“Remoted” – Day 538 (Sunday)

Today was spent in thought. I thought about doing things – making a puzzle, reading a book – then did not. As I watched Annette, a movie on one of the streaming services, at a frequency of approximately once every few minutes, the thought ran through my head, “What in the hell am I watching?”

Mushroom and cheese quiche.

Early in the day, I flipped through the Finnish cookbook hoping to be inspired by recipes to make on a gray and dreary day. A couple were reviewed, but one had too many steps – making a dough, making rice or mashed potatoes to go into the dough, then baking 12 to 24 tart things. Another lacked key ingredients. Instead of Finnish food, thoughts shifted to the provisions in the fridge, and a most tasty mushroom and cheese quiche was produced. 

The gloomy weather meant lights were on. Noticing one of the lightbulbs is out in the ceiling fan in the living room prompted memories and thoughts. When the team from Mass Save came to my house to conduct an energy audit a few years ago, they replaced all my lightbulbs. The new bulbs were, according to both my recollection and the Mass Save website, “ENERGY STAR certified LED bulbs, which have a lifetime of at least 15,000 hours.” The propaganda to justify the additional cost sounds convincing – they last longer and use less energy, blah blah blah.  

By my rough and loose calculations, the now dead bulb in the living room, if used daily, would burn an average of three hours each night, and at seven days a week, that would be 1,092 hours a year and 4,368 hours over four years. This is significantly short of the promoted rate of 15,000 hours. And the usage estimate is high, because normally, the table lamp on a timer is the primary light in the room, and most nights, the ceiling light is not used at all. Consequently, I’m feeling a bit put out by the newly mandated lightbulb and its untimely demise.

There were musings of making a puzzle and even a trip upstairs to look at the puzzles. The choices for puzzles not yet made were cute puppies or fishing lures, and neither felt appealing. Three books sat on the ottoman and I thought about reading one of them, but it was dismissed and it was back to the streaming TV. I clearly watch too much streaming, as every service app I open to scroll the programs it’s, “saw it, saw it, looks dumb, saw it, don’t feel like reading subtitles, saw it.” I sometimes feel a bit guilty with so much passive screen time, but I’m also often not in the mood to do anything more active. Maybe someday.