A Good Day's Work

This morning, I made myself lunch out of a sliced hard boiled egg and a sliced avocado, dressed with a little soy sauce, cumin, paprika, and freshly ground white pepper.  I also packed several soupspoonsful of salt and vinegar roasted almonds in a zippy bag, an enormous red apple, and my water bottle (well, it's actually Peter's water bottle, but I cannot seem to locate mine since having potentially left it at Peter's last weekend).

When I reached the pickup site, there were a few people already waiting.  I joined them, and soon we were joined by several others (I think there were about thirty of us in all).  The officers came out, and then one of them (Mercado, I think his name is) called my name out to line up to go with him for the day's work.  Also in my group were a young Asian woman and the young Korean-descended man with whom I'd worked side by side last week.  His name turned out to be John, and he talked quite a bit during the day, as he had last week.

We started cleaning up another drainage ditch in East County, scraping overgrown weeds from the joints of concrete and clipping overhanging branches, as well as sweeping up sand and dirt from the bottom of the ditch.  I call it a ditch because I don't remember the actual name of the construction.  It was a concrete ditch with a trapezoidal vertical section (if one were to place a lid on it).  The sides were steep enough so that I required assistance the first time I went into the ditch to start scraping and shoveling.  After about an hour of this, we were called to stop,  leaving the equipment there, because we were needed in Spring Valley to do something.  When we showed up at the materials pickup point, we watched a truck being loaded with three pallets of sandbags.  We followed the truck to the site, adjacent to an Albertsons supermarket.  There, we heaved sandbags from the truck to a few different areas around a low-lying building.  Some of the sandbags were not terribly full, while others were quite heavy.  I helped unload the truck, handing the sandbag from the tailgate of the truck to another worker, who handed them to another, who placed the sandbag to make a short wall around the base of the small building.  We must've unleaded about a hundred sandbags around that building.  After that was done, we took lunch in a park, then returned to the ditch to clean it up a little bit more.  By the time we were done, it looked like a rather nice, clean concrete ditch, if I do say so myself...

We returned to the materials yard, and there, we finished the day filling sandbags in preparation for placement around other buildings, as there was a flood warning for low-lying areas in San Diego County.

We returned to the county offices complex in the van, then all dispersed to our individual cars.