No, we didn’t go reenacting.

Last night, Heather and I embarked on a bit of an experiment. At 5:30PM, I went around the house and unplugged everything electrical, turned off all of our devices, lit a half-dozen candles, poured two glasses of wine, and sat down on the couch.

What ensued? Well, drinking of wine, lots of reading, and a lot of writing things down on paper to look up the next day and to add to our electronic to-do lists.

It was a fun little exercise in the same vein as folks going without their smartphones, and leaving their gadgets at work, but we took it a step further and forewent TV, social media, lights, and even clocks. Granted, I did use a cyclocomputer when I went to the basement to ride my bike, but I did my riding via candlelight. Granted again, we did read on our Kindles because that’s where our books reside, but you get the idea…

I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was able to get about three hours of reading in (only 28hrs to go in Game of Thrones: Book Three!!!) without the constant nagging of feeling like I should be checking e-mail or Facebook, and above all else we had some pretty good conversation. I’m quite certain we’d get along perfectly fine if we did this for a longer period of time, which is a bit surprising to me; I thought the urge to connect would be stronger, but maybe I’m not as reliant on connectivity as I had thought?

Will we do it again? For sure, but next time we’ll be prepared with a few more unscented candles; light was hard to come by and the house was a smorgasbord of smells.

Highly recommended activity.