Mira Mesa High School evacuation – Fire 2007

Man I’m tired! This is what I’m thinking right now. But I really shouldn’t think about myself, but more of the people I’m helping.. in a tiny way that I am. I’ve met some people today, and quite wonderful they are. But to set a little bit of background, I will have to state some mundane facts.

I arrived at Mira Mesa High School at around 11′ish? I found the volunteer booth and signed in at 11:20 a.m. (if my memory serves me correctly.. I’m pretty sure.)

My first job, with Kevin (Indian; parents from India, but I think he was born in Fremont, CA.. or was it raised.. anywho…) was to tally and make a rough count of all the “children/teens/young adults” we could, that weren’t volunteers. Our count, with a duplicates here and there I’m sure, ended up to be 110 +/- 11 (haha. Yup, +/- 11). There was a group of teens that may have been volunteers, sitting at a sign (Welcoming evacuees in?), but without volunteer name tags to identify them. Then our next count was on Elite (hired security) & security guards in general. 4 Elite security, and 8 other security guards from another group… as far as memory serves me. Then the next was military personnel. From asking a marine, he states some exact counts, of which I have no memory of. ;P Can’t remember, and I will not even try to guess.

Then Kevin (he’s working on his Masters degree from Berkeley I believe; in engineering.. doh! Was it .. doh.. I forgot what exactly.. doh! Bad listener! Sorry Kevin.) left, and so I meandered… lol. No, I’m just kidding. … no wait.. before he left, we asked for what other things we could do before he would leave. We had about 30 minutes. We were pointed to Tom (I think) who was working in the cafeteria. He mentioned we could help with trash duty. WOW! This was during lunch. And woah, did those cans fill up quick. So fast that, after doing one complete round, the first one we started on, would basically be filled, and have to be replaced with another clean bag. We did this with plastic gloves, like the ones used to serve cafeteria food with. Not the best gloves to work with; made our hands sweat, and I’m sure Kevin would agree, wasn’t helping one bit in our dexterity department. I have to admit, it hindered me from tying knots into the bags to tighten the bags around the lips of the cans, so I did away with it only my later rounds. My skin’s my glove, and hey, a little bit of soap and water and, “good as new”. But yuck! Dripping juice, soda, liquid, whatever it was, onto my feet and sandals was no joy. hahahaha. Oh well, another trip.. this time to the showers… and… “good as new”… twice. Trash duty was basically all day for me. I did around 3 – 4 rounds, give or take, as some of those were mainly focus on the cafeteria area. The rest were to some areas I thought would be used, but not as often, and wouldn’t be filled. Okay, enough of my trash talkin’. ;P

By 3:45 p.m. There was a magic show. That was pretty cool. At first, I thought these tricks were pretty bad, as even the kids (5?) would even catch on, and question the magician. For instance, he had this container with a die in it. There’d be two doors. He’d hold it vertical, open the top door, and nothing would be there; no die. Then he’d turn it around, and have a little push down (e.g. throwing the die down inside) motion, and open the top door again. Well, “obviously” that’s the trick behind that prop. Well, the young kids caught on to this, and said, open both doors. Ha! The magician was caught! He stammered, and obliged, but with the doors towards him, so the audience couldn’t see it. Haha. I thought, wow, the kids really did catch him off guard, and he’s trying to cheese his way out of it. Then they’d turn, “Turn it around!” He thought, and thought, and then turned his whole body/spin. HAHAHA! “No, the other way. (or something to that effect).” So he spun his body the opposite direction. hahaha. Woah. Too funny. I’m guessing, but this was probably the point I caught a glimmer of his “ploy”. He really well make this die disappear. So he did finally open both doors, and yup, no die. Pretty cool… but I’m not gonna explain all the trick. Anyways, during the show, I took some pictures of the participating children he’d call out of the audience. I’m glad I did, because of the 4 families I did capture, I met up with two of the families. The other ones walked away before I could catch them. I gave them my card with the link to where I’ll be posting their images for download. Free of course.

I went to the free WiFi center, and was working on getting the gallery together, and resizing the pictures, sharpening , and all that “good” (boring) stuff. But that took longer than I had expected, and now dinner was coming. It was heading toward 6 p.m. quick. During that time at the booth, I got a chance to talk with Doug, and he asked what I did for work. Photography of course, and some him some of my work on the laptop. He mentioned he has an 8 year old daughter, and showed me some pictures. She’s a cutie. “She’s your life huh? (something like that, I asked).” Of course (something like that, he responded. … HAHA. I’m silly.. Why gee, THANKS! ;p). So chitter chatter, and it was a few minutes before 6, and so we prepared to do our thing.. him, going home; me, going to lunch/trash duty. .. yah.. still trash talking. Sorry. I ate, then set off to finish off that evening.

I was about to go home, and was really ready to drop. But I decided to go to the auditorium and check out the news. I’m glad I did, because that’s where I met some “pretty neat” people.  Actually quite awesome.

(well.  To be continued… a little too tired to continue tonight).

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