For Earth Hour this year, Mary and I decided to make a candlelight dinner. We got a late start, so we actually had to make dinner by candlelight (picture on right). Good thing we have a gas stove. We decided to make something simple: pasta. We made some multigrain penne and a spicy red pepper sauce with chicken sausage. With that we had some left over broccoli and some raw snap peas. To top it off, we had chardonnay and some sort of German mountain cheese (I’m not sure what that means, but it was tasty). We had everything out of the fridge and ready to cook by 8:25PM. The pasta and sauce were cooking and the wine was chilling in a bucket of ice when we turned out the lights.

Dinner was ready around 8:50. We ate by candlelight (picture on left). It was quite romantic. We enjoyed it so much that we decide we should do it every week (though maybe that was the wine talking). By the time we finished of dinner (and the bottle of wine) Earth Hour was over. With the lights on there was nothing left of Earth Hour except dirty dishes and an empty bottle of wine (picture on right). We’re looking forward to doing this again next year.

There are a few more pictures in the Earth Hour 2009 gallery.

We’ve finally moved in to the modern age. We got our first HDTV, a Sony KDL-52W4100 (pictured on left), late last week. To drive HD content, we also picked up a Sony PlayStation 3. I knew it serves as a great Blu-ray player but I didn’t realize how good even DVDs would look. This morning some guys from AT&T came by to install our new U-verse system. Now we have a 6 megabit Internet connection and 200+ channels of digital TV, including a lot of HD. Out TV stand arrived today as well (see picture). Now we don’t have to put the TV on our coffee table. Next up will be an A/V receiver.

Bay Area Peregrine nest cam watchers have something to get egg-cited about. The nests at San Jose City Hall and the PG&E building in San Francisco both produced eggs within a couple days of each other. On March 12, 2009, Clara and Esteban started their clutch in San Jose, while the San Francisco pair got their start (picture on left) on March 10. I probably won’t have much time to keep track of the San Jose pair this year, but let’s hope both nest have successful hatches!