Tag Archives: light

Shadow play

We recently did a first floor renovation. We created an open concept, taking down the walls between our kitchen, dining room, living room, and front entrance. We love it. A few months later I have to say that there isn’t much I’d change. But there is one surprise we didn’t expect.

It turns out that where we our our kitchen island lines up with our big from windows at a perfect angle to create a shadow line exactly on the line between the drawer shelf and the bottom cupboards at our kitchen sink. So, it looks like we painted these two sections different shades of white.

At night, when no light comes through the front window, you can see that the cupboards are the same colour, but any bright time of day the colour difference is significant. We couldn’t know this in advance. It would have looked like a shadow if the line didn’t sit right at the break between the two sections. And we are just going to have to live with it.

Not a big deal, but totally not expected. When designing our space the idea of thinking about how shadows would change the look of our furniture was not on our radar, and in all honesty, even if it was I don’t think we would have caught this.

So if you ever come over to our place in the daytime, no, we didn’t paint these cupboards two different shades of white. And we didn’t plan this… it’s just the way the shadows and light play.

Into darkness

The days are getting shorter now. It’s really noticeable when you get up as early as I do. I’m used to starting in darkness, but with a hint of light that continually gets brighter. Now it just stays dark well after my writing and meditation. This doesn’t bug me now, but it starts to get harder when it’s dark heading to work and also dark coming home.

(As a funny side note, how do flat earth’ers explain the seasons and different length of days at different times of the year?)

Growing up in Barbados, much closer to the equator, the sun was up most days between 5:30 and 6am, and set between 6 and 6:30pm. The days were quite consistent in length all year. And so we didn’t have longer summer days the way we have here in Canada… but we also didn’t have short dark (or cold) winter days.

I can’t imagine living much farther North where the sun only shows for a few hours in the winter. I think I’d go a little stir crazy. As it is, I’ve already noticed the darkness creeping in, and I know that it can affect my mood. The cold does the same. It’s something I need to stay aware of. I use a daylight light at work, and as always, load up on my Vitamin D. And I dress warmer than most to keep the cold out. These are ways for me to keep the darkness outside from creeping in.