Secants and Tangents

“Water, water, water, yelled her little daughter,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!!!!!!”
-Mrs. O’Leary

At around 4pm I received an email from a girl with whom I worked last year. I was pretty sure she moved off campus and no longer worked here. My gut reaction was that it was one of those viruses that we all receive from time to time from the servers here. The email stated that a water main had broken, and that all of UCLA and the UCLA Hospital was without water. This was very hard for me to believe! Additionally, it was this line that struck me:

“Please stop by your front desk to determine the specific location of the toilets closest to your hall.”

At first I laughed and thought this whole thing was a hoax. 1) I had not heard anybody talk about it, 2) this girl no longer works for this department, and 3) call the front desk to find a toilet????

It turned out to be true! I could live without water, but not with the fallout from this water main breakage…

The water came back on around 9pm, and then LADWP issues a boil water warning. That was it… I am scared of water (especially tap water) as it is, but this sent me through the roof. I drove an hour home just to take a shower. I was absolutely starving because I refused to eat or drink ANYTHING within the alert area. I heard stories about water being brown and foamy, and that some buildings even had particulate matter in it. This was just too much for me to handle. My whole body tensed up and I got a terrible headache.

I drove about 20 minutes to Santa Monica to grab my dinner at Carl’s Jr. at 11pm. The ironic part about this whole scenario is that the water at my house is probably more contaminated than the LA water. I mean, our water can cause cancer: it has a very high level of nitrates in it due to all of the livestock and fields in the area.

Today I get a very rare treat by getting to take a day off of school! I went to my dad’s firestation in Hollywood where he was in a press conference!!!! This regards the train wreck I wrote about earlier. My dad was one of the people that helped find a man in the rubble that wrote what he thought would be his last note to his wife and children in his own blood.

**Now I am resuming this entry. I had to leave the PIC lab because the fire alarm in Boelter/MS went off.

Today we met the family of the victim and they and my dad were interviewed by like 20 different media outlets: news channels and other shows. The victim and his family were interviewed forever late into the night. My dad was cut some breaks, but had to wake up for a 4am interview on Katie Courrick’s show! I got the chance to meet Laura Diaz and Marc Gleason from ABC7 news, a reporter from Inside Edition, and Tony Valdez from Fox-11 News. He said that I am lucky to have such special parents. When he asked me if I wanted to be a firefighter, I said no, but that if I do depart from the math field, I would like to be some type of law enforcement investigator in missing persons or aviation accidents. He mentioned that missing persons were always the most difficult stories for him to cover.

What a great day!!!! To top it off, I saw Mrs. Schroeder’s husband - a camera man for CBS2 news. All of you from TOHS remember what a nut she was…two gears short of a watch. This was a nice diversion from all of the stress I am enduring prior to my RA interview.