January

It's been a difficult start of the the year so far. Christian's school had another lock down at his school towards the end of the school day. It's been the third time this school year. One was a live shooter situation. No shots were fired but they did find a kid on campus with a gun. One was a swatting call. This last one was maybe the same but it was weird because people from two schools in the same district were reporting shutdowns at about the same time. We couldn't find anything in the news and everybody seemed to have gotten a different story. Somebody had said that it was something actually going on across from the school at a restaurant. But that didn't explain the other school. Someone said a bomb threat, but why would you lock all the students in the school if there was a bomb threat...talk about stupid. In the end, some people just said it was another swatting call, but they didn't ever seem to have any official story in the end, which is suspicious.

Christian's dad had been in and out of the hospital for some time...he's had many complications since his initial surgery back in July of 2025. He's had strokes, seizures and all kinds of problems. Jackie wasn't really able to care for him and he ended up in an Acute Nursing Facility in November. He was able to return home in December but he wasn't doing well. We were not sure that he was going to make it to the end of the year, but he hung on. The last time we saw him, he was fading away and in pain most of the time. He didn't make it through the week. His wife wanted to wait to bury him on Valentine's Day for some reason.

While all this was going on with Christian's dad, his mom had knee replacement surgery. Aron had spent a week up there helping her out. Her cousin helped the week after that. As she was recovering, she had been dealing with a lot of abdominal pain. Aron made her go back to the hospital and ended up getting emergency gall bladder surgery...which is what Terry had at the beginning of all this mess.

The last weekend of the month, we were scheduled to go see my mom for her birthday. We ended up keeping that appointment since my sister was expected in town and Christian and I would not be available later anyway. Wendy wanted to go out to the park, so we planned a picnic. I looked for a park that we could go to that we could also do some birding. There were a couple of little parks nearby but with very little parking. Christian and I went out early to do our birding while we waited for the rest of the family to arrive.

We arrived to the first park and there was no parking at all. We called the rest of the family to let them know what was going on while we investigated the second park. That one was packed as well. We ended up just meeting them at a local park down the street from my mom. There were only a few parking spots there as well. Apparently all the Chinese gather there to do their exercises like the old Auntie's back in China. They clogged up most of the little park. By the time the rest of my family got there, there were some more parking spaces available since one of the exercise groups had just finished up. There wasn't much to do there but we tried to make the best of it.

None of the grandkids were available except for Christopher. He set up some new toys he brought, so that was kind of fun. It was pretty hot out.

Afterwards, on our way home, we ran into bumper to bumper traffic. So we got back off and decided to go look at the first park again, thinking that we could take a look around and get out of the traffic, but it was even more crowded than it was in the morning. We ended up just getting back on the road further down the way and headed home. 

We are finding it very difficult to find anywhere to go anymore. There are just too many people out and about everywhere. It is pretty miserable.