Night Lights

If you thought everything was dark at night in your house, or even your bedroom, you would be wrong. At night, things come alive. Our street, with no lights, is so dark at night that we take a powerful flashlight with us when we walk to the neighbors' for dinner, yet there are little LED lights set into the risers of all the stairs around our house, which go on when it gets dark. The eerie neon blue light in the patio, went away with the pool, and will not be missed.

In the house, all the appliances have little lights on them which are on all the time, but are barely noticeable during daylight hours. A ramble around the house at night reveals that just about anything with a power cord attached also has a light on it--the stove the television, every telephone, radio, computer, monitor, smoke alarm and even some light switches. There are six little lights glowing every night in our bedroom alone.

The office looks like the dashboard of a car at night, the blinking lights on the wi fi broadcasting some indecipherable message. Tthe "entertainment center" looks like the cockpit of an Airbus, its blue and green lights spilling through the louvered doors of the cabinet and pooling on the floor. The Bose radio has a lighted clock on it, which lights up the bedside table, though it still can't be read from across the room and has to be operated by remote control.

What on earth is the point of all these lights? Most of them don't seem to serve much purpose, other than to let us know they exist, and, believe me, we already know that! They must use power, yet the only way to turn most of them off is to disable the whole machine when not in use. Has anyone figured out how many kilowatt hours we are paying for to run these little glowing lights night and day?

We got a new "energy saving" washing machine and dryer last week, and I notice that they don't have a single light on them. Perhaps someone is finally coming to the same conclusion I have reached.