November

The month started out pretty shaky. The sinks in the bathrooms were clogged up with hair and stuff and the usual drano wasn't cutting it. The bathroom sinks are back to back, so they are both connected and when one sink clogs, they both get backed up. Christian took it apart to snake it and found that the pipes were just disintegrating.

When we first looked over our house to buy it, we made certain that the sinks and tubs were in good condition because the tub in the house we had rented was in terrible shape and never looked very clean even after just cleaning it. But when the previous owners of this house moved out, they made it a point of pride to clean the bathrooms before leaving. We wanted them to just leave it and leave the house. Well, she decided to clean it with some kind of acid as the kitchen sink, and the bathtub and sink in the main bathroom is now utterly ruined. The enamel is destroyed. So, we are again, dealing with sinks and tubs that don't look clean no matter how much you clean it. We were so pissed. There is nothing we can do except tear it apart and swap all of it out or paint over it...which is only temporary.

But now, to add salt to our wounds, we find that not only did the enamel get ruined, the pipes did too. We don't know how extensive the damage is. We are hoping that the worst is where it made immediate contact with the acid. Anyway, Christian ripped it all out, up to the wall. He had to grind out what was left, as part of the pipe crumbled and broke as we tried to remove it. Then we had to order a tap and die to fix the pipe or we would have to rip the walls apart to get in further to replace parts. Christian also had to order some special adhesive/gasket, to make sure it would not leak as we couldn't get the new pipe in far enough to be really confident in the joint. So, the kids were without a bathroom sink for over a week. They either had to use the kitchen sink or the sink in our bathroom, which was working again after Christian snaked the kids sink.

It was a pain in the butt, very stressful and was an unexpected expense but it is finally all back together and working fine.
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Christian had a birthday and we celebrated our twenty-first wedding anniversary, but we didn't do that much and I don't have any pictures to show for it, as Christian was sick again. He's been sick a lot, on and off since the beginning of October. Luckily, no one else in the house caught anything.
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Emily is back on her full schedule of soccer practice and games, although, the season has not actually begun. There are pre-season games and soccer tournaments still. So, they've been practicing a lot and trying to get back in shape. Much to our dismay, they even had a game and practiced during the Thanksgiving break.

Emily is on the junior varsity team again and is happy to be playing with most of her friends. So far, she is still doing fairly well in keeping up her grades but the season is about to start and the end of the semester is just around the corner now, so we will see if she gets to finish off the season or not.
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We celebrated Thanksgiving with my family, as usual. We met up at my sister's house. My sister and her immediate family had gone to visit with her in-laws before our dinner though and didn't get back until quite late. Our dinner ended up to be pretty late, so we were a bit irritated. We ended and came home even later. The kids didn't get to crawl into bed until after 1:am.
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A couple of days later, we drove back out for a big Chinese banquet. My sister's family was throwing an eightieth birthday celebration for her father-in-law and they were also celebrating their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Our kids have never attended a big banquet before, so they were pretty excited to be try a traditional ten-course meal. The biggest problem was getting them to dress up for it. I only managed to get them to wear their church clothes. 

Again, the party started late. Some of the food was pretty good but a lot of it was mediocre at best. We were a bit disappointed. The worst part was, that they had music blasting in our ears almost the entire time. Not just any music, but karaoke music. Luckily, Christian brought ear plugs, which made it a little more bearable. By the end of the evening, even my head hurt from the constant noise (which they turned up louder and louder by the end of the evening). The party included significantly more than two hundred guests. As some of the people started to stream out at the end of the evening, we took the opportunity to escape as well. Of course it took us nearly half an hour to dodge and weave through the crowd and keep our group moving and left the party to the singing and dancing fools of their core group...an no, they were not the younger generations.

October

Emily went in for her annual sports physical at the beginning of the month. It was a lot less painful than last year. She has not grown since her last physical so we are pretty sure she has stopped growing. She seems to be holding steady at 5 feet 5 and 3/4 inches tall. Her weight, eyesight and hearing was good as well. She got a flu shot thrown in since it is that time of year. Caitlyn and I got ours as well, since we were there. Unfortunately, Christian was already home with flu like symptoms.
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The first quarter of school ended. Both of the girls are doing really good. They both managed to get all A's and one B. Hopefully, they can keep their momentum up. Emily is on a short leash this year with her soccer. If her grades drop or even misses assignments, she doesn't get to go. She has missed a few days of practice this month but she gets it fixed with the teacher now, whether it is her fault or theirs.
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On one of nicer days (weather wise), we walked out to the back hills to do a little climbing. The short hike back there showed that we were pretty out of shape, especially myself. Emily is working on getting back in shape with soccer and Caitlyn had to put some real effort into it with returning to PE.

I only climbed one route. Everyone else went up a couple of times before it got late. We were going to attempt to go to Joshua Tree on another weekend, but it didn't really work out as Caitlyn procrastinated and had too much work to do. Christian took Emily out to the Quarry for a bit to get a little more climbing in. 

I don't know if it is the weather or what, but Christian has been having a lot of trouble with one of his knees and I have been having problems with my back so we have not been able to do too much.

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Christian has spent a great deal of time this past month working on our vehicles. He changed the brakes on my vehicle (he had to do it several times due to some complications). He also changed the transmission fluid in my vehicle. We had not done it since we got the new transmission put in. Apparently, they cheated us on the transmission fluid as we didn't get nearly as much out as we had to put in.

He had to put in a new fuel injector in his truck. We've been having problems with the truck occasionally running rough and the fuel being to rich for a number of years now. Slowly, but surely, Christian has been able to narrow down the problem. He spent a good six months or so, building an electronic circuit to test his injectors. With his new electronic gadgets, he was able to identify the exact problem and swap out the faulty injector and it seems to be running nicer than it has in years.

It's all a never ending process though, as both of our vehicles are getting old and there is a lot of maintenance we need to keep up with.

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Emily went to Disneyland with her friends. One of her best friends took them all for their birthdays this year (including her own, I guess). She got to go out and spend the day at Disneyland with her closest friends and has not one single picture to show for it. I don't know why I expect more. I just don't understand that.

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We didn't do anything for Halloween this year. While Emily was at Disneyland, Caitlyn and I attended some Harvest Festival at church. She volunteered to help out with some of the games for the younger kids and then we stayed for the Chili cook-off and talent show. I brought an apple dessert from my canned summer apples. 

We skipped on our friends' Halloween party this year as Christian was sick with another flu and I just started having problems with my back and was in no mood to go stand around at a Halloween Party.

On Halloween night, we just stayed home. We got one group of kids trick-or-treating and that was it. I only prepare a small amount of candy these days since most of the time, no one comes by. Luckily, we had just enough to give a small handful to each of the trick-or-treaters. After the kids finished their homework, we watched a somewhat scary movie together and called it a night.

September

Not much of note happened through September.

The kids got to play some prelude music on the organ one Sunday. That was pretty cool. Emily was scheduled to give a talk that day as well, so she thought it was pretty unfair to have to be up there so much that day. But the kids did well and we thought that it was pretty neat.
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Emily is doing much better in school this year so after she got her first progress report, we let her go back to soccer practice. They had already had tryouts, so it was a little late, but since she played last year already, they were not so concerned with her late start. However, because of last year's performance, she is pretty much skating on thin ice with us though, so if her grades start to drop or if she even misses an assignment, she won't get to go to practice or play at all. We'll see how it goes. She usually does pretty well at the beginning of the term and peters off at some point but she is still going pretty strong so everyone is happy.
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Caitlyn and her friend had a brief inclination to join cross country but after we took them on a hike over the summer, we got them to drop that notion as they would have to run over similar trails in the heat of the summer for practice. She has no interest in any other sports, although Emily and her friends tried to get her to join soccer.

Instead she has joined a couple of clubs on campus. She is giving ASU (Asian Student Union) and Art Club a try. She showed some interest in joining Key Club but they meet on the same days as ASU and has only made a slight effort in attending any of their meeting so nothing has materialized on that front.
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I had my birthday this past month. My sister and mom came over to take me out to lunch. Christian joined us as well. We ended up at this little gastro pub downtown for some Pork Belly Burgers. Actually, my sister and I tried the Pork Belly Burgers and my mom and Christian decided to try a portobello sandwich, so we all shared and got to try both. Christian is going to try to make the Pork Belly sandwiches at home and see how that turns out. It was pretty tasty.

Unfortunately, that was it for our plans as Christian and I had to be at church that afternoon for Primary practice for the Primary Program. It was to be the last practice before the program and they provided pizza for dinner afterwards. The girls had leftovers at home for their dinner.

Christian did get me a really neat and fancy wheat grinder for my birthday though. It grinds wheat effortlessly in minutes. Previously, we were doing it all by hand and it took hours. You can imagine that we only did it in fits and starts as it was kind of a pain in the butt to use.

August

Emily finally returned from her trip with Grandpa Caldwell. She was a bit dismayed at how hot it is still here. We had her show us her pictures and catalogue them, work on her journal so that she would not forget, but we all know how well that worked out.

The girls were invited over to their friends' house for some end of the summer fun. They had made these big slides in their backyard. The kids missed the previous party since we were out visiting my mom and helping her move. The best consolation for missing it was that we got to make Doong or Zongzi (粽子). The kids love them and I'm pretty sure my mom won't be making them anymore. It is too much work for her now. She handed over some of her supplies to Christian. Neither of my siblings' families are very big fans of them. 

But I digress, it was not a good time of the month for Caitlyn, so only Emily got to play on the slides. Caitlyn came with me to say hello and drop Emily off. I snapped off a few pictures before leaving.

Emily's friend didn't want to play on the slides as she doesn't like to mess up her hair or get dirty or some other nonsense like that. Emily was on her own for a while and made the best of it by entertaining her younger brothers. The oldest sister had the same problem as Caitlyn and just stuck around a bit to help out. Emily's other friends came later and she got to have more fun.

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We had the girls volunteer at this international summer camp for Chinese students visiting from China. They changed locations at the last minute and it also ended up conflicting with the kids registration and orientation schedules so they ended up only going for two days. They are supposed to get service credit for helping. They need it for their high school requirements. The girls mostly enjoyed it. It was an interesting experience for them but the camp doesn't seem like it is put together very well.

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Emily and Caitlyn had to go in to register for their classes, pick up their books and schedules since school will start next week.

This will be Caitlyn's first year in high school...so a big change for her. She also attended the orientation at the end of the week to get her familiarized with the school. Plus they get class t-shirts from school, so she definitely wanted to get that.

This has been the shortest summer ever. It's so unfair that the kids got cheated out of two weeks of their summer. Plus, except for Emily, we didn't get to do hardly anything this summer. When you add the record breaking heat we've been having, it's been a pretty miserable summer. I wish I could say that at least Caitlyn had a productive summer, but she didn't finish her history project and didn't even begin her other projects so I'm not sure what she's been doing all summer.

Emily's Big Summer Trip

So this post is about a month overdue. I encouraged, threaten and cajoled, but could not get Emily to give me some pictures from her trip and write about it in her journal. She started writing it, but couldn't be bothered to finish it. She picked out her favorite pictures but never sent them to me. So, here we are, part way into the school year and I have not made my post.

I finally gave up on her and put what I could together from a couple of pictures she originally took with her iPod and sent to me while on the trip when she had WiFi, a few pictures that Christian's sister texted to him while they were there, and a couple of pictures that I got from Christian's dad afterwards. She hasn't even returned the camera she borrowed from Christian to take all those pictures that we didn't get on her trip or my SD card that she borrowed for the camera.

Christian's dad came very early Sunday morning, July 22nd to pick her up. They headed out on the road and met up with Erin's family in St. George, Utah for lunch. I know that they stopped in Tooele where Grandpa Caldwell was born and they apparently visited the cemetery where his dad (Christian's Grandfather and Emily's Great Grandfather) is buried. Emily apparently took a fall in the parking lot or something and never ended up recording any of it for us. I never could quite get a full story of what happened so I am presuming that she was doing something stupid with her cousins at the time.

They stayed with friends of Erin's family while out there. In the morning, they headed out to Idaho. Emily's cousin Mason is going to school at BYU Idaho currently. They planned to pick him up along with his girlfriend (fiancee?). Emily and the younger cousins were supposed to get a tour of the campus. Christian tried to set it up for her a week ago but never heard back from them. They finally contacted him after they already took the tour. Apparently, they were having commencement ceremony's that day and they got a very abbreviated tour of campus. They gave them from free swag and sent them on their way....all of which was nice, I guess...but less than helpful.

That evening, after Mason and his girlfriend got off work, they all headed out to the cabin in Yellowstone where they would be staying for the next couple of nights.
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On their first day in Yellowstone, they went hiking around to see a bunch of geysers and hot springs, including Old Faithful and the Grand Prismatic.

On the second day in Yellowstone, they went to see the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone which includes  Yellowstone Falls.

They got to do some swimming somewhere near there.

The next day, the party split up with Erin's family heading back to Utah and then home, Mason and his girlfriend were going to go visit her parents and Terry and Emily heading out to Montana to visit with Terry's brother (Christian's Uncle Tony).

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Tony has a cattle ranch in Montana. He raises Red Angus breeding stock. He puts up his own hay still. Emily got a small glimpse of what life on a ranch is like. Terry went out of his way to take her around to a few places in Montana to keep her entertained.

On their first full day there, he took her to the World Museum of Mining in Butte. It rained after that, so they headed back to the ranch.

The next day was Sunday, so Terry and Emily ventured into town to attend Sacrament Meeting but did not attend the full block of meetings. They stayed home that day to hang out and visit with the family. Uncle Tony took them back into town for dinner.

On Monday, they went to another museum in Helena. On Tuesday they went to Georgetown Lake. Apparently, Emily got to do some more swimming.

They also stopped by in Phillipsburg to go to The Sweet Palace and loaded up on a bunch of candy.

They made their way home after that. They spent the night in Nevada before continuing on their journey home.

As far as I know, the best part of her trip to Yellowstone was of course, seeing new and beautiful places but also, hanging out with her cousins.

And the best part of her stay in Montana, was Uncle Tony's basement, where she got to stay. She said that it was so cool and quiet, she never wanted to leave.

July

July seemed to be an excruciatingly long month. The heat was unbearable most of the time.

Between the heat and dealing with our neighbors noisy dogs, we didn't get much rest. They had a couple of huskies, which was fine for the most part, except that they did't take very good care of them. Then they decided to breed them and they had 3 to 5 puppies...I'm not even sure exactly how many. The puppies mostly stayed inside of the house. They kept separating the dogs and they would whine and howl until they were let back in. The worst was when they were weaning the puppies and the mother would make noise for hours and hours until they came home again (sometimes late into the night). Once, it even broke the backdoor window trying to get in to her puppies. They lived in deplorable conditions. Most of the time they would lie in their own filth with little or no shade in temperatures over 100 degrees, sometimes with no water or food. The dogs looked mangy and half starved. They shed most of their fur...which was lying in clumps all over their yard.

We tried talking to the neighbors but that was useless. We tried getting help from animal control, but they were not much help either. They finally started getting rid of them one by one but this situation dragged on for a couple of months. The mother husky was the only one left in the end and then it just disappeared one day. Not sure if they finally managed to kill it off or if they got rid of it. But it was replaced with a new dog by the end of the month. What joy is ours.
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We spent Fourth of July with our friends the Dean's who has their annual firework viewing party downtown. They live on a hill in view of Mt. Rubidioux. It's always good to visit with old friends. The Christensen's put on an excellent bbq for it as usual. Christian took the opportunity of being around so many teens to interview some of them for a project for his adolescence psychology class this term.
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We spent a couple of weekends here and there helping my mom move. We had to sort through a lot of stuff to help her get rid of all necessary things that she's collected over the years. She's moving into my sister's house and she's going to rent out her house to help pay for my dad's care. It's going to be a long process.
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Emily finished her summer school to make up for the World Lit class she didn't do so well in this past year. She did pretty well in it and has picked up her gpa a bit. We still think their summer school is a bit of a cheat just to get kids not to fail or flunk out entirely. Still, Emily said that some kids flunked it a second time at the end.
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The girls continue their organ lessons and even got to take a small "field trip" to the stake center to check out the bigger organ there.

Their lessons are coming along nicely. They continue their piano practice along with practicing at the organ a couple times a week for a short period of time.

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Marian came over to visit with the girls. She does an annual Christmas in July kind of thing with us. She took them out to the movies and then we met up and she took us out for more sushi. The girls just love it.

She got them a ton of back to school supplies: backpacks, clothes, school supplies and a bunch of snacks. It was pretty insane.

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We didn't have much else going on. I worked on putting up our summer apples. The girls played occasionally with the neighborhood kids. Emily left for her trip to BYU Idaho, Yellowstone and Montana with her grandfather. More on that in my next post.

Caitlyn and Christian just did homework. We wanted to do a small weekend camping trip but in the end, decided that it was just too hot to do much of anything. The other places we considered going to was on fire so we stayed holed up in our house most of the time. The summer started off fairly well but in the end, it seemed to be the hottest summer in history. Even with us at home watering the plants all the time, a lot of them suffered and got damaged from the constant high temperatures. All our grapes shriveled up and turned into raisins before they could even fully develop. The guavas all dropped their fruit and many of the developing lemons did as well. Even our oak tree has damaged dried up leaves all over the tree.
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Christian and I did manage to take Caitlyn out bowling one night before Emily got back. She had never tried it before and Christian and I had not been bowling since some time in college. We played three games. The first one, Caitlyn and I did a lot of alley balls. Christian either did really well or just as badly as we were doing for a while. We started to get a hang of it during the second game. By the third, Caitlyn seemed to get too tired and gave up. I think Christian won the first two games and I won the last one but the overall score was also higher than theirs. We all managed to get a strike in there somewhere and a few spares to boot. Christian even got two strikes in a row but couldn't quite manage a third.

We had a pretty good time and was glad that we could get out of the house for a short while to take Caitlyn out for a little fun.

June

The kids are finally out of school, but there isn't that much of a change since Emily had to start summer school the following Monday. Not much time off. She has 6 hours of World Lit every day for   the next four weeks to make up her grade in that class. She is not loving it. But she is doing better, so that's good. I just don't see how they can genuinely get the same education in two weeks, even going to class for 6 hours a day as in a semester of high school. They don't even have any homework!
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While Marian was over visiting for Caitlyn's promotion, we asked what the girls wanted to do for their dad for Father's Day. Christian had class that evening so we had a bit of time to run some errands if they wanted to. They decided to do a bunch of chores around the house for him. Marian made out a big list for them. They started that evening and every time their dad left to go study or class, they would work their little hoofies off doing chores around the house. They dusted, ironed a couple of his shirts, cleaned the windows, washed his car, swept the driveway, did some gardening, etc. And since it was a weekend, they did all of it on top of their normal chores of cleaning their bathroom and the floors. It was something to behold.

Of course, even though Christian left early and came back late, he couldn't help but notice some of the things around the house. Emily even made him dinner after church on Sunday.

It helped that Marian also gave them the incentive of taking them back out for sushi again if they actually accomplished everything on the list. I don't think that she actually thought that they would complete it. To be honest, knowing my kids, I didn't think they would either! We were pleasantly shocked.
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Caitlyn met up with her best friend Aubrey to swim shortly after school ended. Emily joined them at the pool.

It was really nice at the pool. It was not as crowded as usual. Unfortunately, Aubrey couldn't stay for the whole thing as her parents had other plans for them.

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Caitlyn and Aubrey then planned to go to Castle Park the next week. They tried to get their friends to join them but it didn't work out. They got in free with the good grades award program. Castle Park tried to say that they didn't have the incentive any longer but Aubrey is a really outgoing and outspoken kid and wouldn't take any of that. She had them call the manager over and showed them the program on their own website before they would let them in. So sad that they would try to cheat a couple of kids out of their hard earned award.

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The week after that, Caitlyn spent the week in a coding camp at UCR. We had high hopes for this program. We were really disappointed when we had to give up Emily's spot in the camp because of her summer school.

When we dropped her off for her first day, we were a little worried as they seemed a bit disorganized and unprepared. Then we found out that they did not teach the kids any actual coding using computer language but just used this MIT App Inventor that uses built in blocks of code to program. This is what I would have expected at some elementary school as an intro to programming. This is not what I expected from UCR. It was sad.

She still had a lot of fun I suppose. They were there for 8 hours a day for a whole week. They provided them with lunch at the dorms and at the Panda Express on campus so Caitlyn thought that was pretty neat. Plus they got to eat pretty well. They took some time to give the kids a tour of campus and they played a scavenger hunt around campus on different days. Being near the University means that Caitlyn has already had a half a dozen tours of campus already.

They did their "coding" on a desktop computer in one of the computer labs but they ran them on an android device...which means that they all got little Kindle Fires for camp which they got to take home. She's pretty happy about that. Plus she got to meet a new friend there.

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In addition, Caitlyn managed to pass off another level of Piano. She was going through Alfred's Basic Piano Prep Course Level C. She will start level D now. Caitlyn was ahead of Emily for a while, but a couple of months ago, Christian bribed Emily to put some effort into continuing her Piano. She has to play everyday for 3 months and she will get a cell phone out of the deal. She had been really dedicated to putting in her practice and is now ahead of Caitlyn again, if only by a little. But it's nice because she will do all her practice without us having to tell her or remind her (for the most part). She doesn't whine or complain about it at all (that was part of the deal as well).

The reason for the big piano push since they haven't put in very much effort to learn is because someone at church has offered to teach them to play the organ. Many of the people that actually know how to play the organ are getting older and will not be around forever. She wants to make sure that the future generations don't lose the ability and end up having to use pre-programmed organ music during service. Both girls are actually pretty excited to learn it.