I’m not doing Earth Hour.

Yes, obviously I’m against climate change. But I think the whole Earth Hour notion is pointless and misguided for a number of reasons.

First, it’s yet more preaching to the converted. What’s the point of an event which caters only to those already sympathetic and in the know?

Second, it’s pointless. Turning off the lights for an hour is cute, but lights are only symbolic. My furnace uses more kilowatt hours than all the lightbulbs in my house put together. So does my stove.

Third, it’s a distraction, one of those things that makes people feel they’re doing something when actually they’re not. File it with those click-for-a-mammogram, click-to-donate-rice sites which exist to suck in advertising revenue far in excess of any donations. File it with driving a Prius, which is a. hardly clean to manufacture; b. only about 20% more efficient gas-wise than a normal car; c. reliant on electricity, which may well not be cleanly produced; d. a large chunk of metal taking up public space which could better be used for other things — i.e., it’s still a car. File it with switching to those hideous flourescent lightbulbs, which mean less heat produced, which means your furnace runs more and now you have hazardous mercury-containing waste instead of normal lightbulb waste, plus you get more migraines. You haven’t changed anything with any of these actions. They’re feel-good tricks that drive people to complacency and through their very triviality distract people from paying attention to the larger issues they’re supposed to highlight.

So yeah, I won’t be turning the lights out. But since I only ever have one light on at a time anyway, I doubt it would make much difference.

Everyone and his brother seems to be listifying rules for life these days. So here’s my totally random list of wisdom, at least as it bubbles to the top of my mind at the moment:

1. In matters of plumbing, the answer to the question “Gee, do you suppose there’s still water in that pipe I’m about to cut?” is always “Yes”.
   Additionally: Is it under pressure? Yes. Should you listen to your wife and put a bucket underneath, just in case? Yes. Is she going to roll her eyes as she makes a dash for the bucket and mop? Yes again.
2. The successful installation of any sort of plumbing fixture always requires blood sacrifice. Mine, usually. If you ask me to help with plumbing you can be pretty sure it’ll be me who gets gashed/squashed/sanded/cut.
3. Always pee before you get on the subway. The one time you think “oh, never mind, I’ll be home in twenty minutes” is the day there’ll be some massive delay and there you’ll be all squashed in there with twenty million other crabby people, and you with a bladder the size of a planet.
4. Margarine is nasty. Buy butter.
5. If you had a night of hideous insomnia, wash the sheets. Otherwise the insomnia cooties lurk in your pillows.
6. As I discovered two years ago, always sit in the second of two exit rows on an airplane.
7. Things on which one should not scrimp: facial moisturizer. Cat litter. Chocolate. Champagne. Tea. Jewelery. Concert tickets.
8. Things which are perfectly good even though they’re cheap: non-Champagne sparkling wine. Train travel.
9. Mayonnaise is not food.
10. Neither is eggplant.
11. Nor zucchini. Do not sully your body with these non-food items.
12. Hit the “Save” button every time you pause for breath.
13. Don’t litter. It won’t kill you to put whatever it is in your pocket.
14. Shovel your sidewalk.
15. Corrollary: Shovelling a neat path from your front door to your SUV while completely ignoring the sidewalk? Not cool. You will go to hell for that.
16. Things you can do without but once you have them, there is no going back: air conditioning. High-speed Internet. Dishwashers. iPods.
17. Libraries are truly wonderful places. Get to know yours.
18. Life is a whole lot easier and more interesting if you are not squeamish.
19. You come home and the kitchen is clean except for some yuckies in the drain which have been abandoned there by your spouse. You could think “that %#$%@ NEVER cleans the @#&^^# drain!” or you could think “hey, the kitchen’s practically clean — now all that needs to be done is to clean the drain”. Option #2 is better for your mental health and probably your relationship.
20. Nonetheless, try to remember to clean the damn drain if it makes your spouse crazy when you forget.
21. Rock, paper, scissors can be a very efficient decision-making tool.
22. Quantum physics is very cool but it will make your brain hurt.
23. If you need to replace a wax ring on a toilet, buy three. If you buy one, you’ll wreck it. If you buy two, you’ll wreck them both AND have a sore back from lifting the toilet twice. If you buy three, you’ll get it right on the first try.
24. Don’t buy bottled water if you can help it. It’s absurd to package a zero-calorie item in plastic and then use yet more fossil fuels to ship it elsewhere. Let’s save the fossil fuels for shipping stuff that really matters, like the raspberries from Peru that make February survivable.
25. Find work you like. Life is too short to do something you hate every weekday for forty years.
26. Vote. If you don’t vote you don’t get to complain.

…or not. That’s a picture of my front garden as it appeared yesterday afternoon.

The other day I was going through my photos looking for something else entirely and I happened across this picture (below) from March 13 2007:

Note the lack of snow covering the garden. Note the beginnings of crocuses.

Today is March 20.

Note my tappy foot (and I’m not the only one – h/t to Melle).

Hello? Spring? Please?

It’s a good thing Easter is super-early this year; at least we can console ourselves by grumpily biting the heads off chocolate bunnies.

I was listening to someone’s playlist on last.fm and it caught me off-guard. Hey, I thought, this is pretty good, what is it? Radiohead?! Bleah!

Thursday evening I excavate M’s backpack and pull out two Magic Tree House books which she has chosen to bring home from the school library.

Stories!

We’ve had week after week after week after week of educational nonfiction books about sea creatures. It’s entirely karmically appropriate given my own childhood reading preferences that I am now forced to spend hours reading aloud to my child about the digestive habits of sea cucumbers (in my professional zoological opinion, sea cucumbers are gross) and the locomotion methods used by brittle stars. But after months of contemplating the many uses and flavours of plankton I’m all OK, OK, I REPENT! PLEASE BRING ME SOMETHING WITH A PLOT!

I check out the Magic Tree House books. Nice — they look good, mostly fairly simple words with the odd challenging word (“sympathetically” for example) tossed in for interest and — oh thank you thank you — an actual plot.

Me: “Hey, these look great. Tell you what. I’ll read one to you and you’ll read one to me.” We have two weeks before they’re due and they’re pretty short books so I figure even if we crawl through them we stand a decent chance of finishing.

M: “I CAN’T READ CHAPTER BOOKS. THEY’RE TOO HARD.”

Me: “Nonsense. They have the very same words in them as all your other books and you read those just fine. We’ll give it a try. I’ll help you if you get stuck and if it gets too frustrating we’ll stop. The rule in your class is ‘try your best,’ right?”

After much fussing and resistance — TOO HARD! CAN’T! WON’T! SHAN’T! TOO HARD! — she picks the one about pirates. She climbs into the Reading Seat (a special recliner-cushion with armrests that lives on the foot of her bed and is only sat in by The Reader) and off we go. I mentally hold my breath.

But not for long. Four effortless pages and lots of positive reinforcement later I stop her only because it’s getting late and I don’t want her to get so tired she starts to fade. Plus it only seems fair that I do some reading too after she’s done all that great work. So I read a bit of the other book, one about an earthquake, and tuck her in for the night.

7am Friday, my alarm goes off. I curse at it as usual and then there’s this little voice from the other room:

“Mommy, are you talking in your sleep?”

“No, sweetie, I’m awake. Sort of. Not very. I was just shouting at the mean alarm clock for waking me up.”

…”Can I come do some more reading for you?”