Let There Be a Certain Kind of Light

I am caught between imperatives.

On the one hand, the fluorescent lights in my home office have been buzzing at me for a while now – the audible hum that inevitably heralds their demise, usually at the most inconvenient moment possible, occasionally accompanied by bright flashes and the ozone scent of burnt electrical fittings.  Fortunately, because my long-term project is to replace every bulb in the house with something LED as they burn out over time and they do make LED replacement bulbs that fit the 4-foot fluorescent fixtures and are not completely unreasonable in price, I have two LED replacement bulbs sitting in my office waiting to be installed.

On the other hand, the fluorescent lights are still working.  They have neither flickered nor failed, and despite sounding like a small group of bees trying to have a political argument at a holiday dinner without disturbing the kids table they continue to do what lights ought to do, which is to replace the dark with visibility.

So.

There is part of me that thinks I should just go ahead and replace the fluorescent bulbs now, whether they’ve burned out completely or not.  I’ve already bought the LED bulbs after all and they’re just cluttering up my office at the moment, not that anyone could tell unless they looked very hard (honestly at one point even I had to stop and seek them out – it’s the middle of the semester, after all, and things get a bit unkempt around this time of year).  They should be installed.

But there is another part of me that thinks, well, I don’t really notice the buzzing unless I think about it, and the lights are still working, so it just seems wasteful to throw out things that still work.

It’s a quandary.