Dark

One of the things I love about living on Ocracoke is how dark it is at night. You can sit in the middle of the village and still see many, many stars (more than can be seen from the center of almost any other town, I'll wager). Although I adore the area where I live right now, I love the spot where my new house is even more, because there's a streetlamp right near my current residence, and nothing of the sort near my new home. That means it is pitch dark outside: not terrific when you need to walk in with an armload of groceries or something, but marvelous when you want to sit on the deck and stargaze.

In four days, 23 hours and approximately 20 minutes (from the time of the post of this blog), there will be a global event which seeks to make large cities darker than they would usually be at night (although I daresay they won't come anywhere close to the inky blackness around my house). It's called Earth Hour, and started in 2007 in Sydney Australia. The idea is this: for an hour on Saturday March 29, people are encouraged to turn off their lights "to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming".

You can learn more about Earth Hour on their website. It loads slowly (at least it does for me), but once it's up and running there's a lot of information there.

Hope it's dark enough to see the stars, wherever you are...