It's no secret to anyone who's been reading here a while that Em had taken an interest in environmental issues, especially the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. This is and was no fly-by-night thing, let me tell you. Since her 'correspondence' with Ahnold, she's decided to take matters into her own hands. She's attended two different talks with me at our synagogue--at which she was the youngest person by several decades, both times--about how to live greener lives, she's been reading 'green' books and articles, and she began a pretty persistent campaign to replace all our incandescent bulbs with CFLs.
And when I say persistent, I mean persistent. So persistent that I've had to get strict with her on a few occasions, explaining that I am not going to go through the house throwing out all those perfectly good regular lightbulbs...at least not until they've burned their last energy-wasting watt. But I'm not dashing all her eco hopes and dreams. When she got a new lamp in her bedroom, we got her a CFL to put in there. And when she began agitating to replace the bulb in her own room's overhead fan/fixture, I gave in quickly; it's her room, and her passion. But her hopes were dashed when we realized that the CFLs we have don't fit. They're too long, and won't allow the glass globe to be fitted back onto the fixture.
She accepted her fate, however reluctantly. Until, that is, the light in the fixture officially blew this evening. Faced with having to put--the horror!--another incandescent bulb into the fixture, my 10-year-old daughter began to cry actual tears. So Baroy went rooting around in our increasingly diverse CFL collection in the garage (I buy them when they're on sale, trying to find ones whose light isn't so bleak and sterile that it makes me want to weep) and unsuccessfully tried quite a few before finally unearthing a 'mini' CFL that fits the fixture perfectly.
When she saw her room illuminated with that weak, greenish glow (I really do hate the light from CFLs), Em came running over to Baroy and threw her arms around him. "Thank you, Daddy, thank you!" she declared. "I'm so happy now! I'm saving the world one lightbulb at a time!"
Somewhere out there, Al Gore is smiling.
3 comments:
I love it!
Not to be spammy, but you might want to show her www.scholastic.com/actgreen.
I tell you, if the American youth are going to be indoctrinated in something, I'm really glad it's in living green.
I'm so impressed that Em is walking the walk; that is awesome.
Hey, I notice a significant difference in my electricity bill when I use CFLs--when we moved from the apartment where I had gradually replaced all bulbs to the new CFL-less place, I couldn't BELIEVE how much my bill went up. Just sayin'.
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