A-Ha!

A lightbulb moment. That used to mean a brilliant idea or a moment of great enlightenment. Now it means a dim expensive mercury-filled twisted idea.

I hate curly light bulbs, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to find the standard style ones, and in fact they will be illegal to sell by 2012. So I am starting a light bulb collection.

I was reading an article about hydro rates in Canada increasing by over 50% in the next eight years. It blah-blah-blahed about how/why the rates are going up. The final sentence in the article read "Switching to compact flourescent and LED bulbs can save money."  Yeah, whatever.

Sure you might pay $8 to light a standard bulb for a thousand hours compared to $2 for a useless curly bulb, but the old bulbs themselves are 50 cents instead of 5 bucks for a curly one - which you need to burn three of to get enough light to read by. Alternatively, you can buy the new LED style bulbs - Superstore had 'em for $25 each. I'm not particularly a math wizard, but somehow it's not adding up to over all savings in my head.

Not to mention you are supposed to call in a haz-mat team to clean your house if you break a curly bulb. And God forbid if you dispose of one in the garbage.

Currently my hydro meter is whirring like a helicopter blade because I have a hot tub on my deck, an electric washer and dryer washing clothes in electrically heated water, an oven baking chicken, a dishwasher cleaning dishes (in Jed's suite- I don't have one. Yet.) I blow dry my hair every day, have 4 flat screen TVs in the house, a toaster, kettle and crock pot.....  Forgive me for looking like an idiot, but somehow I just don't see my 50 cent light source being the evil culprit here.