Sacramento Ball Drops

On New Year's Eve we went out with a couple that we have spent New Year's for the last couple of decades. This year's festivities included three events. The first was a strange play at the B Street Theater. I only got to see the second act because I was trying to get a note out to clients about the Governor's budget proposal - which was released yesterday. (No this post is not about that proposal - which for the most part was rather uninspired. No wonder the approval rating for the Governor is only slightly higher than the Legislature.)

Then we went to a really fine dinner at Lucca's. The restaurant is unpretentious. We had thought about going to another place called the Firehouse but they had a very expensive set dinner which our two wives thought was not for us. So we chose Lucca's instead. The food and service were great. While they had some special items on the menu they also offered the normal menu. Lucca's is a place where you can enjoy a meal because they never rush you. And the ambience of the place is that it seems to have been designed to do just that. So we had a wonderful time.

There were lots of cameras for this event. I had my new G-10, which I continue to be very pleased with. My friend had his Nikon with a fast set focus lens. His wife had a small Canon. So some of the time was spent matching photographs. My friend has become a better photographer in recent years and even has a starting business in wedding photography.

The supposed highlight of the evening was to go see the first "ball drop" in Sacramento. (Note the first picture is not about a star in the East - that is not for five more days anyway.) The electronic image of a cube (not a ball) was on the top of an empty bank building (does that say something about 2008?) and the crowd began to gather at about 10 PM. Since it was near my office we went into it. Unfortunately, unlike my old office, since the current one is in the basement (we call it the "lower level" and it has plenty of natural light) we could not have seen the festivities. The crowd was mostly younger than us. There was a fair amount of very restrained drinking around us. One foursome had brought a bottle of Champagne and another had a flask. (It does get cold in Sacramento at this time of year.) But the crowd was very well behaved.

Although there was one annoyance. I am not sure how many people were squeezed into the mall. But people were packed in pretty tight. For the fifteen minutes before the ball(Cube) dropped groups of people would squeeze where no person could possibly move to get from one side to the other. Some moved laterally while others tried to advance to the front. There was a lot of jostling.

In the end the drop was a non-event. New Year's at this point in life is more about friends than events. The drop was supposed to be the same height as the one in New York's Times Square. If that is true, I am pretty sure I will never go to TImes Square either. When the thing descended there was first a countdown and then it dropped into a lighted display of 2009. Whoopdie Frickin Doo! I am not sure what I was expecting but as we were leaving I thought a lot about the cattle feedlot near the Harris Ranch. I think I now know how they feel when the place is full.