candles - January 27, 2012

I missed a blog entry about yesterday. Oh well, I figure missing one in over a month isn't too terrible.

Fact is, I haven't been out much. Apparently it was snowing pretty hard for a little while this afternoon, but it took Ingrid calling me in my map cave for me to know anything about it.

I've been putting in a little extra time at work, working on a little bit of a bottleneck of multiple projects all with a certain amount of rush to them. Nothing desperate, and nothing enormous, but every so often the planets align and there we are with a late night or two. Luckily, Ingrid's been able to take some slack this week.

Working late used to be a lot more trouble for desk workers. Candles don't shed nearly as much light— a "standard candle" gives off about 1/120 as much light as a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb (reference). And until the 20-century development of the self-trimming wick, it required nearly-constant work to keep candles trimmed and burning efficiently.

So imagine the extra labor required to do office work in the northern European winter: maintaining the fire for heating, styaing bundled up against the draft, and keeping en eye on the candle wick to keep in trim. Makes Bob Cratcit's clerkly life in A Christmas Carol that much more grim...