The Hour Without Power

By the lights that were on at our most of our neighbor's houses, we believe we are the only ones on the block that turned the lights out for Earth Hour, but we feel good about the little bit that we did. We should probably do that more often, actually.

A couple of days prior to the big event - I believe it was Wednesday - I was in the car with Nicholas and they were talking about Earth Hour / Hour without power that would be taking place on Saturday night. It was actually funny because they were basically advertising the music they would be playing during that hour. I thought to myself: if you turn the lights out, shouldn't you turn off the stereo too? And then they answered my question - they recommended getting your walkman out (does anyone still have one of those?!) or anything battery powered to be able to listen to them. Then I thought to myself: is using battery power really much better than using electricity? Come on! It takes a lot of processing (thus electricity) to make those batteries, then you have to ship them to all the distribution centers, case pick them to go to the appropriate store distribution centers, then finally to the stores where they'll be shelved and people will get in their cars to go buy them... And that's got nothing to do with the poisonous disposal of those batteries! Anyway, I digress...

So we did turn off all the lights in our house. We did not turn on the tv or stereo. We certainly didn't try to find a walkman to listen to music. Trev even turned off the laptop!!! We just lit a few candles on the mantle and had some very quiet time. By the end of the hour, I was freezing - it's then that I realized that Trev hadn't only turned off the fan for the furnace during the non-heating periods, but had turned down the temperature to 16C...

Christine had been in bed for almost an hour before we turned out the lights, so she didn't know the difference. Nicholas seemed to enjoy looking at the light given off by the candles, but really, he didn't know the difference. By the end of the hour, he and I were dozing off, so we had a nice nap on the couch until almost 10pm when we decided to go upstairs to bed.

All in all, a nice and relaxing hour. Like I said, I think we need to do that more often. Perhaps the real challenge for us would be to do it earlier in the day when we actually have more needs for electricity and all the conveniences it provides us.