decided to head home a little earlier than we had planned. However, the best part of the trip was finding out that the gas mileage on the Trooper improved significantly! We are very happy with the results. We did not believe what we were seeing initially and stopped to check a couple of times during the day with the same results. 

At the end of the week, Marian drove out to visit with us. We decided to smoke some ribs and Marian decided to pick up some rib eye steaks so we ended up with more food than we could possibly eat. We ended up eating the steaks and saving the ribs for the next day as it would keep well. We swapped a couple of small gifts and closed the evening out with a movie.

It rained during the last weekend, so we could not go out to do anything else this week.