Or why I will never leave the house without my camera again. This is something I intrinsically know from my days as a budding photojournalist but was hammered home today on my walk to work. I work in the Upper Haight and like to walk to the office in Soma on nice days. Like today actually. So as I was walking by Page and Divisidero I noticed unusually nasty traffic and looked up the road to notice a Muni bus was stopped and blocking the road at Divisidero and Haight and people were trying to get around it. This in an of itself wasn’t too unusual I guess. But as I crossed the street 3 people came into my field of view. All 3 were looking up at the building and one was on a cellphone looking quite worried. I glanced down and noticed a fire extinguisher at one of the persons feet looking rather sad and lonely in the early morning shadows. Curious, I looked up to see what they were looking at and noticed small puffs of smoke starting to billow from an upper story window and I just muttered to myself, “someone is about to have a really really bad day” when I heard the sirens. I didn’t stop walking since there would only be chaos, confusion and firemen doing their jobs. Something that generally requires me to have a camera to enjoy. Understanding that watching this for the sake of watching it would just add to my growing frustration that I had the camera on the counter ready to go but thought to myself “Nothing exciting will happen today. I don’t really need to carry it”. So I kept walking and enjoying my audiobook. I got about a block away when the first engine arrived. A standard sized fire engine that was having a hard time swimming upstream through the gridlock caused by the stopped bus. Another precursor to the aforementioned “bad day” since the last thing you want when your house is on fire is there to be traffic. I thought that it looked like an engine that was well equipped to get the job done and all woud be well and that the people might have a salvageable but soggy day. That was until I got a little farther up the road and was passed by the SFFD’s juggernaut of the “Heavy Rescue” van and a very shiny ladder truck. Now my day had just gotten a wee bit worse for not bringing the camera. A few blocks later another SFFD rescue truck came by and I could hear a cacophony of sirens through my headphones all converging on the area. I guess things were worse than the little puffs of smoke had led me to believe. I also couldn’t see the front of the bus that was stopped up the street so for all I know some hippie love bug was wedged underneath it on fire while flower children were being burned alive. The thought, coupled with my glaring lack of camera put me into a more foul mood so I just had to walk on and comfort myself with the fact that at least I now have something to blog today. Even if I don’t have any hi-res glossy photos to accompany it. And a solid reminding of why I will never leave the house without my camera again…