Photo of the Day March 27th

Shedding a little light on Earth Hour from our front porch

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I got the gift of a slow start to the day this morning thanks to Sophie, who crawled into bed with Chris and I around 7am, then got herself up about a half hour later, fed her fish, played with her stuffed animals, drew a few pictures and turned on the computer so she could play games until she got bored and woke me up around 10:30am. It was lovely, although it did throw off my game plan for the day, which had involved showers for both Sophie and I, a nice breakfast, going to the Farmer's Market, working out at the gym, and grocery shopping before meeting my friend Cheryl for coffee at 3pm. It was a bit of a stretch even before I lost two and a half hours to sleep (which I'm not complaining about, mind you.) As it turned out I did manage to get to both the market and the grocery store, but I skidded into the driveway a couple minutes after 3pm to find Cheryl already waiting for me... time management on Saturdays is not one of my strong suits. One time I did manage to stick to was 8:30pm - 9:30pm, Earth Hour. As with previous years, and in conjunction with millions of people around the world, I powered down all my electrical appliances (except for the fridge and freezer, for obvious reasons) and turned off my lights for the hour. I had enough time after settling Sophie in to bed to go around the house and light candles, including some in the lanterns on my front porch, which acted as a defacto front porch light for the hour. It was quite pretty and while I would really rather have shared it with Chris, who's at work tonight, I poured a glass of wine, grabbed a book and read by candle light for much of the hour. I also went outside on the front porch a couple times to check out the neighbourhood and see how many other houses went dark for the hour - some of them did but I was surprised that there weren't more. I think of our neighbourhood as a real tree-hugging place, very eco-centric, so I was surprised to see the houses both to the left and right of mine had lights shining as always. Baby steps I suppose - and four houses directly across the street, one of which seems to have the TV on 24 hours a day, were candle-lit and peaceful. It's lovely really - I wouldn't object to having Earth Hour once a month instead of once a year.

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