Spring Break!

So I noticed it has been over a month since my last "adventures in Lexington" installment. A lot has happened since then: mid-term hell week came and went, my car was totaled, I spent my spring break in Chicago and St. Louis Frankensteining a new car, camped in the Natural Bridge State Park here in KY, spring sprung, and got back deep into the cadaver lab which is smelling worse and worse by the day.

Mid-Term Report Card
Mid-term hell week itself was not bad. It was the three weeks leading up to it that wore me out. Four exams in four days is brain numbing and then having to go to lectures afterwards for the new material was just ludicrous. In the class right after our last mid-term, the professor looked out at us and said, "Did you all just have a mid-term or something?" I kid you not. We were mush - it was like Charlie Brown's teacher going "wah, whah, whah, whah, wha." The final outcome: 3 As and 1 B. Not too bad.

Good Things From Bad
So you read right, my Ford was totaled. I took it in to get an estimate on repairs to the transmission and while the mechanic was out test driving it, he got hit. He was making a left turn and got slammed in the back end hard enough to spin him 180 degrees, knock his cell phone off his belt and send it sailing into the back seat. Since he was at fault and insurance follows the car, not the driver, my insurance was going to have to pay out for the other car and nothing on mine (no comprehensive coverage there for me). BUT, God is good, as it all unfolded, since the mechanic was driving it for business reasons, his business insurance paid me for my car and paid for the other woman's car. I got almost exactly the amount I need to pay for a semester of school that I was wondering where I was going to get the money for. AND, he said it would have cost about $1,700 to $2,000 to repair the transmission - which I didn't have to spend because I no longer have the car. Amazing.

O'Grady Chop Shop
So, after three weeks of being chauffeured around by my numero uno study partner, Chad, an old friend (Sean, in St. Louis) calls and says, "Hey, my sister got married and moved to China last week. You would be doing my dad a favor if you took her car off his hands." Hey hey! A free car! Little did I know that while it was "free", as in no money to purchase, sweat equity would be required in the form of five days of intense labor to getting it running, looking and smelling decent. Yes, you read right - smelling. Joe, Sean's sister, was not overly concerned with neatness. While she ran a house cleaning business, that skill did not transfer to her car. There were piles of moldy clothes, moldy food, cleaning supplies, three miscellaneous tires and rims, 30 empty packs of Merit and Basic cigarettes, spilled Chinese food, and beads from crafting stuck in the Chinese food. Not to mention that she wrote these neat little pearls of wisdom on tiny pieces of paper that could not be thrown away (they were pretty cool). So something that looked like trash, you found out was not. Even once the car got cleaned out and vacuumed, it still smelled like a cat had vomited, peed and then died in there. Sean's dad, Tom, and I took out the carpet and both front and rear seats (which had no vinyl left on them anyway). We replaced these with junkyard seats and carpet that were a thousand times better than what was in there. Not to bad. We lucked out in that the car we found at the Victory Auto Wreckers was the same make and year and color - but one model better. So it was a great up grade (folding rear seats!). After we tossed a bucket of water in the car to get as much of the mold out as we could, we bolted in the front driver's seat, threw everything else in the trunk and back area, and off I went to St. Louis. My mom followed me there to make sure I made it ok. After all, I could actually see the road beneath me as I drove. We took out the body plugs to let the water drain and to get the smell out. With no radio, that 4.5 hour drive was long. Once in St. Louis, Sean and I played chop shop for three days. Literally. The car went up on stands, tires off, all interior out, engine opened, etc. With the help of his friends and co-workers we welded, de-greased, re-greased, took apart and re-built this car. Little Ercel (it is a Toyota Tercel, but the Tercel on the back is missing the T, so we nicknamed her Ercel), is now running, looking and smelling good. The welding of the back seats in burned out any smell that remained and the Vanillaroma tree took care of the rest. The redeeming factor of little Ercel: she is a manual four speed. She is very fun to drive. And she is bright UK blue (I now bleed blue too) and looks good with her little UK sticker in the back window.

Natural Bridge State Park Backpacking Trip
Since my spring break was not very relaxing, I was looking forward to my beginning back packing trip to the Natural Bridge State Park. Chris Dettmann and I signed up weeks ago to learn how to back pack. We learned Leave No Trace (LNT) ethics, learned how to plan for a multi-day pack packing trip, how to pack our packs, and off we went! We hiked 11 miles in two days (only half days of hiking), leaving from the Natural Bridge State Park and hiking into the adjacent Daniel Boone National Forest and spent the night there with our group. We learned how to have a pan fire (no roaring bon fires that I love in LNT camping), learned that in order to do this LNT camping "right" one would have to rinse out their pots and pans with water and then either carry the water out with them or drink this "grey water" for the extra nutrients. Chris and I agreed that we were never going to be that hard core. Another crazy thing was brushing your teeth. You can't leave things in the back country that you did not find there - that is LNT - so what do you do with tooth paste? You either don't brush or you swallow. We cheated, we diluted with water and spit. Some things can be taken too far. And I was not going to not brush nor was I going to swallow the paste. I won’t tell if you won't! But other than some of that crazy stuff, we had a blast - in a space of minutes, we had warm sun, then fog, then a snow cloud came right over our ridge and we were enveloped in snow/ice pellets. Ten minutes later, sun while it snowed. During the day we were toasty while hiking , but freezing when we stopped. The overnight low was in the mid-twenties. The pan fire kept us warm if we were within two feet of it, but that can't be taken to bed with you. We saw some amazing natural bridges, salamander egg slime pod things (see photo at NBSP caption), frog egg ponds, amazing rhododendron forests (not you average potted plant that we are used to, but tree sized ones!), caves, burned out forest areas, and Jeeps off roading and crawling over these huge boulders. Those are amazing machines. We even hiked were it was too tight to take your pack - it had to be left behind. All of this within one hour of my home here. I will be going back.

Well, as you know school is back in full swing. Next round of big exams is two weeks away. Big paper due on the Kenyan health care system and how they are dealing with the HIV/AIDS and malaria issues. But he fun part is that I am signed up for an Outdoors Adventures Medical Club. We will be doing trips and learning how to do outdoor emergency medicine. And next semester I am signed up for an elective class (on top of the 14 credit hours I have to take!) called Medical Missions and get to go to the largest medical missions convention in the US - it is right here is Louisville next year. Good times.

So, four weeks left this semester, the trees are budding, the state parks are calling, I have only 6 classes this summer, so come on down!!!

Jess