"Earth Hour," Ron & Robyn Style...

The connection between today’s fractal and post is, at best, tenuous. I mainly chose this Zimple Zpiral because it is a spare image and I’ll be telling a simple story . . .
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SO--on with the post!
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Saturday March 29 there was an eco-awareness campaign called Earth Hour. I wish I could tell you who started it, where and how long it has been going on. But somehow I missed hearing about the event until the very DAY it was to be scheduled. The idea was to turn off as much power as you could for a single hour to show how much energy could be conserved if everyone made a concerted effort. (Even now I don‘t know if we were supposed to all turn off our power at the same time or if each time zone was supposed to go off at 8:00 PM.)
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Personally I figured conservation is conservation--isn’t it? So Robyn and I decided we’d celebrate OUR “Earth Hour” from 6:00 to 7:00 PM (mainly because we don’t have very many candles and we’d be falling asleep in the dark if we waited until 8:00 PM) So at 6:00 PM we turned off all the lights in the house, turned off the fan and decided we’d spend an hour just being together.
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The first half-hour or so was pretty easy: we were having dinner and there was enough light coming in from outside to see what we were eating. Putting the leftovers away was somewhat more difficult since clouds came over and the light level dropped by more than half.
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The last half hour got more difficult as we went along: Robyn and I were both on the couch and we quickly discovered we had run out of topics to discuss so we sat there as the room got slowly darker and darker. (I hadn’t really thought until then how many little power-consumers we have in our home--the microwave, the computer monitor, the DVD/VCR . . . I could see all these little yellow, green and blue lights all over our kitchen, living and dining rooms. The last ten minutes of our “Earth Hour” I spent a lot of time looking at my watch waiting for the time to be up so I could turn on some lights, the TV or maybe the computer . . .
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Still, our “Earth Hour” made both of us think--about how much we consume and how much we don’t think about the bounty we have--until it was taken away. We’ve decided to make “Earth Hour” a weekly event at our home: Saturdays from 6:00-7:00 PM we’ll be doing without power (at least as much as we can without unplugging an entire household of appliances) and we’re going to dedicate that time to each other. It ought to be interesting.
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Maybe you should think about joining us . . .