280. Carnaval

Carnaval 2018

Early in my greening career we worked Carnaval every year, and it was a royal pain. This is the festival that goes along with the yearly parade. The festival stretches for eight blocks down the middle of the Mission district. The Mission tends to be sunnier than the rest of the city, but it isn't consistently sunny at this time of year, and even when it is it can still be very windy. Wind being the bane of outside events around here as we often use cardboard boxes for the eco-stations that can blow away in even a moderate wind.

After a while we stopped doing it, and I was happy about that. So when "Carnaval" appeared on our scheduling calendar I was resistant until I saw that it was a "Civic Center Plaza" event. That area has the same weather issues, but at least it is a contained area and we work many events there. So I signed up for both days. I was cruelly tricked. 

Still no explanation about how "Civic Center Plaza" appeared on the calendar, but it was the usual Mission event. My favorite people were crew chiefing, so I went along. How bad could it be?

Before I even located our home base dumpster village, I knew it was going to be a nightmare. All of our eco-stations were lined with black bags. We use clear bags for landfill and recycling, and greenish-translucent compostable bags for compost. The virtue of clear bags is... that you can see what is inside them without opening them up in a good light and poking around inside. When I get black bags from vendors (they seem to think once inside the bag the contents become whatever you want them to be. "This is all compost" They will say confidently and I will open it up to find a lifetime supply of latex gloves and all the beer cans and bottles the vendor staff apparently drank while they worked.) I empty them into one of our clear bags so I, and anyone hauling or sorting the bags, can see what we're dealing with. An "all black bag" event is thus similar to a "let's all work an event blindfolded" event.

While I still don't know how "Civic Center Plaza" got in there -- yes, I'm a little bitter -- I do know how the event itself and the black bags came to be. Instead of running the whole show, we were sub-contracted to just to our eco-station and sorting thing while other groups took care of other aspects (like the food vendors). And the SF Department of Public Works donated the black bags. Free sounds good but, as is so often the case in life, there are often hidden costs that go along with the "free" item. Every phase of our work was harder -- and took longer -- because we couldn't see through the bags. 

I had a busy, food intensive block, and my method of pulling out the compost and letting the rest build up, was much harder to cleanup when you finally pulled a bag because I could only see the top, not the sides or bottom of the bag. We had a fair number of unsorted or semi-sorted bags from my block which I always try to avoid. Even the bags that I was relatively sure were near 100% landfill were a problem at the end because there was no way to mark them so that fact was obvious to the haulers.

On the other hand, the event really lucked out with the weather. It was overcast and cool until mid-afternoon on Saturday, then it cleared up and it has stayed sunny and even a little warm, for us. Of course this means I was working hard in the sun for eight hours, but that's not something I am going to complain about unless the temp is in the 80s F or above, and we aren't close to that.

My favorite pit bull, from Cinco de Mayo, was at Carnaval as well. He appears to think these events are intended to bring people into the streets to pet him. Which, actually, sounds like a great concept for an event.

Completely unrelated to anything

Today at lunch I saw another guy, trying to cross the street outside the cafe, who I'm pretty sure didn't understand the meaning of the traffic signals. Not only was he nearly hit by a car when he walked out on a red light, but he seemed equally confused when the light turned red for the cars and they all stopped for him. I would really like to know, both as a percentage and in total numbers for a given population (though I guess that comes to the same thing) how many people are so developmentally challenged that something like that is beyond them.