Friday, February 02, 2007

So much for unified action!

Well, I realized why I hadn't seen anything about the power-off protest. Duh -- I shut my power off on the 31st of January. Everyone else who participated did this on February 1st!

Even if I wasn't part of the worldwide effort on this, it seems to have had some effect. Apparently France measured a 1% decrease in power demands during the exercise. The image of the Eiffel Tower gone dark is impressive. Here's a link to a blog asking an excellent question: why do we seem to expect our monuments lit up anyway?

Naturally, there were some mixed messages about this, but aren't there always?

And even if I didn't participate on the right day, I have to say that I enjoyed the peace and calm in the house. For once, it was silent. The fridge wasn't humming, the fan on the heater wasn't whirring, the little buzz the lights make wasn't there. It was great!

Learning to hear the silence again was worth the annoyance of resetting all those clocks. I think I'm going to set aside time to do this again.

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