Saturday mornings for most might mean sleeping in, paddling out for a late morning surf, attending the yoga class with your favorite teacher or catching up on your recorded shows from over the weekend. Although all of us Mixte-ites relish San Diego weekend activities, our love for our clients and what they do go beyond Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

Every year, on the third Saturday in September, people along the California coast join together at various beaches to take part in one of the largest volunteer events: California Coastal Cleanup Day.

Volunteers clean up local beaches, rivers, creeks and parks to keep debris from destroying our environment. Nearly 80 percent of marine debris that ends up in the ocean comes from the land, ranging from plastics to glass and fishing gear to the worst and sadly, most common of all—cigarette butts.

Not one, but two of our clients, San Diego Coastkeeper and Surfrider, took to the beaches with San Diego’s volunteer dream team to host an event in efforts to restore our what makes San Diego, San Diego.  The best part about this event’s location? It is here in Ocean Beach where four Mixte-ites and office space lives. It is safe to say that Ocean Beach is our community and our clients are working to protect our home. Mia and I couldn’t have been more stoked to see the turn out when we arrived.

Armed with reusable “I Love the Ocean” bags, a trash picker straight out of Transformers and a data sheet to track how much of each type of trash we collected, we hit the sand. To our surprise, much of the beach had already been swept and didn’t have a single piece of trash. “What if people just picked up after themselves every day, instead of just on beach cleanup events?” we thought.

After a few minutes wandering around in hopes to use our trash picker, we grew tired of walking in circles with empty bags. Then, a light went on in our heads. Duh! As water advocates, we know that trash travels from our streets and eventually ends up on the beach and in the ocean. So, instead of just picked up on the beach, we’d pick up on the streets. Genius! With our new epiphany, we took to the streets of our neighborhood and got to work.

Almost immediately, we had our hands full. To summarize two hours of cleaning up trash in a few bullet points:

• Why were there so many tampon shells? It took us both a minute to figure out what they were and how they got there, and what to mark them as on our tracking sheet.
• A kind neighbor with a guitar serenaded us as I scaled the hillside at the end of Niagra Ave. in Ocean Beach.
• We educated two dog-walking bystanders about the importance of keeping the streets, as well as our beaches, free from trash year round.
• The amount of cigarette butts we picked up disgusted us. Our disgust only continued to find out San Diego Coastkeeper counted 75,069 cigarette butts removed from San Diego beaches in the year 2014 alone. (Surfrider San Diego will install cigarette-butt canisters in your neighborhood for free! Mixte has one, and if you want one too, click here.)

A few hours and a full grocery bag later, we couldn’t call it quits until we played a prank on one of OB’s finest neighbors and our fellow Mixte-ite, Lauren. The good old fashioned ding dong ditch. She wasn’t surprised that it was me.

As we walked back to part ways and go on with our Saturday, Mia and I stopped and smiled at each other. As cold weather, east coast/midwest transplants, no two people loved the ocean more than us and today, we played an important role in keeping them healthy.

To find a beach cleanup in your neighborhood, please click here. We’ll see you out there.