We have just finished our Earth Hour in Melton, and we had a ball. We lit up every candle we could find, and wound up the dynamo torch about 15 minutes before 8pm and shuffled the UNO cards. At 8pm we dealt our first hand, and played UNO by candle light. Quite an experience, because you can’t tell the blue cards from the green in candle light, so there was a lot of cheating going on. Ben (our youngest) got a bit upset, mainly because he is not very good at the rules, and got angry when someone threw a Draw 4 card at him. We tried to explain to him, but to no avail. UNO only lasted for 30 minutes until everyone got bored or got cramps from sitting on the floor!Then we all sat at the dinning table with about 10 candles lit, and played a game called “what is a word in numbers on a mobile phone”. For example, Adam = 2326. Obviously all mobile phones were banned from the table. It was good fun for a while. Then Kim came up with random words to make song lyrics. Here is an example, and all it needs is music written for it;One hundred thousand islands with weirdo relatives and hippy dressed sheep. With dogs wearing thongs with moles on their bums.
Sounds like a David Bowie song in the making!
We actually kept on going past 9pm because we were having so much fun, and then Adam told Ben that it was 9.15pm and it was all over. How very hard it is for today’s generation to live without electricity. Adam was having PC withdrawal symptoms about 45 minutes into the event.
So blow the candles out and another Earth Hour is over. Luckily we practice energy efficiency anyway and have a very low footprint on the earth. For our family, Earth Hour was just another excuse to light some more candles and have fun. Something we normally do on a Saturday night anyway! It was interesting to have a look out on our street and see that most of the lights were off in the houses. It looks like about 60% of our neighbours participated (or maybe they were out for the night), however the orange glow coming from the east was still ever present, signalling that most of the street lights in Melbourne were still lit. Baby steps, Gavin, baby steps (take a deep breath). Maybe next year they will have the courage to turn off the street lights!
The street lights were on in town, for safety (it’s hardly good for the environment for everyone to crash into one another) but the city buildings did seem darker than usual. Fewer lights on the outside of buildings, fewer office lights. The same number of hotel lights though.