It’s strange the turns you find your life takes.

Lately I feel like I spend a lot of my time thinking about and writing about lightbulbs.

Green lightbulbs, not-so-green lightbulbs, LED lightbulbs, smart lightbulbs, WiFi-enabled lightbulbs, and connected lightbulbs of all kinds.

Of course, it does become a self-fulfilling prophecy: every time I make a post about lightbulbs my inbox fills with new pitches from PR pros letting me know that their client (who is always an “industry-leader” too) has launched a fantastic new lightbulb that my readers need to know about. Their pitch (sometimes) piques my interest, so I write a post about them. And the cycle continues.

Five years ago I wouldn’t have guessed that so much of my blogatorial output would focus on lightbulbs.

Well, this blog post won’t deviate from that trend.

I’ve been on a mission of sorts to migrate my household out of both incandescent and CFL lightbulbs, towards achieving near-100% coverage via LED.

It’s a slow mission, due to two factors. The first is that I’ve still got a substantial stockpile of both incandescent and CFL bulbs stashed away. I feel vaguely guilty at the thought of sending perfectly-good lightbulbs to the recycling center.

The other is cost. While they last much longer, and thus save money in the long run by not having to replace them anywhere near as often the initial investment to buy LED bulbs is higher, although their prices continue to decline.

Which brings me to my point.

When I was at Costco this week, I was there for some groceries, but stumbled across three-packs of Sunbeam-brand dimmable LED bulbs that with the in-store coupon were $12.99, which makes each bulb $4.33 each, breaking the $5/bulb barrier.

Maybe down in the USA you pay less for LED bulbs ($12.99 Canadian is about $10.39 in what you folks call “real money”), but up here that’s a significant demarcation in LED lightbulb pricing history.

So I splurged, and loaded up on several 3-packs, and have gone to work replacing bulbs in high-occupancy areas of the house with LED bulbs.

Progress marches on.