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.

Last week Mary got me a new camera body, the Canon EOS 40D, to replace my old Canon EOS 10D. The 10D is still working, but the shutter is starting to stick. The 40D has higher resolution (10.1 mega pixels), faster frame rate (6.5 frames per second) and a larger LCD (3 inch) among other things. It comes with a longer life battery but is compatible with the batteries I already have for the 10D. It also uses the same CompactFlash cards as before and of course is compatible with my EOS lenses.

I haven’t done a lot of shooting with the new camera, but I’m pretty happy so far. I’ve taken it out to my normal haunts like Don Edwards and the “Magic Fence” (where I took the shot of the burrowing owl on the left) and I even brought it along to Mission Peak this past weekend. The resolution improvement is quite obvious and I feel like the focus is a bit faster, though it’s still a challenge to capture sharp images. One of these days I’m going to have to break down and start using a tripod.

I’m still trying to figure out what the next phase of my career is going to look like. I had more or less given up on the green technology field since I just can’t seem to find much that matches my skill set. However, after Al Gore’s speech last week about moving to 100% carbon free energy in 10 years, I’ve become somewhat reinvigorated. I blogged about it on GreenValhalla titled Al Gore’s Challenge to America. I’ve even started getting involved with the We Campaign by writing to elected officials and the local newspaper. I’ve even submitted a form to become a volunteer and applied for a job at the parent organization, The Alliance for Climate Protection. Don’t be surprised if you get an email from me asking you to get involved!

It’s Earth Day 2008, and there will be a celebration at the San Jose City Plaza. Even more importantly, the peregrine falcon eggs at the City Hall nest have started to hatch!. Three of the four have hatched so far. Breakfast was served at 7am (see the photo on the right from the SCPBRG’s Flickr page). The hatching even made the news this morning, with coverage by KPIX CBS5 and KGO ABC7. As always, you can watch the live action on the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group’s Nest Cam- San Jose. Hopefully egg number four will hatch soon and we’ll have four lovely white fluff balls to enjoy for a while.

Every once in a while, I find myself lying awake well into the night thinking about a wide variety of crap and just not falling asleep. This is one of those nights. So rather than lie in bed waiting for Morpheus to take me into the world of slumber, I decided to blog for a while. I’m not sure this will help me sleep, but there’s a very good chance that if someone happens upon this post in a similar state, it should put them right out!

Earth Day is tomorrow. Well, not the “tomorrow” that starts in a couple hours when the sun rises, but the tomorrow after that, namely April 22. As usual, it has crept up on me and I have not made any plans. I suppose there will be some events in the area on Earth Day, and perhaps on the weekend to follow, but I’ll just have to take it as it comes. Maybe when I finish with this blog I’ll search the net for useful stuff to do for Earth Day, though I would prefer to go to sleep.

Even though I haven’t been blogging regularly, I did make a few posts on my green blog. One post was about the California Clean Tech Open 2008 Launch event and the other was a video I ran across from Al Gore: How Dare We Be Optimistic. The video is Mr. Gore’s latest presentation on climate change which runs about 30 minutes.

The San Jose peregrine falcon eggs (from Carlos and Clara on City Hall) haven’t hatched yet. It’s getting to the point where a few people are starting to worry, but I think they’ll pip soon (if they haven’t already). I waited until the last minute to do taxes, but with my recent income record (or lack there of), they were pretty quick to complete. I was also on call for jury duty for the US District Court, even though I had just been on call for Santa Clara County in February. Apparently since I was never called in for the county, I could not get out of the US District Court duty. Fortunately, I wasn’t called in for that either. Of course that just means I’ll get another summons in a month or two.

As advertised, I’m really not saying much of anything here. I guess that’s not so different from any of my other posts. At least I usually try to post a few pictures, but I haven’t uploaded any recently. Oh well, maybe next time. Good night (I hope)!

It sounds like Earth Hour last week was fairly successful. As I understand, some cities had more than double the electricity reduction as they were hoping for. As for Mary and I , we turned out the lights at 8pm sharp. We had a rechargeable battery powered fluorescent lantern, but we just sat and chatted in the dark for about 15 minutes. Eventually we cheated and went out to eat. Hopefully this event managed to raise some awareness that will start to carry over in to every day life.

On Saturday, Mary and I started the day with our usual: I played hoops and Mary went hiking. For lunch we made some chicken with Jamaican jerk marinade. It was pretty good. In the evening we went to an event called The Gospel Zone at a church in downtown San Jose. The event was a combined concert of the Hope of Glory Mass Choir (picture on left) from the Maranatha Christian Center and the Low Ding Zone from the Bay Bells (a handbell ensemble). I have seen the Hope of Glory choir before, and I enjoy them very much. They sing with such power and control. I had never seen a handbell ensemble before, though it is pretty much what you would expect, a group of people ringing bells by hand and playing music together. Low Ding Zone is interesting in that they only play the “big bells” of middle-C and lower (see the picture on the right showing Mary and one of the larger bells). They were interesting, but over-powered by the choir.

On Sunday Mary went for another hike and I did a bit of work. In the afternoon we headed towards downtown for lunch and coffee. In the evening we went to see a professional lacrosse match between the San Jose Stealth and the Portland LumberJax of the National Lacrosse League. I had heard about the Stealth a while ago, but had never been to a game (nor had I been to any lacrosse match before). This league is indoor (the Stealth play at the HP Pavilion). There is also an outdoor league called Major League Lacrosse. The game was pretty entertaining, but in the end the Stealth lost to the Jax 12-10.