BETTER late than never stacks most of the time.
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On the weekend we observed Earth Hour between 8.37pm and 9.37pm on Saturday, not quite to the world schedule but it’s just like I said above.
Our Saturday night movie, Sing, ran over time by seven minutes. We could hardly skip the finale though guilt made us turn the volume down.
When the credits rolled we moved on to Charades by candlelight.
It’s interesting how the action for “Movie” has changed in one generation. While my husband and I rolled our movie cameras to indicate the category for the miming game, our six-year-old made her movie entirely on a mock iPhone. (Our 10-year-old had to translate: “She means movie!”)
When my husband acted out the movie category, I immediately said: “Star Trek”. When he indicated “no”, our six-year-old just as quickly said: “Star Wars.” She was right. He had planned to do Star Trek but he couldn’t fathom how to act out “trek”. True story. Anyhow, the point was he didn’t need to act at all because we knew him too well.
When we’d exhausted all of our favourite movies and books – The Very Hungry Caterpillar is not as easy as you’d think – we moved on to that other guessing-style board game Guess Who?
Having only got reading glasses this year, I was actually and literally in the dark in this game. Luckily our version of Guess Who? was a personalised one made up of the faces in our family, a handmade Christmas gift from my sister-in-law. Everyone looked vaguely familiar by candlelight.
In the race to find the right face, I teamed with our youngest who chose the first person.
“I can’t quite see who we picked,” I said.
“It’s actually you, Mum,” she whispered in my ear.
She asked my husband and her sister just two questions before guessing the right face from the 20 left standing on their board. Beginner’s luck, I thought. During round 2 she asked one question and then picked the right face and during the last round she just had a stab in the dark, so-to-speak, and correctly chose the right face. It was even more impressive because the others picked the same person as in Round 1 to trick us. Proud of her strike rate, our youngest was up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to see if anyone wanted to play again. Arghhh!
With daylight saving winding up on the Border on Sunday, here’s my Top 10 list of the benefits of going over to the dark side:
1) Children go to sleep when it’s dark. It feels like ours have been up all summer long.
2) Footy’s back. My Round 1 tipping was atrocious but, on the bright side, it can only get better.
3) It’s soup season. Nutritious, wholesome and cheap. I can’t help but saute and simmer any stray vegetable in sight. Parsnip and broccoli soup, anyone?
4) House of Cards Season 5 is coming. (May 30, 2017)
5) No after-work-gardening-guilt. Save it for the weekend. (The gardening, not the guilt.)
6) Winter wardrobes are cosy and cover the fact you don’t tan easily.
7) Candlelight. Absent all summer on account of the air-conditioner.
8) Binge TV-viewing feels less bad when the sun’s down.
9) Rutherglen reds after dark make for a good night out.
10) The early nights in are more conducive to Charades and Guess Who? Someone I know will be thrilled.