a weekend off

So much has happened lately!!  First, can you believe tomorrow is the start of my eighth week?  Summer is flying on by, three weeks of classes to go and then finals and theeeeennn ten days of freedom!  The past three weeks were kind of the most insane it's ever been.  We had really huge exams, each requiring an obscene amount of preparation, and sacrificing of sleep both at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day.  It was a huge push to get through, and in the middle of it all my parents and sister came for a visit!!  In my head it sort of didn't register that they were in the same state as me until I finished my immunology exam that Thursday.  We had a super tasty meal out to celebrate, and for the weekend they rented a cabin on a lake about 45 min from Portland. It was so great to see them and hang out all together (minus Micah) for the first time since our move!  Unfortunately I spent all day Saturday studying and then all day Sunday in the cadaver lab, but I hear that they had fun swimming and kayaking around!  JP and I made it up for one night, and it was beautiful even if it was short-lived on our end!

Reading comic books in the morning while I studied...

We finished our third neuro/anatomy/practical exam this past Thursday (one more and done!), and I think they were the hardest exams I have ever studied for in such a short time.  It was one of those times that I could literally have flipped my notes open to any page, pointed to a topic, and focused a day's worth of energy on just that small detail.  For this exam we covered the brain, the skull, cranial nerves, muscles and vasculature of the neck, the eye, the ear and all that those subjects entail in both identification and function.  Sometimes I am in awe that my brain can retain so much, and pull things seemingly out of the blue that I didn't even think I would remember.  Every exam I think that there is no possible way I can keep all of that information straight, I have to call on so many new strategies but so far it's working alright!  I will be so happy to get to the fall semester, into more organized chaos than the crazy way things are in the summer!

In any case, after that gigantic push, I think most of my classmates, myself included, took this weekend off.  This is the first weekend that I barely did anything productive.  JP and I decided to go camping Saturday night, and I didn't even bring a lick of study materials with me.  I might have felt a little panicked Sunday morning thinking about how unproductive I was, but I squelched those feelings and let myself enjoy being outside with my boy and my pups, free of responsibilities.  It was so incredibly lovely.  We made a big fire, took the pups down to play in the water, and grilled meat and drank wine.  Lovely indeed, and just what we needed to gear up for these next few weeks.  

We wore out the pups with all the excitement.  You know it was a good weekend when it ends in pure exhilarated exhaustion like this:

we finally made it to the mountains

Ever since getting a tent from my parents for my birthday waaaay back in December, I have been eagerly anticipating taking it out for a spin.  Then when JP's birthday came in May I surprised him with a sweet new camping grill so we could not only have cover over our heads but also a means of heating some delicious camping food.  Our first attempt at camping was rained (or maybe snowed) out, and then I think GREland took over and we had no weekend time to spare.  I think I've spent over 75% of my summer indoors so far, working on all my important trying to be an adult things, and SUCH a small amount of time enjoying the summer weather and all that that entails!  What a shame!  With school starting next Monday (yipes!), I have been doing my best to pack in as much summer as possible in these few short days.  Mason (of the nerdiest study group ever) brought me out to Boulder Creek with his friend Scott to participate in an essential summer staple: tubing.  Wooo...umm hooo?  We maaaybe got in the freezing cold river a little too high up and rode some rough rapids through sharp pointy unforgiving rocks just as the sun was going behind the clouds and it was starting to sprinkle... but after that whole thing it was really fun!  A little bit terrifying, but all together some damn good fun.  I think next time I will make certain that the sun will be blazing, and I won't follow Mason without scouting the area for impending disaster.  Fun though, it really was fun.  Especially the surviving part.  In any case, camping was obviously on the super-short-packed-in-summer-list-of-awesomeness, and since I didn't have to work this weekend we seized the opportunity!  It turns out that everyone who lives in an around colorado likes to go camping on beautiful sunny weekend days too.  It just so happens that those other people plan on seizing the opportunity a few weeks in advance, which just isn't our style  We headed towards Estes Park with the assumption that something would work out, and we came up short.  It was a bleak outlook, pay $35 to camp on gravel sandwiched between two giant RV's while still in town?  Sandwich yourself between two RV's in the middle of a field?  Guh, our prospects weren't looking good, and such were our desires to make it work that we almost plunked down at one of those places.   We heard at the visitor's center that you could camp anywhere you wanted to on land that wasn't in Rocky Mountain National Park, so we just turned our car towards the mountains and drove with the intention of just finding a nice spot and clearing some brush.  We randomly happened upon a campground just 10 miles outside of Estes, and there was also one last little spot that we snagged up right quick!  We set up camp, and then took the pups walking around the area where we spotted the best site ever, and it happened to be kind of empty!  I asked the family next to it if there was anyone staying there, and they told us their friends had reserved it but couldn't come, so they offered it to us!!  We burritoed up the tent and moved right on over!  It was great, the furthest from neighbors, and with a little hiking trail in the back that O and I explored while foraging for kindling.  The tent was easy to set up and fit all four of us nice and snug, and the new grill was just perfect for our steak and corn on the cob dinner.  Mmmm camping.  What a great treat to get away from the hustle of real life. 

The Loneliest Road in America

Oh Nevada, no thank you. This whole trip we were all waiting for Colorado. It was the promised land, it was going to be so beautiful after all the rows and rows of corn, and so many people on our trip had never been there. After Colorado we knew that Nevada would be hard, it would be chalk full of head winds, really hot and flat as far as the eye could see. How could we have ever been so wrong about that last part!? Did you know that Nevada holds the title for most mountains per square mile then any other state? Well, it does, and it most certainly does. Holy mountain climbing! At one stretch we did 13 passes in 4 days. Isn't that insane? In between the passes are these long stretching valleys, some of them go for ten miles or more before the next mountain. What a strange feeling to come over a mountain and see the next mountain right in front of you, but know that it will take hours to get there. Depth perception in Nevada is such a weird thing, you can see so far that it seems simultaneously as though you are right next to your destination and as though you have been biking in place for hours because it sure isn't getting any closer. It was so frustrating, and at times the wind nearly blew me over. Slogging through Nevada was such a hard thing to do, and so discouraging. We took Hwy 50 the whole way, and it sure is a lonely road. We went the whole day without passing through a town, just going and going in the middle of nowhere. We camped a few times, and didn't see much civilization anywhere. It was just plain tough, and we had ten straight ride days in a row. Nevada is also a state that doesn't have many bike shops, and my bike chose this time to rebel. I haven't had many big problems with my bike on the trip, but of course I did when we had no way to fix it. On maybe day one of the ten day stint, a cable snapped on my bike and I lost the ability to use any of my gears except my granny gears. I quickly learned that there are few things more annoying then having to pedal, pedal, pedal, coooooaaaast, pedal, pedal, pedal, coooooaaaast for days on end. Drew helped me get a few more gears, which came and went with no real pattern. Luckily (?) we basically climbed all day long, and that meant I was sitting in my low gears any way. We did it though, and though some of us are a little worse for the wear, we made it across the loneliest road in america.

Moustache Monday helped get us through the day..


Our camp site, the morning after. We used the rocks to hold down our tents, the wind was absurdly strong during the night.