Turn lights off on Earth Day Sat. March 28, 2009

This is coming stright from me.Earth day is a day to celabrat not to throw a party but to help the earth one day wich is today.What the earth wants is to be treated right and just wants one single minute to trun off everything in your house and give it the earth break, one minute can be alot if evry one does it, it will give the earth one chance to breath after all it lastests forever and it wants one chance to breath out of 365 days a year.So if you can pitch in it would really help by turning of all the lights and all energy on.t By the way its the only way your living now so help Plz.

i was so busy with homework this week, i didn’t really log on to this site for awhile. so i completely forgot about doing this. but anyhow, i’ll do it on my own and just turn out my own lights for an hour some day.

I fell asleep – and ended up sleeping 12 hours!

I felt all day sort of crappy and like I was coming down with something. On Sunday, for the first time in weeks, I finally felt somewhat normal.

We got so busy we nearly missed it, but I checked the site and it was at the 10 minute countdown point – just time enough to gather up all the candles (after lighting a few for Markus, who was in the tub and got an unexpected candlelight bath) while Isak helped me turn out all the lights and shut off switches, computers, etc. as we talked about why it’s good to save energy.

I had a friend on her way over, and she hadn’t heard about Earth Hour, so was wondering what was going on. I left one small light at the door (until she got there), and my neighbour, also participating, came by to remind me to shut it off and we had a chat about global consciousness and how nice it was to see the blocks around us darken.

Isak had a little rechargable blue nightlight, and escorted people to the fridge or washroom. We also finally found him a tiny green smart car for the occasion (and our friend brought a dinosaur car, which was strangely appropriate in a fossil fuels conservation sort of way).

We all had a very nice candlelight evening talking, having a few drinks, catching up, and making plans for a games night. At 9:30-10 we turned on one little light, but we kept a pretty low energy profile for the rest of the night.

My wife and I turned our lights off at 8:30 and didn’t turn them back on all night. We made dinner and ate by candle-light, which was nice and mellow. Then we talked about our life and the possibilities for the future while we polished off the delicious bottle of wine we started at dinner. It was so nice I think we might start doing it more often.

I would say that 80% I adopted this goal was for the romantic atmosphere and 20% for environmental “consciousness”, so I think my plan worked out well!

Last year during Earth Hour, we decided that the one thing we could do that would most positively impact the environment was replace our aging heat pumps. We accomplished that goal earlier this year.

This year, we came up with a kind of cluster of goals rather than one single thing—an energy evaluation of our house, replacement windows, and insulation. An energy evaluation would surely point out the need for the other two, but we don’t need the evaluation to go ahead and get some of it started.

Then, this morning, we came up with two more ideas—replace the electric heating/cooling unit in the sunroom with a mini split (a small heat pump) and replace the hot water heater.

Obviously, we won’t get all of that done in the next year (the replacement windows, in particular, are something that will likely be done over several years) but we can get started.

Some next actions:

• figure out who can do an energy evaluation of our house
• visit our favorite locally-owned door and window business and see how they can help us
• look into the tax credit for replacement windows that apparently was in the stimulus package
• figure out who we would work with to improve the insulation in our house
• get a bid from our HVAC folks on the mini split and the hot water heater

There was a bit of a rush to get dinner prepared in time, but HA did it with just five minutes to spare, while I rushed around finding candles and turning stuff off.

My planned Earth Hour activity was somewhat stymied because we spent the first half hour of it eating Thai noodle soup, and the second half being too full of Thai noodle soup to move. So instead we fiddled around with our ukuleles and HA taught me the intro to U-Mass by Pixies – it’s educational.

very easy actually…....something we do most nights. Turned off all of the lights for about 3 hours…..ate dinner by candlelight ….we eat late anyways…...it was nice. Sort of romantic!

At 8:30 I shut off all the lights, TVs and computers in the house and sat around with my family, accompanied by three candles. We just talked and laughed the whole time. I couldn’t believe how peaceful it was, without the background noise of the TV which is always on. We decided to continue doing this once a week in the future, not just for appreciating our planet but for the quality family time as well.

I found it so peaceful to slow down and switch off. It’s something I intend to make a regular practice of.