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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Monday, December 31, 2001
03:33 - Well, that's a first...

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This was the first time I ever spent midnight on New Year's on the freeway.

Instead of doing whatever my friends were doing-- which turned out to be taking 360-degree panorama photos of all of us in a repeated loop to make into a QuickTime VR movie with each person appearing three or four times-- I spent the tick-over hour listening to a Cuban salsa and mambo concert on NPR. The ten-second countdown was done to the tune of a song that sounded very much like "Oye Como Va", which afterwards gave way to variations on "Guantanamera" and other such crowd-pleasers. Definitely not the usual way I spend this night.

It was interesting being on the freeway at that time, though. 880 was almost deserted. In the stretch between 101 and 280 in downtown San Jose, I never saw a single other car in my direction, either ahead of me or behind me. Very spooky. But I did catch a brief glimpse of fireworks through the trees.

I was about 15 minutes late getting home for the midnight festivities, but it was worth it-- I'd just come from dropping off my folks in Larkspur after a very fun and very full day of sightseeing in San Francisco. We saw about five minutes of the Ansel Adams exhibit at SFMOMA, looked in on the Metreon, walked up to Chinatown for dinner, rode cable cars down to Fisherman's Wharf, did Ghirardelli Square for dessert, then walked down the Embarcadero to see the huge crowd gathering at the Ferry Building for the impending fireworks display and the booming speakers with dance music to stream out over the crowd.

"Welcome to San Francisco, the most beautiful city in the world!"

I must admit, it looked it. And it felt it. One of these years I'll have to go up and take part in that crowd.

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© Brian Tiemann