Post Earth Hour

So Nanny and I did participate in Earth Hour, although you couldn't tell because Nannys camping lantern is brighter than the living room lamps. Perhaps we should just switch to that permenantly. Nanny was more into Earth Hour than I was, which is kind of cool when you think about it. She said all her lady friends were going to do it too.

We dutifully turned off our lights at 830. She turned off her lantern and i headed to the basement for candles. It may have been smarter to get the candles before we turned the lights out. Anyway, I also should have used the ladies room beforehand. No biggie, I headed to the washroom candle in hand and unthinkingly turned the light on. Oops! Habits are hard to break, I promptly turned the light back off and conducted my affairs by candlelight.

I though a walk around the neigbourhood might be interesting, see who was participating and who wasn't. From the house it looked promising and it had been a beautiful day. Leaving the house I realized it was much colder than it had been and knew it wasn't going to be a long walk as I wasn't dressed for one. Also it was dark and I didn't want to get mugged. Not because mugging is a popular sport in my relatively quiet neighbourhood, but because I'm distrustful and paranoid by nature. I wandered around for almost 20 minutes and eventually came to the conclusion that participation in Earth Hour was maybe 30%. It's hard to judge as my survey was not extensive enough to give an accurate result and the numbers were hard to guage for a few reasons. A number of the completely dark houses appeared to be totally empty with no cars in the driveway. A fair number just had lights on all over, a couple had candles lit. A few that appeared to have lights on may have just had lanterns like us so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. And then were the ones with no lights on, curtains somewhat firmly shut who were watching TV. I'm mildly conflicted about those, because turning off your lights while watching TV is still saving electricity and is at least a symbolic gesture of participation in a largely symbolic event.

Much chilled and somewhat dissapointed in my survey I returned home and read for a little bit and then, oddly got bored. The quiet was kind of getting to me. I'm used to reading with music or something else goign on when I'm not in bed. And it's rare that Nanny is up and she doesn't have the TV on. So I figured that instead of sitting there ignoring each other and reading we should just play cards.

We played skip-bo (spite and malice would be the non-brand name). We had a darned good evenly matched hand that took quite awhile. I eventually one and got 40 points for what was left of Nannys deck. Funnily enough 40 points was exactly what I needed to hit 500 and win the game. I think it's also the first time I've won 500 to zero. At the end of the hand we discovered it was 945 and Earth Hour ran long.

All in all, it was pretty cool. It reminded me of when the power goes out in a storm and you just chill and read and hang out. It was cozy and nice. On a forum I frequent full of people from all over the world I asked who had heard of Earth Hour and who had participated. I discovered that lots of people had heard of it and participated and more than one mentioned using the time for hanging with family. Kind of cool.

k-