The girls and I have been making our rounds to the outlet stores lately. We started out at the Dessert Hills Outlets in Cabazon mostly prompted by trying to get Emily outfitted for her internship. Then Caitlyn wanted to find some more and we went to check out the ones in Orange on our way from the beach last week. When Emily came home for the weekend, we planned to head out to the Ontario Mills Outlets.
It turned out to be less of an outlet than it used to be. I have not been there for quite a few years, but it feels more like unique mall with a few outlet store scattered throughout. It is also a lot bigger than I remember! We were pretty exhausted by the time we got through it. As an outlet mall, it was a bit disappointing but we did find a store that all three of us liked there.
For Father's Day, we got Christian some Lizard Skin for the bucket of the Jeep. All the carpeting was pulled out long before we ever got the Jeep. It is starting to rust in spots where the paint has been worn away from people's feet. The seals on the doors aren't great, so when it rains, water gets in and pools. It used to be worse, but we've figured out the leaks from the roof. That part is mostly sorted out now. The other problem we have is from the heat emanating from the bottom of the Jeep.
The Lizard Skin will protect the tub from rust and is supposed to help with the heat somewhat, but it will also help with some sound dampening as well.
We gave it to him a week before so that we can make a plan and the kids can help him prepare and clean up the Jeep. We will need to remove the seats and center console in order to do it. So Christian took all the pieces off during the week. Caitlyn helped him clean the Jeep to prep it for the next step. Christian put a bit of primer on the worst of the bare metal spot that had some surface rust developing on it. When Emily came home on the weekend, Caitlyn and Emily helped scuff and clean the rest of the paint. They were also going to help paint the Lizard Skin on, but when we opened it, we found that it was super thick and extremely difficult to work with. It has the consistency of pumice filled peanut butter. Christian decided to just do it himself. It took another week nearly to get it on because we didn't get the sprayer, so he painted it on in layers and letting it dry for the rest of the day before putting on another layer. We were not sure how far the stuff would go, so after the initial thin layer, he concentrated on building extra layers in the problem areas first to insulate the worst of the heat. It went farther than we thought, but at some point, he got sick of working with the stuff. It was kind of a nightmare. We have a little left for touch up in case we have problems once we get everything bolted back in.
When Emily came back the next weekend, we had not put the vehicle back together yet and we wanted to go for a drive. We were hoping to go on a short hike. We ended up taking my Trooper to the San Jacinto Mountains but it was a total disaster. The freeway was a mess and we got stuck in some bad traffic. Then, when we finally got to the area, a bunch of morons were stopped in the middle of the parking lot blocking everyone's way, even though there were plenty of parking spaces and they could have pulled into it to do whatever the hell they were doing before. We went to Lake Fulmor. We have not been here since before we were even married, but it was very pretty and there were not so many people there in the past. 
There were a ton of people there. Lots of people fishing in the Lake. Lots of other people walking around the Lake. Those were mostly young families with screaming kids that they made absolutely no effort in controlling. Some of them just went out there to take a quick selfie and others just seemed to loiter around. We went passed them to find a small waterfall that used to be on the side of the trail but found that most of the trail seemed to be gated off now and we could not even get to the area we were looking for. We ended up just going back around to leave. Since we couldn't think of another place out there that we could go to, we ended up just leaving. The only other area that we considered needed a 4x4 that had better clearance and flex. The Trooper is not the right vehicle for this.
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The other things that we worked on this past month was to try to decouple ourselves from Adobe. Like many people, we are not happy with the direction the company has taken. After decades of using them, we are no longer happy with their programs. Christian started a couple of years ago by switching from Adobe Premiere to DiVinci Resolve for his video editing. Then he dumped Adobe Acrobat. The biggest thing that was keeping us tied to Adobe now, is Lightroom. We use it for our photo catalogs and editing. We had not found anything to replace it with.
However, Christian has been trying to get the girls to try DarkTable for a number of years now. Caitlyn was too invested in Lightroom and did not want to try it. She has been using a very old version of Lightroom on my old Mac except for when she took some Photography and design classes which gave her temporary access to the new cloud versions. Emily tried DarkTable but barely used it because we have not been able to get her that interested in Photography still. This past Christmas, since Christian got me a new camera, we shifted everybody into a newer camera...which meant that Emily finally got access to an SLR which she wanted to try but never made enough of an effort at taking pictures to justify getting her one. In order to get her more vested into using it, he dove into trying to figure out DarkTable in order to help her with it. The work flow is very different from Photoshop or Lightroom. It is not as intuitive for a Photographer, so there is kind of a high learning curve.
After we came back home, he continued learning little bits about DarkTable in the evenings before bed, pretty soon, he discovered that it can do a lot more than we initially thought. Not only that, but if you can figure out how to do it, it can do it better than Lightroom.
Last year, Christian updated his computer to make it more powerful in order to process videos...but he was having problems with it crashing all the time. He had taken everything off in order to try to pin point what was crashing his computer. He was reluctant to reinstall All the Adobe Software and decided that this was a good opportunity to dump it all together and try DarkTable instead. If he liked it, he would rid himself of Adobe forever. Since I still use it, he figured he would let Caitlyn use the other license. In transferring all his catalog, he found that Adobe had lost (deleted) a lot of his pictures. We don't know why or how that happened. It still had the previews for them but the actual files were missing. Anyway, it was a huge mess.
We found that our backups were not sufficient and had to stop to back up everything that we still had. We partially hadn't done this to our satisfaction because we ran out of hard drive space and were reluctant to buy new drives because we had other things we wanted or needed to spend our money on.
In the end, we got everything backed up finally. Christian still lost a lot of his files but managed to keep screenshots of his missing pictures and he was ecstatic to rid himself of Adobe. Plus, he really likes DarkTable.
Since we currently have the entire Adobe Creative Suite, I wanted to get rid of some of my Adobe products as well, so I spent some time trying to rid myself of everything except for the Photography package. I figured that those would be easier to replace and spent some time investigating some of the free open source programs. I only use Adobe InDesign to put together my journals, so that was the easiest to get rid of since Blurb has their own software that I can use. It is what I started off using. Illustrator was a little more difficult to replace as I don't use it for making vectors that much. I mostly use it as a desktop publishing type program. I tried a couple of different options but was very unhappy with the first one I tried as it did not work properly, even though it is the most popular alternative for people making vector drawings. The second one I looked into was more for desktop publishing but it didn't do some of the things that I really needed that Illustrator did with ease. I finally decided to just stick with using Photoshop for this purpose and abandoned all the other options and it is always packaged with Lightroom anyway.
After all that, I found that they no longer have just the Photography Suite deal on its own...or they don't have a deal on it anymore. Christian usually gets a better deal doing the Education discount but now it is all or nothing. You can't choose only certain programs or packages. I can just get the Photography package with no discounts or get all the programs with the teacher discount for the same price. It was not like this even last year. I found I just wasted a whole day looking into this. So, until I am ready to move over to DarkTable as well, I am still a slave to Adobe.
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While Debbie was in and out of the hospital, dealing with my brother's stroke back in May, her mother was also complaining of a constant stomach ache. They had finally gotten her in to get her checked out and they diagnosed her with colon cancer. They had started chemo treatments for her, but last month, they had found that the cancer had already spread. She was moved to hospice by the end of the month. She passed away a couple of weeks later. The cemetery was apparently booked up though, so they could not hold her funeral for another couple of weeks.
Through most of June though, they also thought her dad might have alzheimer's! He was not doing well but they later found out that he was taking too much insulin. I guess with everything going on, there was no one to make sure that he was checking himself and taking the right amount. They finally got that sorted out and he seemed much better by the time we saw him at the funeral of his wife.
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While all this was going on, Terry has been in and out of the hospital all week. He seemed to have some kind of infection. Part of his body turned yellow. They said that he had a number of stones from his gall bladder. They set him up to have them removed. Meanwhile, they had him go home. But after seven stones were removed, they recommended that he remove his gallbladder all together. After deliberating for a bit, they decided to go ahead and take it out. That operation was scheduled but got pushed back for some reason. Once they finally got it out, they had him stay until the weekend so that they can monitor how he is doing since he is old and his health has not been that good for a while and because they live so far from the hospital.
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One weekend, we tried to take the TJ out for a test run to see if the Lizard Skin made any difference. We took two vehicles because we were a little unsure of how the TJ is running right now. After Christian's trip on his first weekend off, the TJ was making a lot of disturbing noises and we have not been able to diagnose what the problem is yet. We took it down to the local auto parts store to recycle some oil and to gas up the vehicle and it seemed to sound and drive perfectly fine.
We took the TJ and the JK out to the San Bernardino Mountains, but by the time we got to Mentone, the noise was definitely back. Since we do not know what is making the racket, we decided to keep it safe and return home instead of heading up the mountain. The interior of the TJ did feel much nicer with the Lizard Skin coating though.
Christian spent the next week dismantling the vehicle. Our first thought was that it might be the flex plate in between the transmission and the transfer case. The transmission itself is running flawlessly, so we didn't think it was that. Anyway, he had to drop the transmission in order to get in there to look at it. Once it was all out, he still could not find anything wrong with it. We thought that it was possible that it might be something in the exhaust that was disintegrating and rattling around, but after he removed all that, he still was unable to identify anything that could have been making the noise.
Since everything was taken out of the bottom of the TJ, we decided to put extra shielding above the transmission tunnel and the bottom of the Jeep. That was our original plan to reduce the amount of heat going up into the interior of the Jeep but we had been putting it off since you had to take the transmission out in order to do it!
This was a bigger job than we expected as well since everything had to be cut to fit and we ran out spray adhesive and had to put a hold on the project to order more, but I think it is going to make a big difference.
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Caitlyn had started her internship this month finally. She had to have the whole nine yards of background checks and drug tests just like Emily did. I wasn't that surprised that Emily had to do it because she is working in the aero space industry but I was kind of surprised that Caitlyn had to as well. I guess it is just normal practice nowadays.
She seems to like the company and the people she is working with. She spent the whole first week doing tours and a lot of training videos. She is finally getting to do a little actual work now. So far so good.
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