July

This summer's heat has been pretty unbearable. We've had two fires already in the local hills near our house. The big giant eucalyptus tree at the foot of the Box Springs Mtns here has fallen over and died. We, like many of the neighbors over the years, have taken our kids to swing in the huge tree. It has not been looking well for some time. The last few years has been hard on the tree with the drought and being inundated with graffiti and trash. It finally got some good earlier this spring but it wasn't enough to keep it going. All the damage was done.
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There was no annual Fourth of July part for us this year. I made an apple pie and we met up with some neighborhood friends to have dessert and hiked up a little way to watch the fireworks over the city. The police and the city tried to crack down on illegal fireworks this year. The result was that there seemed to be more illegal fireworks going off all across the city than ever.

One of the girls' friends had a bit of a scare with a traveling tarantula that decided to cross her path.
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Our garden has still been producing very well this year. We have armfuls of zucchini, grapes and apples. We also got a few dragon fruit and we got our first figs.

I've been spending most of my time processing apples. When the summer apples comes in, they come in fast and intense for about two months and then they are gone. So we have had endless apple cakes, apple bread, apple pie, and apple crisps. Plus, we have made apple sauce, apple butter, canned apples and dried apples.

We have given bags of apples away to neighbors. The flow of apples are finally starting to dry up now though. I have a love hate relationship with our apple tree. I love having the delicious apples and getting to make so many different things with the apples but the heat combined with the intensity that the apples are produced makes the process a miserable one at times. We definitely have a good amount of apples to last us the rest of the year now.

The girls help me with the apples now but not nearly as much as I would like. Even Christian has pitched in to help peel apples several times when he was available.

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The girls have spent much of their time with the various chores we have assigned to them. The both have piano, of course, which they seem to be a lot more eager to work on this summer. Emily seems to actually enjoy it now, which is nice. They are also each supposed to be cooking a meal a week. We have had mixed success with that plan.

Emily is supposed to try to fill in some the gaps in her chinese language studies since we have not been very happy with her teacher this past year. She is also supposed to go over some of her PSAT practice questions to help her prepare for that next year. She had one summer reading assignment for her class next year. It was just a small book, The Lord of the Flies, but I had to really push her to get it done. 

Caitlyn is suppose to work on her History Day Project for next year since they demand a lot and do not give them very much time to do it during the year because they have all their normal work to do as well. Plus, her history teacher is a slave driver. The project has always been a major thorn in our sides. Emily will not have to do one this year, so that is a relief. This year's theme is supposed to be 'Conflict and Compromise in History.' She doing a report on the Tiananmen Square massacre. I try to get the kids to work on it over the summer so that they don't have to pressure of working on it so much during the school year when they have so many other assignments to do, but it has never gone that well. They do get a head start, but they never get so far as to make the deadline any easier when it comes around. We'll see how this year goes for Caitlyn...personally, I'm not that hopeful as to the result.

Plus the girls have been dabbling with learning how to code since Caitlyn came back from the GenCyber conference. Actually, Emily has put more work into it that Caitlyn. Mostly because she simply has had more time and energy than Caitlyn has had to do it. They've also been having fun taking apart old computers, monitors and printers. They see how things are put together and how it works. Afterwards, they harvest useable parts like fans, heat sinks, buttons, led lights, power supply, nuts and bolts, etc. You can't believe how many hours they can spend on taking apart something without getting bored. 

Between chores, the girls spend much of their time playing and swimming with our neighbor up the street. It is a great blessing to them to have a friend with a pool within a hop skip and a jump away. And it's been nice that the girls are able to take armloads of apples and grapes to share with their friends as they play. 

This summer has been so hot that all we can manage to do it hide in our homes or they can go swimming. It has been much too hot for much of anything else. On a couple of rare mornings, we manage to make it out to ride our bicycles for a bit.

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The girls went to see a children's musical performance with their friends. They actually enjoyed that.

We had a couple of unexpected rain storms at the end of the month. We got some rain which was nice, but it made it pretty humid.

On one of the first mornings, we took advantage of the cooler morning by doing a bit of climbing at the Riverside Quarry. We each got to go on two or three routes before it got too hot and unbearable. Plus, Christian still had to go in and get some work done.

There has still been no change in our employment situation, so things have been pretty stressful.

June Update

The school year has finally come to another end. We've have gotten none of the June gloom of previous years and have skipped ahead to weather that is just scorching hot.

Emily did well in a few classes and as usual, managed to pull her grades up at the last minute in several others. She swears that she has learned her lesson and will try harder next year to keep up her grades but I've heard it before and will believe it when I see it, as it has caused us no small amount of stress watching her skimming the line of passing and utterly failing classes.

Caitlyn has still been maintaining a 4.0 all year. She has had more homework than Emily had in Jr. High, so we are pretty pleased with her hard work. In fact, she, and few of her friends, were invited at the end of the school year to join a week long cyber security day camp held at Cal State San Bernardino. CSUSB received a grant from the National Security Agency and partnered with the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio to put our this weeklong free day camp.

Caitlyn was pretty excited. The cyber security camp taught them some of the basics of cybersecurity, they had guest speakers from Bank of America, Facebook and Google to name a few, they got to try their hand at hacking and protecting drones from being hacked and they had various obstacle courses they got to go through. They provided transportation to and from camp everyday from her school.  Plus lunch and snacks while they were there. Plus, she got set up with a Raspberry Pi of her own at the end of the camp!

She didn't really get grouped with her friends but she met some new friends and looked forward to getting up going to camp each day. Now she has a tool to learn how to program. Hopefully she will take advantage of it and learn lots of neat and useful things.

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Meanwhile, Emily stayed home and worked on trying to catch up on her piano. Now that her sister has kind of passed her up in their lessons, she seems more self motivated to catch up. I don't think it sits well with her that she is behind her sister in anything. She mostly stopped practicing regularly (not that we put that much work into it before) when she got into Jr. High. It was like pulling teeth to get her to practice. I usually regretted trying to make her and decided to just stop pushing. It wasn't as difficult to make Caitlyn practice still, although, it became less frequent when she went to Jr. High as well. Once they get issued those stupid Chrome books, we seem to lose all control of our kids.

Anyway, Caitlyn liked the idea of being ahead of her sister.

She also got a new bike. She bought it mostly by herself and with some help from Caitlyn. Caitlyn has outgrown her bike for some time now. We are not able to buy her a new bike at this time but she had enough money that she has earned and saved up to buy her own. She decided to contribute to her sister's new bike and inherit Emily's old bike instead since Emily has kind of outgrown hers as well. It worked out for the both of them as they are both happy with what they have now.

Plus, Christian taught her how to put her bike together and taught her some basics of maintaining her bike.

She loves tinkering mechanically with things so this was great for her. Plus, now she can maintain our bikes all by herself!

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The kids garden is doing much better this year, they got their first zucchini harvest, plus they have corn and melons growing. 

It is also apple season, so we've been doing a lot with apples lately. 

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Caitlyn gave her first sacrament talk on Father's Day. She did a great job and got so many compliments from people. Despite her nervousness, she spoke loudly and clearly.

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After a few weeks of hard work, Emily finally finished her first piano lesson (Alfred's Basic Piano Course Level 1A). Finally, on to 1B! Hooray! Hopefully, it won't take her another 9 years to finish the next level. She doesn't seem to mind it as much as before and she still has a little more to technically catch up to her sister. Hopefully she won't get lazy again if she catches up or once school starts back up. I guess only time will tell.

May Musings

The month of May pretty much came and went without much fanfare. 

The girls made another attempt at planting a vegetable garden. They pretty much just tried to plant as many of our old seeds as possible before they go bad. So there is a little of everything in there. We'll see how it goes this time, or if only the gophers will profit from their efforts.

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Meanwhile, we met a really nice neighbor through NextDoor that has a large garden and chickens. We've been getting some fresh eggs and garden vegetables from her. We try to help out in her garden when we can, but when she is in town, we are busy and when we have time, she is busy. The kids don't even mind working in her garden because her garden is so neat, and the fact that she lets them eat any ripe strawberries in her strawberry patch while they work, certainly helps.

We brought her a loaf of Christian's crusty rustic bread once when we picked up some eggs and she shared with us some of her sourdough starter. We have made our own sourdough starter through out the years and it has been mostly disappointing in certain ways. Plus, we can't stand the amount of waste involved in creating and maintaining a sourdough culture when you don't bake a loaf of bread everyday. Her starter is super active, much more so than any of ours ever was. It is pretty fantastic. We had one culture that we started from Nappa Valley grapes which tasted superior, but it was never this vigorous. But since we eventually killed it off from neglect, we were not able to perfect it.

So, we are enjoying the sourdough a lot more this time around and I have found all kinds of recipes to use the excess sourdough in which has been both fun and rewarding. We still discard a little bit of it here and there when it gets too sour because we forgot a feeding or something but it has not been very often.

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We went to visit with my mother on Mother's Day. We had a luncheon with my sister and brother's family at my sister's house. We had indulged a little too much on all the food and decided to go take a walk around the local hillsides. There a few trails through the parks in the neighborhood. It wasn't that close though, so we had to drive, and unfortunately, the parking lot was closed on one end due to some rain damage on the trail. We ended up driving down to the other end of the park but by then, it was starting to get late and we were not as enthusiastic for our walk.

When we finally got back, we grazed on some of the leftovers for dinner and the kids helped Aunt Wendy pick peaches from her tree. We ended up getting home a lot later than we had anticipated.

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Caitlyn started her year end state and district tests so she had really weird schedules for most of the month. It was pretty irritating because they would feed Caitlyn lunch about an hour after she had breakfast and then by the time she got home, she was hungry and then I would have to make another trip out to pick up Emily each day since Caitlyn had minimum days.

Caitlyn turns 12

Caitlyn had her 12th birthday! We had her birthday party on her actual birthday. Grandpa Terry and Jackie came to celebrate with us, along with Marian. As usual, we prepared her birthday feast for lunch as Terry and Jackie has a 2 hour commute and like to get home early which means, I got up at 4:30 in the morning to start the brisket in the oven.

I prepared most of the cake the day before. I made a chocolate crepe cake. It just needed some finishing touches. Caitlyn and grandpa always shares a birthday meal since Terry's birthday is approximately a week before Caitlyn's.

After lunch, we rolled over to the living room to watch the video Christian made of Caitlyn's 2nd year. We are still working on catching up with all the kids videos so Christian makes two every year. Last year he did her first year video over and her 10th year. This year he is doing her 2nd year and her 11th year. We actually didn't get her 11th year done on time. He's hoping to get it done before Mother's Day now.

Afterwards, she opened presents. Emily got one gigantic present this year. Caitlyn got a bunch of little ones as she isn't really in need of anything specific.

Grandma Cheri sent her a card along with some money. Grandpa Caldwell also gave her some money.

Grandpa got a couple of presents as well.

After presents, we cut the cake. The crepes were not so tender. I don't think that I will be using that recipe again. It was a difficult batter to work with and didn't turn out that good. I think I will try it again some time making a variation of the previous recipes we've tried. The crepes were much better. The chocolate hazelnut topping was excellent though.

All our guests left shortly after. Caitlyn and Emily spent the rest of the afternoon playing with her gifts. We were tired and by dinner time, no one was even hungry since we all had a huge lunch. We had smoothies for dinner, watched a movie with some popcorn and called it a day.

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The next day was Sunday. Caitlyn "graduated" from primary. She had to go up in sacrament meeting to get her Faith in God award and recite her favorite Article of Faith. She chose number 6. Luckily Sunday was also her friend's birthday, so they got to do everything together. It is much less frightening for them to go up there when they were able to go together. They had even gotten baptized together when they were 8.

At home, Caitlyn worked on her friend's birthday gift. Later that evening, they stopped by to bring Caitlyn a gift. We had made some cupcakes to celebrate Lynette's birthday.

Update for April

Spring break was fairly uneventful. We went to Joshua Tree in the middle of the week so that there would be less people there. Christian worked most of the week, I worked on the eaves some more and finally finished it this month. I still have a lot more to work on my the eaves are at least done.

My Trooper had some major problems. The transmission gave out on us. We knew that there was some slipping in the transmission. We were hoping it would make it until summer so that we would have some time to rebuild the transmission, but it was not meant to be. We ended up having to take it in to a transmission place to get it fixed. Supposedly it would take only 4-5 days. If we did it ourselves, I thin that we were looking at nearly a month of work and we just could not be without the vehicle for that long.
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At the end of the week, we went to Shen Yun. Christian's dad got tickets for our family for Christmas. We had to take the truck. We have not fixed the problems we were having with the fuel pump yet, but it seems to be running okay again. We figure that it is a loose connection in there. Luckily, it is still running of us or we would not have any vehicle at this point.

Shen Yun was a very beautiful and interesting show. The girls were pretty excited to attend. The dancers and music was great. We learned some interesting things about the Falun Gong as well.

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My dad had had a cold for a while that he couldn't quite shake. It turned into Bronchitis at some point and ended up in the hospital because of his high fever and difficulty breathing. He got pneumonia as well. He was spending most of his time sleeping. He was barely eating. He had to have supplemental oxygen and was getting a barrage of antibiotics. We figured that his time was coming to an end pretty soon and was thinking that we needed to prepare for the worst. 

After about a week and a half though, he seemed to recover somewhat. They were able to take him off the oxygen and move him to a nursing facility. We drove over to take my mom to the new facility. He was still sleeping a lot but was eating a little more. He slept through our visit. We were not sure if it was all the medicine or the sickness that made him sleep so much. He was still on some antibiotics at this time.

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Marian came over the next day after church for Easter. Last year's Easter Egg Hunt was supposed to be the kids' last as they are older now. But the kids kept pestering Marian for one more. They also missed the Deans' annual Easter Egg Hunt since we had to go visit with my dad.

Compared to last year, this year's Easter Egg Hunt was fairly straightforward. Although, she did have some peculiar and strict rules (such as, no opening any of the Easter Eggs until we are done).

Caitlyn was really on fire. She got a lot of eggs. It was probably the first year that she actually got more than her sister. I'm not sure why Marian made us participate as well.

In the end, the whole Easter Egg Hunt turned out to be a big gag. The candy in the eggs were very old and disgusting. She threw in some old screws and staples in them to boot. The kids were sad to have to throw away what used to be perfectly good candy...especially the Godiva chocolates. What a shame! We just don't know why Marian couldn't leave Christian and I out of her sham of an Easter Egg Hunt.

Aside from being saddened to throw away all that candy, the kids still had fun doing the hunt, so they were not completely deterred my Marian's efforts to stop the Easter Egg tradition.

But Marian didn't forget about them completely. She brought them an Easter treats still...

What made it a little sad was that it was a hollow Belgian chocolate egg...but since they got a little melted in the heat, they had collapsed on itself. What they got was a barely recognizable lump of chocolate. The kids aren't too picky though and happily ate them anyway. At least they were not moldy or rusty!

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Marian had missed Emily's birthday this year because she had to work, so after the Easter Egg hunt, Emily got some belated birthday gifts as well.

She actually got a whole pile of presents. She mostly got new clothes so she was pretty excited.

We ended the day with a nice Easter dinner with Marian before she had to take off.

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We got word back from the transmission place that our TCM was not communicating with our transmission, so we had to order another one of those. We had to settle for a used one as a new one would cost a small fortune.

However, while there was a small delay for them to get the part in, they apparently didn't bother to even get working on the transmission. So, 5 days turned into nearly 3 weeks since they didn't even have the parts for the rebuild after 2 weeks. We were none too pleased since we didn't rebuild it ourselves because we feared that it would take 3 or 4 weeks to do.

Meanwhile, Christian had to take the kids to school every morning and then come back from work to pick them up again. It was quite disruptive. On the third week he got pretty busy and I had to walk over to pick them up. The kids headed back and I met them most of the way back. The first couple of days was not too bad but it started to get hotter and hotter as the week progressed, so we were pretty relieved when I finally got my car back.

After all the money we ended up spending on it and the time, it appears to be working like a champ. It just better stay that way for a number of years to make the expense worth while. It will most likely be the last major work that we are willing to put into the vehicle as parts are getting increasingly difficult and expensive to procure. I couldn't even get parts from my old contacts at Isuzu. After we recover from this latest hit to our bank account and after Christian gets a new job, we will have to start saving up for a new car. It will be a sad day as I love my old Trooper!

Joshua Tree

At the beginning of the month (during the kids' Spring Break), we talked ourselves into going to Joshua Tree once again. We have not had very good experiences here lately, but out of desperation, we gave it another try.

We got up extra early to get a spot out on the Wonderland of Rocks area. Our climbs were open and there were no other climbers on the Wonderland North area. We climbed up The Chief (5.5). It is somewhat short so we all took a couple of laps on it to get back into practice.

Christian led the climb and the rest of us top roped it. After getting a feel for the climb and warming up, Emily was going to attempt to lead the climb but as she started up, she inadvertently put her hand down on a furry caterpillar. It is spring and there were a bunch of western tent caterpillars crawling all along the rocks we were on.  Apparently, they carry some kind of toxin on their spines because Emily started whining and crying about her hand. We did not think too much of it as we have not had any experience with stinging caterpillars. As she was upset and cradling her hand, we told her not to go up. Christian went back up to clean his anchor. I followed to clean his gear. The kids took a nap at the bottom of the climb while they waited.

By the time we got back down, Emily was calmer but her hand still hurt. We moved the gear to the next climb (Speedbump 5.6). This was a fairly easy 85' slab climb. The only difficulty was getting over one difficult spot near the beginning, dubbed the "speed bump."

While I took my turn on this climb, a swarm of bees flew by me. Luckily, I had passed the speed bump and was going up the easier slab at the time. I had to throw myself down onto the rock face to get out of the way of the swarming bees. It was a little scary.

We had our lunch at the base before we moved on to a much more difficult 90' slab climb named Fender Bender (5.9-). This had some pretty difficult spots but everyone managed to make it up pretty well.

After the kids did their climb, they took off to do some exploring. Christian and I actually took a brief nap in the shade while they were away. I took my turn going up Fender Bender and was finishing up when they got back. Christian went up Ninny's Revenge (5.9) which had this crazy overhanging start. Of course, the kids didn't take any pictures, so we don't have any of that. It was pretty neat though.

Then Christian went up Reggie Zigzags (5.4). A 60' pitch that goes up this chimney that is about 6 or 8 feet above the ground then zigzags up some cracks.

Nobody was up for any of those climbs so we called it a day. We packed up and hiked back to our car. We were pretty happy with how our day turned out overall (minus the insect incidences). We only ran into one hiker that came around. He was friendly but quiet and left us in peace. We got in some good climbing.

We decided to head back out to Trashcan rock to have our dinner as they have picnic tables in front of the rocks. Christian and Emily decided to do some climbing while I heated up our dinner. Emily decided to lead Karpkwitz (5.6) since she did not get to lead The Chief. It is a short but somewhat difficult climb up some crack systems. She even set up an anchor up on top but she was not very confident about her pieces. Christian climbed up and checked her pieces. She did pretty good for the most part except for a couple of pieces that he thought would not really have held too well.

March Update

I have been terrible about keeping up with my journal entries this year. I try to eventually get to it, but  because so much time has passed in between, I am unable to remember all the things that are going on...especially if I don't have pictures to remind me.

It has been a dark month for us. Christian found out that his boss and friend of some 25+ years is dying. He has cancer. It is terminal. He got diagnosed with it some time last year, I think. He had some operations and chemo-therapy and seemed to come out ahead, but in his latest check up, they found that it was still there and spreading.

To add to that, Christian will have to find a new job. Everything is going to be changing because of it.

We were supposed to go on vacation to the Tetons with Christian's sister's family again in June. That's not going to happened anymore. We can no longer afford it or if Christian has a new job by then, we won't be able to get so much time off in the beginning. His sister actually had altered their plans to accommodate our schedule and now we won't even be joining them.

We went down to San Diego to see her family and explain our situation to all of the family there.

The main purpose of our visit, however, was to be there to see our nephew open his mission letter to see where he will be going. Christian's sister was working so we all ended up at the hospital, where she works, to open the letter.

Austin got called to a mission in Paraguay. His big brother, Mason, will be returning from his mission in Uruguay shortly before Austin leaves. I think that they will only have a few weeks together before it will be Austin's turn to ship out.

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Caitlyn finally completed her Alfred's Basic Piano Prep Course, Level B. She is officially ahead of her sister now. Neither of the girls practice very much. It's always like pulling teeth to have them practice and so, we haven't pushed very much. Both girls pretty much stopped practicing regularly when they got to Jr. High and were issued Chromebooks. They pretend to have too much homework to practice and end up wasting their lives away playing games and watching video and just searching out stupid tidbits. 

I have still been able to push Caitlyn a little more than Emily, which is why she managed to pass up her sister. Emily isn't too happy about it and has put a little bit more effort into completing her piano lessons because of it. 

Dad gave Caitlyn a little Soprano recorder as a prize. She was pretty excited about that, because it fits her hands a bit better than a regular recorder.