Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

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.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Thursday, April 11, 2002
00:24 - It's times like this that I wish I had my camera along...	(top)
Now that we're on Daylight Savings Time, my drive home-- which takes me through downtown San Jose right about 7:20-- is the source of some of the best colors of the entire year. Those who know me well know that I take a certain bizarre pleasure in the oddest of things. One of those is the drive home. It's relaxing, it's liberating, and it gives me a different movie to watch every time I do it. Tonight's feature gets three and a half stars. Right after the DST switchover, the 7:00 hour is the sunset hour. This means that as I drive east through downtown, the sun is setting behind me-- it's already dipped behind the Santa Cruz Mountains enough that the freeway itself is in shadow, but the buildings of the skyline and the mountains behind them are still lit. And better yet, spring means the end of the smog season in the Bay Area-- it's now the era of clear air, high clouds, fog spilling through the cracks in the ridges of the Peninsula, and that golden quality to the light at sunset that reflects off all the downtown buildings' windows-- including the new one that's going up right next to the freeway. I don't know what it is, but it's turning out to be quite attractive-- tall (about 20 stories, which is tall for San Jose), symmetrical, clad in reflective glass except for the windowed stone-beige piers up the centers of the sides, and the westward-facing major wall sporting a gentle bulging curve that throws back the sunlight and strikes a pose like a building from the Presidio in a Star Trek future. The best part of all this, though, is those eastern mountains. Tonight, as I passed through downtown, I noticed that the eastern ridge-- which got at least two dustings of snow this winter, luring me up into the Sierras for those two ski trips-- was still lit with that clear, golden sunset light. The cloud cover was wispy and high, lending some color to the landscape but not much obstruction to the light-- instead, the crest of the hills was wreathed with a series of what looked like that same kind of hill fog that constantly spills over into the Valley from over the western ridge, but that I'd never seen on the eastern one before. Depending on how poetic I'm trying to be, it looked either like a crown of thorns or a string of turds. Above it, though, you could see the observatories. Those two or three bright white globes on Mt. Hamilton, the little specks of visible civilization that you can always see from down in the valley floor and dozens of miles away-- but today the light played on them in such a way that they leaped out from the cloud wreaths at their feet like a moon artificially inflated by being next to the horizon. They looked larger than life. They looked like the Spanish missions must have looked in the 1760s-- the only edifices of pure white to be seen for hundreds of miles, naturally attracting all the local tribes to come see them, to center their lives around them. The observatories seemed to be visible in as much detail as if I were standing in their parking lots, 3,000 feet up. With the sunlight glinting off them, with dim clouds behind them and drab fog below, they looked Olympian. And then the sun went down all the way, foreground ridges obscured my view of the Hamilton crest, and I realized that my windshield was covered with spotty gunk from a recent rain spatter anyway-- so small good my camera would have done me. Ah well. I saw it, at least.