December

December was super busy. Christian and I finally kicked the flu bug that plagued us on and off all of last month. We had to crack down and desperately worked to try to get the TJ put back together before the girls come home from Idaho, trying to overcome all the problems that set us back last month. We got the back axle completed and put back together with the new gears. Christian made made new beefy control arms that can be rebuilt without the nightmare bushings that never lasts and gets seized up and are then impossible to remove. 

The girls finished finals and packed up to come home. Both girls did great this semester. Emily has decided that she definitely doesn't want to live at Aspen anymore. Her and her roommate got a storage unit to store most of their stuff for over the winter. Caitlyn's apartment provides a small amount of storage during their off-track semester if they are signed up with a lease for the following semester, so she is covered for that. Emily signed up to stay in the same complex as Caitlyn when they return in the Spring. It is a bit more and is further from campus, but Caitlyn's experience with her apartment has been so much better than Emily's experience at her apartment so far.

Waiting and watching for the girls to return safely was seriously nerve wracking for us after Emily's accident at the end of summer earlier this year. They traveled down to Salt Lake with Emily's roommate before parting ways. They then stayed with their cousin in St. George. They stopped by briefly to visit their Aunt in Mesquite before proceeding home. 

With Emily's help, Christian was able to finish putting the front axle back together with the new gears and lunchbox locker and install it along with the new control arms and other modifications. She also got to play with some of Christian's tools. She built a removable winch plate that can be used in any of the vehicles with a hitch.

When we finally got everything together, we had to test it to make sure it worked okay as we had never done anything like this before. We also have to break in the new gears for 500 miles before changing out the differential oil. 

We went to visit my mom first to celebrate the winter solstice 冬至. My brother and his kids joined us. We were technically a few days early but we had a tight and specific schedule to keep.

The next day, we went down to San Diego to visit with Christian's father. We took him for a drive to the Black Mountain Truck Trail Overlook. We attempted to take him there over the summer but it was too hot and Caitlyn's XJ stalled on us. We've been battling problems with heat soak since we got the thing but Christian's dad freaked out a bit, so we didn't continue up the trail once the vehicle cooled down.

It was a beautiful day with the most perfect weather, so on a whim, we took the doors and top off of the Jeep and left them at Terry's place when we picked him up.

We returned and had a late lunch/early dinner and a movie with Terry and Jackie before heading home.

With the initial miles for the break in of the new gears on the Jeep, we finished off with a trip down another part of the Mojave trail. We wanted to test the new seals on the water crossing. We had heard some people recommend to change the oil after every hard trip or water crossing and we wanted to know if that was going to be an issue. We did initially have some water in the front differential when we first took it apart.

We finally made it to Soda Lake and the Traveller's Monument.

We headed home as the sun went down and caught a really nice sunset.

We put the requisite miles on to break in the gears with no issues. The water crossing did not cause any issues. We are thrilled at how it all turned out.

November

November flew by in a bit of a haze. Christian was more or less sick nearly the entire month with the flu. I was sick nearly three quarters of it. We didn't get to do much. I didn't take any pictures. Regardless, we managed to celebrate Christian's birthday. I got him a little book and a new flow meter for his TIG welding.

I also got him a lunch box locker for the front axle of the TJ. We had decided to get new gears for the TJ because of the bigger tires. Caitlyn will get the TJ gears as she needs slightly bigger gears as well and Emily will get some spider gears from either the TJ or the XJ as hers are worn down. Since we are tearing out all the gears, we decided to put lunch box lockers in the front to improve the capabilities of the Jeep. Since they were on sale, Caitlyn decided to get some as well for the front of her XJ. 

But the whole re-gearing project has been kind of a big dumpster fire of an experience because it was a lot more complicated than we expected and in the tools that we needed to do it.  Getting correct and timely parts has been a bit of a fiasco. You can't simply order parts and expect them to send you actually what you ordered and needed in a timely fashion anymore. Sometimes it just gets lost or stolen somewhere along the line.

So there has been delays because of sickness and because we have been waiting on parts for one reason or another and the month is done and the gears are not.

Meanwhile, Caitlyn has been getting some engine codes on the XJ. It is misfiring for some reason so we have to worry about that. Emily is helping us get information on it.

We celebrated our anniversary during all this. Didn't do much. Was not really in the mood. We celebrated Thanksgiving the same way. We could not go to see the girls and we could not spend it with family. We had a small quiet Thanksgiving meal at home and continued cleaning parts to get everything ready to put back together...eventually.

October

The end of last month and the beginning of this month was pretty rough, so we spent the rest of the month mostly playing catch up in October. Christian had a ton of school work to catch up on, plus the other teachers are still out a lot so he has been doing a lot of substitute teaching to cover for their classes. 

I basically celebrated my birthday last month by myself as Christian was at the hospital with his family. He bought me a new fancy pillow from Amazon and it was delivered on my birthday though, so that was nice. I got to chat with Emily for a few minutes and Caitlyn sent me some text along with my family. Marian tried to come over to take me out to dinner, but got too busy so she came the day after and took me out for some Poke. We just picked up some food to bring back to the house to eat. I didn't feel like going to a restaurant and Marian had to log in to do some work while we chatted. 

Christian's dad came back up this month to take me out for my birthday. He took us to Islands and we went shopping for some boots. We didn't find any though because they were either hideously ugly or they didn't fit me. My calves are generally too big to fit into boots but I found some later that kind of fit okay.

Christian also got me a new lens for my camera. My old one is from before the kids were born and has a bunch of grime and scratches that can't be cleaned from the outside. We found a killer deal on a used one that we just couldn't pass up so we decided to take a chance on it. So far, I love it! I got so sick of having to retouch my pictures from the old lens. It probably cost nearly just as much to get the old one cleaned if that is even possible any more. Plus, this one has a slightly greater range. We have not had any time to take it out to try out so I've just been testing it around the house.So far so good!

The sad news is that the Josephine County Grand Jury decided that the officer that killed Mark was "justified" so nothing will happen to her for taking his life. His mom is devastated all over again. 

Christian's dad has also brought back his dreaded Trooper. His heater core broke so now Christian has to tear it all apart again to fix it. The dash and seats are out. We had to take his air conditioning back out as well because we could not get to the heater core with it in the way. Plus we have to flush his radiator before we can put it all back together. It is a nightmare, as usual.

Also, our nephew Mason got married out in Boston where Kendall's family is from. Obviously, we were not able to go out there.

We were a little worried about him for a while since his first fiancé called things off a number of years ago, but he seems to be doing fine now. We are very happy for him.

Mark

 

1976-2022

Mark's funeral was supposed to be in two weeks but it got moved up a week. So after Christian returned from Oregon, he went back to work for all of three days before having to take time off again to return to Oregon for the funeral. He had time to prepare for some things for his students to work on at least.

Of course, in the frantic preparation to go back, he forgot to post the assignments online and we had to pull over in Bakersfield to get some WiFi to post his assignments for his students. It took us 14 hours to get there. We arrived Thursday evening. 

After breakfast Friday morning, we stopped to visit with Danielle. She wanted to give Christian a few things that she felt that Mark would want him to have...mostly stuff from his shop that Danielle had no use for and couldn't sell easily. 

Afterwards, we returned to his mom's house for lunch. She had run out that morning to get some flowers. When we met back at the house, we went together to the cemetery. In making the funeral arrangements, she had found out that there was an extra cemetery plot next to her grandparents that was already paid for, so she had wanted to bury Mark with family. There is another generation of great grandparents further up above at the same cemetery. So we went to bring flowers for all their graves.

Later that afternoon, Christian had to go with his dad to the mortuary to help dress Mark. He definitely was not so excited to have to go do that but wanted to be helpful to his father. They did it together with Danielle's father and brother-in-law.

Afterwards, Christian and his dad came back for dinner. Aron and her husband was expected to arrive in the early morning hours to get a few hours sleep. The service for the funeral was set for the morning.

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There was a viewing at the stake for the family. Afterwards, they moved his body to the chapel and they had a short program. Christian's dad gave a bit of a timeline of his life. It was very nice. For some reason, Danielle had one of her sister's give a talk about Mark whom she only knew for relatively short time, which was strange. She insisted that Mark and her sister bonded over his illness and her cancer which might have been true, but it was fairly obvious that she didn't "know" Mark that well. 

Danielle pretty much controlled every aspect of the funeral service. Mark's family obviously paid for the plot and gave her a big chunk of money to help her plan the rest but pretty much got no say about any aspect of it. It was completely frustrating for his family, especially his mother. Cheri had even picked out a beautiful wooden casket for him but the mortuary said that he would not fit in it the night before, so they substituted it out for a blue metal one with Danielle's authorization later.

But the worst thing about it all, was that she didn't hardly even show any emotion through it all. I think there was about 45 seconds in which she showed a slight sadness but other than that, it could have been just any church service we were attending. At the actual burial site, she and her sisters took selfies together while giggling and cracking jokes. There was no solemnity or deference for what his family was going through. It was just awful.

She did ask Christian to dedicate his grave and that was the end of that. The Relief Society hosted a luncheon for all the attendees. I think Danielle over estimated the amount of people that she expected to be there. Christian's mom was in no mood to be around any of them, much less eat and we were of the same mind when it came down to it. The three of us went directly home. Christian's dad attended along with Aron and her husband. They had something to eat and headed back on the road to Mesquite for their 12 hour drive home.

That evening, we were supposed to host Danielle's family for dinner at Cheri's house. They were having the food brought in. We all took a short nap as none of us had been getting a whole lot of rest and it was an incredibly difficult morning for us all. Terry ran some errands and stopped by to see how Cheri was doing. He told her that if she was not feeling up for it, he would tell Danielle and her family not to come over and we all jumped to grasp the opportunity for an escape. Cheri was not doing well at all. Her heart was obviously completed shattered by the experience. I think Danielle would normally be upset by the change in plans but was obviously open to the change because we would be such a downer for her reunion with her family and realized that this was the best option for all involved.

Early the next morning, we headed back home again. Cheri packed us full of food and snacks for the trip home. We picked up Terry from Danielle's house and hit the road. We got home in a record 13 hours.

Uncle Mark

Beloved son, brother and husband

Mark was 46 years old. Mark is survived by his family, minus his little brother Garth, who died two years ago, and his uncle (Terry's brother), who passed away last month from cancer. While he was not exactly cut down in his youth, or even health, his life was needlessly ended by those who are supposed to be protecting and serving.

Tragedy

On the evening of September 19th, my brother-in-law heard a commotion outside of his home. There was a bunch of yelling and someone knocked down the fence in the front that keeps their dog in the yard. He turned on his porch light and grabbed his shotgun to find out what was going on. He was shot multiple times by the police. They did not announce who they were or what they were doing. They had lights shining in his eyes. The female cop told him to put his gun down. He told them to lower their lights so that he could see and she opened fire on him. He collapsed and begged them to stop shooting. The cop repositioned herself and finished unloading her clip into his general area, some of which hit him. We have not been able to get any clear information about what happened. We know that she put her gun down and started swearing as she walked away. This was all caught on tape apparently by the neighbors. 

We later found out from the investigator that Danielle's lawyer hired, that the woman cop that shot Mark had only been a police officer for about a month. Her and her partner, I suppose, was chasing some guy from a nearby park (we also had heard from a nearby business). The guy ran through their neighborhood. After the shooting, one of the neighbors apparently approached the police that the guy they were chasing had been cowering in the bushes at the end of the street for a couple of hours but they could not be bothered to go get him. In the news, they said that they were "still searching for the suspect"...yeah, right. The investigator said the police knew very well who they were chasing as he had a record but he is still at large.

When we got the call from Christian's dad, I had to reread his message twice because I could not believe what the message said. Google transcribes the voice recording into text and that's what I was reading. We were in denial that this could actually be happening. We quickly returned his call and confirmed that this was indeed the current situation. They transported Mark to the nearest hospital to stabilize him as we believe they hit a femoral artery in one of his legs. At 12:30, we heard that they were transporting him to a bigger hospital to operate on him. We got another call at 4:30am and his prognosis did not sound good. He got over 30 units of blood and was not stable.

I took calls while Christian took something to help him sleep because he offered to drive his dad up to Oregon. He got up around 7:am and spoke to his dad. Christian's dad didn't get much sleep at all. Christian decided to take his dad up by himself while I stayed back to take care of things at the house as we were not prepared to be gone and were also expecting several packages in the mail over the next few days. By the time Terry packed, showered and driven up from San Diego, it was already after 11:am. They transferred his stuff to Christian's truck and headed out. They did not arrive in Oregon until after 1:30 in the morning.

Mark needed several operations but they had to put it off because his blood pressure was too low and all the new blood was not clotting. I heard his kidneys were also failing. The next day, that had to amputate one of his legs and remove his colon. He still needed another operation on his stomach. His parents knew that he wasn't going to come out of this but his wife kept insisting that Mark would want to continue to fight regardless. It was just the most horrible situation.

On the 22nd of September, all the various family members raced back to the hospital. After much deliberation, they finally convinced Danielle to let him go. Between operations, he was able to open his eyes, but they pretty much kept him sedated for the majority of the time. He was never really lucid. A little after noon, they took him off life support and he died within two minutes. 

They said that they had to still perform an autopsy because of the police investigation so that it would be some time before they would release his body to his family. Christian drove home the next day with his sister Aron. He dropped her off in Mesquite before coming home.

BYU

Our time finally ran out at some point and it was time to take the girls to school. Christian took a couple of days off from work. We packed the trucks the evening before. We got up before the sun was up and got ready to go. Amazingly, it started raining that morning. We have not gotten rain in so long. When we finally get it, we aren't even here to enjoy it. Apparently, it was also a lot cooler while we were away.

There was a big grass fire when we finally got to Idaho. The air was thick with smoke. We camped out in our usual spot near the sand dunes. We set up camp and went directly to sleep so we could get up early to head into town.

We dropped Emily off at her apartment so that she can organize things, then went to Caitlyn's apartment to get her checked in. We then started to move her boxes into her new apartment. Caitlyn's apartment is significantly nicer than Emily's in many ways, except for her kitchen. Her kitchen is ridiculously small. While it does have two refrigerators instead of one, there is almost no counter space and very little storage space. The apartment has six girls but only a table for four and no room for four people to eat unless you moved the table. Caitlyn was getting really stressed out and was starting to really regret not just moving in with her sister.

While we were still trying to figure things out at Caitlyn's place, Emily walked over from her apartment. She looked around since she had never been there before. Eventually, Christian took Emily back to drop off the rest of her stuff. It took a while, but we finally started finding places to put everything and Caitlyn was able to relax a little bit. She still decided to send a few things home with us that she could not find room for in her kitchen. They were not really essential items for the most part.

The nice thing about her apartment is that there are actually two and a half bathrooms and each girl has their own sink in their bedroom so that is a lot nicer than what Emily has to deal with. There is one bathrooms next to the kitchen that  is actually really big. We couldn't figure out what was going on. They could easily have cut the bathroom in half to make the kitchen bigger and there would still be plenty of room in the bathroom.

One of the roommates finally informed us that their apartment is supposed to be wheelchair accessible. That is why the bathroom is so big. Caitlyn has a shared room, but all the other bedrooms are private rooms. Her roommate told us that there are more shared rooms upstairs and that she believes that the kitchens up there are bigger...so that is something to look into for next time if Caitlyn finds it too difficult to deal with the small kitchen where she is now. And if Emily decides that she wants to move there as well, then maybe they can find a room upstairs at that point.

Caitlyn's current roommate has been there for several semesters so she probably won't be moving out  any time soon unless she gets married. She also has set up her room so that she takes up the lion share of the space. We were not too happy about that but Caitlyn said that she was okay with it for now and didn't want to make waves.

They also have a basement where they can store their boxes and/or store some of their things when they are off track, as long as they sign up to stay there the next semester, which is really convenient so that they don't have to drag everything home again. Emily thought about actually having to rent a small storage unit for that purpose.

After both girls were settled, Christian brought Emily back and we heated up some lunch. We went on campus so that Caitlyn could get her student ID and both the girls could pick up their textbooks. The campus was pretty crowded so Emily said that she would bring Caitlyn back to show her her classes over the weekend. We then took the girls to a couple of stores to get a few items and some groceries for them. Groceries are pretty expensive for some things in Rexburg. I was a little dismayed. And some items we take for granted like ground pork is not even available. It was pretty frustrating. When we were done, we picked  up some dinner and ate at Emily's place since no one was really there at the time. We talked for a bit and then we had to bid Emily farewell. We went back to Caitlyn's place to say goodbye after getting her some gas. 

The plan was for us to go back to the sand dune area, spend the night and make our way back in the morning but Christian was too stressed and anxious about having to leave the girls and we ended up just heading out of town that night. We camped in Nevada near the Idaho border where we had camped before with Caitlyn.

In the morning, we continued on our way. When we finally got out of the smokey areas, it was cloudy and we caught some rain on and off during our drive.

We found some more big horn sheep along the way. Christian took a brief nap while I drove us towards California. We found some really interesting rock formation that we wanted to come back and visit one day. Christian drove us the rest of way into California where we expected to get some heavier rain. We entered California near Bishop and drove home down the 395.

We stopped by to pick up some dinner and continued on our way. We made it home to our empty house late in the evening with no other incidents. 

Mojave Trail continued...

At the beginning of the month, we knew that we were quickly running out of time. Caitlyn's last day of work was the last day of the month. We ran around getting last minute miscellaneous items for her for college. We visited with Christian's dad for a bit. We drove the XJ so that we could make sure how well it was running after Christian's last maintenance repairs. We tried to take Christian's dad up to the mountains to just get out for a bit, but the weather is still unbelievably hot. As we were heading up a winding steep dirt road, we pulled over so that a couple of cars could come down and the XJ stalled on us. Apparently, the heat soak problem isn't entirely fixed...not in this extreme weather anyway. When the cars passed us by, we tried to restart the engine but it was vapor locked. We knew that we just had to give it a chance to cool down a bit but Christian's dad was a little worried and started hiking down to where there were still trees to get some shade. The girls and I went with him to make sure that he was okay. We got into this big thing with some strangers heading up the mountain wanting to give us a ride and offering us water. Terry was grateful but it was a bit of a nuisance for us as we didn't want to get a ride. As a mater of fact, it was cooler on the side of the mountain than our driveway has been. As we started to move towards the shade again, Christian had already got the XJ up and running and came down to get us.

We decided to just get off the mountain and return on a cooler day. We did take a drive through the canyon as the drive is a lot easier on the engine that climbing the steep mountain. We did not have any further problems. We returned to his house to get some dinner. As Christian and his dad took off to pick up some food, we got hit with a power outage. It affected the whole town, so none of the restaurants were up and running. Christian helped his dad set up the generator for their refrigerator but we decided that we had just better head home and hope that we had power when we got there. Luckily, we had no power outages at home.

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On the Sunday before the kids were to leave, we decided to go for a drive out around Mojave after church. There had been a series of thunderstorms and flash floods out there and Christian wanted to see water in the normally dry lakes. We are still in the middle of a horrible heat wave, so that might not have been our best idea but it's been nearly this bad all summer and you can only sit at home so long, cowering and hoping that your electricity won't go out before going crazy.

We decided to explore more of the Mojave Trail. It took us some time to even find it last time. Unfortunately, there was a biker that was wading through the water crossing we did last time, so we did not pause to take any more videos or pictures. We did find a second water crossing near the railroad bridge though. It is usually probably dry except for the flash floods that have hit this area recently.

We knew that we could not complete the trail since it is long and we only had half a day, so we spent some time just exploring.

Afton Canyon was beautiful, but exploring the area was limited due to the extreme heat. We saw a big horn sheep but we were not fast enough to capture it. We also saw some antelope but we scared them away as well before we could take pictures. We might have them on our GoPro footage though.

Once we left the canyon and got into the open sandy area, the trail was not quite so obvious. This area was obviously well travelled by side by sides so the road was a lot rougher, there was more trash and the trails were cut going every which direction so it was difficult to decide which was the road we were looking for. The trail we took went to the Raser OHV area. We retreated back the way we came but instead of going all the way back to where we think we veered from the tail, we took some smaller trails in the direction we thought we were supposed to go to soda lake. Unfortunately, we were a little off course. We got to some really soft sand at some point and knew we were not in the right direction. We crossed over the train tracks to where we thought would be a more solid trail. It didn't seem to get us anywhere but we passed a bigger trail that we thought would take us to the 40 but it petered out at some point.

By now, it was getting kind of late in the day and the clouds were looking a bit ominous. 

A Mojave lightning storm is certainly something to behold. The constant lighting show around us was both terrifying and spectacular. The biggest problem was that we were traveling along a wash...which would not bode well for us if the storm started producing rain. We raced back to where we had seen a crossing near the train tracks. Unfortunately, as we were traveling along this trail, we must have driven over a protruding piece of rebar or something. It was getting difficult to see and the storm was ramping up, so we hurriedly tried to change the tire in the near dark. 

Just as we were jacking the jeep up and started getting the tire off, a sand storm hit us. So rain was threatening, it was dark, we had lost our trail, we needed to put on our only spare tire and we were being sand blasted at the same time. We got some dark video footage of some of this but no pictures. When Christian got the spare changed with Emily's help, we continued (more carefully) on our way. However, we ran into more problems. A tree had fallen on the trail and they had to move some of it out of the way so that we had room to get around. We travelled back in the direction we came, looking for the route back to the Raser road so that we could get to the 15. 

We eventually found it and stopped to air up the tires near the freeway. The sand was still blowing everywhere. In fact, the CHP was escorting people back and forth on the freeway while modulating their speed because it was so bad. We came to find out that we must have gotten the tail end of a really big sandstorm in Arizona. It was pretty frightening. We obviously made our way home afterwards with no additional problems. Thus, the end of another crazy Caldwell adventure!