Earth Hour and the End of the World

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Heather

Earth Hour has come and gone, and it was a success… sort of. Here at the Pond, we enjoyed an hour of darkness sans TV and computers. (quanta cheated and surfed the Internet for a little while on his Blackberry. Really, a man can only be away from technology and information for so long.) Baby C enjoyed his first candlelight meal, and got his diaper changed in the dark twice. Fun for all involved.

Around Ontario, power usage fell by more than 5% (which is what was expected). In Toronto, power usage dropped by 8.7%. Sure, it is all hype. An hour of reduced power usage isn’t going to change the world, but at least it (hopefully) got people thinking about just how much power they do use.

Blog TO review’s Toronto’s participation in Earth Hour: Earth Hour Toronto 2008: Pass or Fail. The videos on this page are worth watching just to see the huge (and ugly) sign at the corner of Younge and Dundas go out.

The Torontist (a great blog about TO), has a photo gallery of Toronto during Earth Hour here. Stunning!

In other news, the world may end this summer so there is no reason to conserve energy or worry about the environment. Yay! According to two men in Hawaii, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sanchon, when the CERN Large Hadron Collider is powered up, it will create a black hole what will devour the Earth… or it may create stangelets that will lead to a change reaction changing all matter into stangelets… or it may create particles with only one magnetic pole, leading to a reaction where atoms are converted into other forms of matter. (Am I the only one imaging my desk turning into pudding?) I’m glad they’ve got their story straight.

You can read more about this here: CERN Experiment May Violate NEPA, Destroy Universe

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Earth Hour 2008

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Heather

Keeping with yesterday’s green theme, I thought that today I would write a little bit about Earth Hour. On March 29th at 8pm local time, everyone around the world has been asked to turn off their lights and other unnecessary electronics for an hour. (Yes, that includes the computer, TV, and video game console.)

quanta and I have decided to take part. And believe me, turning off a computer around here when we are still awake is a major feat. It has also been really nice to see posters around our condo building promoting the event. I hope all of our neighbours will also decide to take part.

If you are interested in learning more about Earth Hour, go to EarthHour.org. Hopefully you will decide to take part in this simple, yet very powerful event.

And, while you are thinking green, why not calculate your carbon footprint here. Mine rates at about 6.44, below the Canadian average. Where do you rate?

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Speaking of Trees

Posted on March 25, 2008 by Heather

While those who know me may not believe it, I do consider myself a tree person. I may not be much of an outdoor person (sunburns, asthma, and all of that), but I do love to look at a pretty tree and hear the wind blow through its leaves.

One of the things I liked about my bedroom back when I was in high school and university was that as it was in the attic, I felt like I was almost living in the tree that grew outside my window. And when I lived in London, Ontario, our apartment on the 21st floor gave me a beautiful view across the “Forest City”. Our last apartment was near Toronto’s High Park, and it almost felt like we lived in the woods. Sadly, in our new home, in a new development, the trees aren’t much taller than I am.

Toronto isn’t the only city where trees are cleared to make room for new developments (not that there are a lot of trees to begin with). Rob Woutat writes in the Kitsap Sun about clear cutting in his area: Who Speaks for the Trees? We Should.

As an aside, Toronto offers free tree planting of native trees. If you are a tree person too, find out if your city offers a similar program and plant a tree in your own backyard. Not only will you make the world a prettier place, trees help keep down heating and cooling bills.

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Pond Update

Posted on March 14, 2008 by Heather

Whoever told me that the first two weeks of having a baby were the toughest was crazy. Whoever told me that the first six weeks are the toughest was even crazier. Poor Baby C is colicky, and is driving quanta and I crazy. But his smilies, and his attempts to stuff his entire fist into his mouth, make it all worthwhile… more or less.

Blog entries, and new articles on The Lotus Pond, will continue to be sporadic at best until Baby C and I start sleeping through the night. I’ve got lots of notes, but no time to write them out into something coherent.

For the record, it took me three hours to write this entry. *sigh*

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To Do List Extreme!

Posted on February 18, 2008 by Heather

I will admit to being one of those people who writes to do lists. I’ve also been known to use Outlook or Palm’s Task functionality, and even update my progress. I also manage to clear my to do lists on a regular basis. Or at least I did before Baby C came along.

To do lists have sort of become the latest internet trend. You can find sites like “Remember the Milk”:http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ that will help you keep your list online, and send reminders to you through your favourite messaging software. And then there is the the Getting Things Done (GTD) movement, spawned from “David Allen’s”:http://www.davidco.com/ work, and spread to the masses by sites like “Lifehacker”:http://lifehacker.com/ (a personal favourite).

But, there is such a thing as taking to do lists too far…



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New Arrival!

Posted on January 30, 2008 by Heather

The newest addition to the Pond as finally arrived. Baby C was born on January 24, 2008 at 10:05 pm after 24 hours of labour. Mommy and baby are doing very well.

CAndIsis.jpg

As you can see, within a few minutes of being home, Isis had already decided that Baby C was cool.

Life has obviously changed a lot since he has arrived. Sleeping more then an hour at a time is a thing of the past, for example. Also gone are luxuries like a quick trip to the store, or a long bath. Soon enough he will grow up though, and I will look back on these days fondly… maybe.

In more mundane news, the blog has been upgraded to MT v. 4.1, in an attempt by quanta to keep his sanity while all this baby stuff has been going on. Leave a note in the comments if you notice something not working correctly.

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Rome or Reme?

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Heather

For those keeping track, the baby is now six days late. Both the baby and I are still doing fine, but I am getting a little anxious. I’m also starting to get a little bored since I don’t want to start any new projects just in case I’m, you know, interrupted by going into labour. In the past week, though, I’ve finished cross stitching two bibs (picture after the break), read all 800 pages of the entire Chronicles of Narnia, and watched both seasons of HBO’s series Rome.

Rome was pretty good, even though it was far from accurate. I really appreciated how they didn’t make the city itself the beautiful marble megalopolis that most of us picture when thinking of Rome. The city wasn’t clad in marble, as it were, until after the series took place. (Octavian used the captured Egyptian treasure to start the transformation.) The city was dirty, the people rude and rough, and life clearly hard for anyone not a patrician. The depiction of Egypt, at least in the first season, was a bit disappointing. I’m not sure where the idea for the ratty wigs and face paint came from. In the second season, Egypt was a little better. However, Alexandra was more a Greek city than an Egyptian one, but that’s me being nit-picky and not appreciating that Rome is about the drama and not about the “copyright-free history of Rome”, as quanta has reminded me.

I am very surprised by some of the changes made for the sake of drama, though. For example, in Rome, Caesar’s freedman, Posca (a fictional character), steals Marc Antony’s will from Egypt and takes it to Octavian Caesar in Rome. In actuality, Marc Antony had left his will with the Vestal Virgins, as was the custom. Octavian (or someone in his employ) broke into their home/temple and stoled the will. Much more interesting and dramatic in my opinion. What about Marc Anthony’s wife Fulvia, who is thought to have tried to start a civil war in his name? And as for Cleopatra and Marc Antony’s deaths, more than a little artistic license was taken there. Surprisingly, Cleopatra still used a snake.

I wonder, though, about how genuine it is to set a story in a well recorded historical time, and present it as a fictionalized re-telling of events, and then change so many things. Sure, it is TV and it is all about the drama and the ratings. But how many people are now going to think that Octavia was an adulteress, when in fact she was held to be a paragon of Roman virtue; or that Marc Antony had an affair with with Octavian’s mother when nothing of the sort happened. Maybe in the next series about Rome, the creators will assume that Remus defeated Romulus, and call the show Reme.

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