I was just in the Student Centre, and one of the groups that was tabling is giving out free compact florescent bulbs. The goal is giving one bulb to every Canadian household, and they say they have the sponsors to do that.

I took my bulb, looked at their website, and was impressed enough by it to go back and ask a few more questions and whether I could give some out to my non-student friends and colleagues. For my troubles, they handed me a teeshirt and a bag of 50. :)

If you see me face-to-face in the next month, ask for your free bulb.

I might just start carrying a few around and giving them to strangers- I see very little downside to that, other than a little bit of talking-to-strangers phobia, which I'm trying to counteract by talking to strangers (win!). The package has non-embarrassing marketing materials, and the form-factor of the bulbs is smaller than a regular incandescent, which is an improvement on most of the CF bulbs in our house. They also claim to be instant-on, which is also an improvement. [edit to add: not instant-on, but maybe half a second, which is acceptable.]

(Boy, they might have made a mistake by handing me 50... how many unconverted lights does our house have?... hm, OK, not many.)

The women I spoked to said roughly half the people who took bulbs were also putting their names down to be contacted about becoming a volunteer.

...One of the things that's making me happy these days is that this guy lives just a few blocks away. Both melted_snowball and I love his work, and not just cause he took photos of us in our house, even though that was fun too.

He's starting up a photography seminar series next Thursday and subsequent Thursday evenings- I had a lot of fun the one time I've taken a photo session from him earlier this summer, and I'm looking forward to sitting in on as many of these sessions as my schedule allows.

This Saturday he's also hosting an open house at which you can see things like these: smp_photos (though most of those are of course not on paper, since he prints on demand). Speaking of printing, his attic contains a printer the size of a human coffin. It's a thing to be seen, after the art.

Anyhow, he's making my schedule just the more complicated- choices! Choices! Life is good.