A trio of completions for Easter

Happy Easter to everybody. Here is a rundown of some recent completions from the list:

• We took some of our tax return money (the part that was left over from paying off all our credit card debt) and made a couple of long-overdue house upgrades. One was to add six recessed lights to the living room (Home-8). The living room, despite having three windows and being open to the breakfast area which has a large sliding glass door, suffers from “dark spots” where light just never seems to reach. We’ve tried adding floor lamps and so on but it just ended up cluttered. Now we can have a cool low-level lighting effect for TV watching or crank the lights all the way up to brighten the room up.
• The other house project was to change the thermostat (Home-7). Our former one looked like it was Soviet-era, despite the fact that the house is only two years old. The bad thing about our old thermostat was that it was directly at the top of the stairs to the basement, and so during the winter, cold air would blow up the stairs and onto the thermostat. The first winter we were in the house, before we had figured out some of the vagaries of our house’s construction, the second floor would frequently have temperatures that would climb into the 80’s overnight because the furnace was always on. And during the summer, sunlight shines through a high window in the foyer and directly onto the thermostat, so we encounter the opposite temperature problem. So we swapped it out with a programmable model which is not as susceptible to these temperature effects.
• This being Easter, I have now officially observed Lent in 2008 (Faith-11). Observing Lent usually involves making some sort of personal sacrifice for the 40-day period Lent occupies. Mine was to give up eating lunch on the weekdays. Although I did actually abstain from lunch during the entire period, I didn’t handle it well always — I’d frequently pig out at breakfast and dinner because I knew I was getting no lunch, and that’s not really the right approach. But on the bright side, I’m actually rather used to not eating lunch now and have been able to get a lot of stuff done in the 30 minutes or so that I freed up. So I will probably stick with not eating lunch from here on, for the most part.

This weekend will mark the 90-day point in this journey, and as part of the process I will be making some initial adjustments to the list and taking stock of how things are going so far. Stay tuned.