Student SPHere 2008-09

Well as I mentioned last week, I was going to be heading up to Grand Casino Mille Lacs for a community engagement meeting. Well that happened as planned and was awesome, Murphy just happened to delay my trip up. I rarely drive to campus because parking is hard to find. I have been taking the bus to campus now for a few years. Well the bus does not drive up to Grand Casino Mille Lacs, so I had to drive. I have one class on Friday, Molecular Epi which is in St. Paul. I drove to campus (the East Bank) and quickly determined I had two options, a meter or the parking ramp, as there were no free street parking spaces. I thought I would save a few bucks by parking at the meter on Washington Ave. Everything went well, until I got back from class, there was no car. I turns out that Washington Ave becomes a no parking zone between 3-6pm.

I immediately started having clips of Parking Wars, a show about the Philadelphia’s Parking Authority. I have seen enough of this show to see people standing in the impound lot for hours to get their cars back. This did not seem like a viable option for me, as I was bringing another EnHS student up to the meeting. Then it donned on me that I would need to figure out how to get to the impound lot and figure out where it is. Fortunately for me there was a guy and two girls standing on Washington who got their car towed too. They offered to give me and my passenger a ride up to the impound lot. So we embarked on the bigger adventure of the day, getting to the impound lot. We took a bus to the Como area and got the guy’s car to drive to the impound lot. During this time I called a colleague to find out the number/address for the impound lot. The drive there was pretty interesting, our driver was a high school student, who obviously did not have much experience driving in rush hour on 94. I though for sure we were going to be rear ended, ever time he tried to merge by stopping hoping someone would let us over. We eventually made it their safely and I was able to get the car back pretty quickly. Thankfully my wife called on the trip over with the car’s vin number, as neither of us knew the license plate number. I was impressed, it only took about 15 minutes to get my car back after we got to the impound lot.

Needless to say with Murphy’s interruption I did not have the time I was planning on for getting hw done up at Grand Casino Mille Lacs. The community engagement meeting was really neat. It was very informative and interesting to be an observer at the meeting. It opened my eyes to some of the issues tribal communities may face during a pandemic or other disasters.

School returned with a vengeance, not getting my hw done like I wanted to meant I had a few late nights. I managed to get everything done. Now its just a steady progression of work until the semester ends, in a few weeks. There are a few more projects that have to be tackled before the semester ends. I hope everyone enjoys their Easter weekend.