Warriors go 2-0, Life Flight opens a Meridian training lab, and seven buildings eyed across from Costco

Fog burns off, the sun shows up around lunchtime, and then the sky quietly loads up for tonight — so if you have outdoor plans, front-load them. Today: the Warriors are 2-0 after Friday, Life Flight quietly opened an $800,000 training lab off Tech Lane, seven buildings are being sketched across from the south Meridian Costco, three things worth actually calendaring, a wet night into a damp Labor Day, and a bit of Meridian High history that will make your kid's crowded hallway sound roomy. Let's get into it.

In the mid-1980s, Meridian High was so crowded it ran a split-shift schedule. Roughly how many students were squeezed into a building designed for 1,800? (Answer at the bottom.)

Straight with you: this is the most picked-over week this list has ever had. Everything happening in Meridian in the next seven days has already run here — the Sunday Market at Storey Park today, free yoga at the SO|ME Amp today, the Labor Day races at the Speedway tomorrow night, the 49ers watch party at Uncle Bob's Thursday, Bike Night and the Upper Room Rave on Friday, Meridian vs. Owyhee on Friday, and roughly the entire Phoenix Fire card-game slate. All still on, all still worth going to — we're just not going to dress them up as news. Here's what's actually new.

Monday, Sept. 7 (Labor Day)

Sunday, Sept. 13 – Saturday, Sept. 19

Saturday, Sept. 19

Today: patchy fog between 7 and 9 a.m. and a 30% shot at showers before noon, then it gradually clears — mostly cloudy giving way to sunny, high near 75, calm wind turning northwest around 5 mph in the afternoon.

Tonight is the wet one. A chance of showers and thunderstorms before midnight, then showers and possibly a thunderstorm between midnight and 3 a.m., then plain showers after that, with fog moving in behind it. Low around 49, 80% chance of rain, and a tenth to a quarter inch of new rainfall — more under any thunderstorm.

Labor Day: showers likely, thunderstorms possible after noon, patchy fog before 9 a.m., partly sunny, high near 68, 60% chance of rain. If you're doing anything outdoors Monday, have a tarp.

Then it turns lovely. Tuesday sunny and 75 after morning fog, Wednesday 78, Thursday 81.

Numbers are the National Weather Service point forecast for 3 miles east of Meridian. One caveat worth stating: that page's own "last update" stamp hasn't moved since Thursday lunchtime, so we cross-checked it against a live Boise reading this evening — Boise also had today at 75, dead level with the Meridian point rather than the usual few degrees warmer. Treat 75 as the number and the rain timing as the thing to actually plan around.

Friday night at Meridian High, the Warriors beat visiting Centennial 36-24 in a non-league game and moved to 2-0 on the season. Centennial is 0-2, and not for lack of trying — quarterback Madden Henderson went 15-of-25 for 177 yards and two touchdowns and ran another one in, and Charles Farris caught five passes for 99 yards and a score. Meridian's answer, two weeks running, has been the ground game: James DiStefano is averaging 100 rushing yards a game, and linebacker Leo Klinger is piling up 12.5 tackles a game. Owyhee (1-1) comes to Pine Avenue on Friday.

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Life Flight Network opened its Clinical Center of Excellence on Wednesday at 1550 S. Tech Lane — 10,000 square feet, $800,000, and about five months after breaking ground on April 4. The nonprofit runs helicopters, fixed-wing planes and ground ambulances out of 34 bases across Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana and Hawaii, and now roughly 450 clinicians have one place to train instead of a scattered patchwork. Inside: four simulation and debrief rooms with mannequins that push back in real time, a control room watching it all, ambulance mock-ups, classrooms, and a helicopter fuselage the instructors can heat up to feel like July or open to the wind to feel like a mountainside in January. There is also a dedicated cadaver lab for advanced procedural work. Flight nurse and clinical practice training manager Laurel Whittemore put the point plainly: crews make calls without a doctor beside them, so "it's a really dynamic world that Life Flight works in." They train 400 to 500 people a year, and they want five years of experience before you even walk in.

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The retail plan for the northeast corner of Meridian Rd. and Lake Hazel — across from the newest Costco — is back, and it has shrunk and multiplied at the same time. The earlier version had three proposed buildings plus three "potential" ones, the biggest at 20,515 square feet. New preliminary drawings show seven, all labeled future buildings, totaling 33,755 square feet on a hair over 8.5 acres. Three of them are drive-thrus fronting Meridian Rd., at 1,200, 3,075 and 3,180 square feet; four straight retail buildings sit behind them at 4,800, 6,000, 7,700 and 7,800. The developer, per earlier filings, is Lockehouse Retail Group, which has an Idaho office in Eagle and has worked with the likes of Sprouts, Trader Joe's, Bi-Mart, Kohl's and Target. Fair warning before anyone gets excited about a specific chain: nothing has been formally applied for yet, and rezoning and conditional use permits both still have to happen.

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All three of the above are Meridian-datelined and published in the last five days — the Idaho Press story on Wednesday, the BoiseDev retail story Friday, the football result Friday night. No filler, no recency exceptions spent this run.

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About 2,400 students — in a building built for 1,800. Meridian High started in 1904 in a one-room schoolhouse at Pine and Meridian Road, the first high school anybody around here had. The move to the current campus at Pine and Linder came in 1975, four buildings' worth, and enrollment was already over capacity the day the doors opened; an addition to the classroom building went up the very next year. Growth kept coming anyway, and by the mid-1980s the school was running split shifts to fit roughly 2,400 kids into a 1,800-student building. Until 1988 it was the only high school in the district and had the largest enrollment in the state — then four more opened over the next two decades to bleed off the pressure. Some things stuck: the yearbook is still the Mana Ha Sa and the student paper is still the Warwhoop, which has been running since the 1940s.

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