Earth Hour

On Saturday the family participated in Earth Hour. This yearly event is intended to highlight issues around sustainability by having people shut off power for one hour between 8:30p and 9:30p. I like to do it because the kids enjoy coming up with fun activities to do in the dark.. Last year we set up candles and made shadow puppets on the wall with a flashlight.

There are a couple things about Earth Hour that complicate things. One is the time.  It's kind of late for Carter to stay up till 9:30p so we start our Earth Hour a bit early at 8:00p. The other thing that's difficult is probably difficult for everyone and that's getting the house completely dark. It's amazing how many little green, yellow and red indicator lights exist in your house even when you've turned off all the lights. My solution is to shut off the breaker to the whole house. I figure it's no different then a short power outage and it ensures we're using absolutely no energy.

This year we played hide-and-go-seek. It took a while for Carter to figure out what to do.  He tended to be sitting right in front of you after you finished counting to 20. Even when he did start hiding he would just hide with someone else and either get bored and leave or give away both players position. I had the two best hiding spots of the evening. One was very simple.  I simply laid down beside our bed. No one thought to look in such an obvious spot. The other was much more difficult. We have a crawl space under our house but to get to it you have to go in the hall closer, open the plywood hatch, get in and close the hatch behind you. Very difficult to do in only 20 seconds. I eventually banged on the floor to let people know where I was. The picture to the left pretty much sums up the experience. I've never been somewhere so dark. If I wasn't claustrophobic before I may be now.