light bulbs over my head

This whimsical drawing looks EXACTLY like me. Except for that whole black thing.Still in the midst of the recessed light install, and while that happens, I've been insanely researching what the heck kind of bulbs to install. Frustrating this, because you have three choices these days:

LED: the current cat's meow of lighting. They're super efficient (50-watt standard incandescent bulb gets replaced by something in the 6-10 watt range). The caveat is that the cheap ones suck (poor reliability and weird greenish light quality) and the good ones are around $50 a pop. The four in the kitchen are less critical because I don't care if they dim, so I have more options, but I want the six in the main room to be dimmable, so that'd be $300 in bulbs. No thank you.

CFL: aka Compact Fluorescent, basically those swirly guys in a spotlight-shaped package. Not as energy efficent as LED, but still about 75% better than standard incandescents. There's decent options here in the $10 range for the non-dimmable variety, so I'll probably go this way for the kitchen. BUT, and that's a big but, it seems that dimmable fluorescents are the illumination equivalent of "military intelligence", i.e. they range from bad to worse. Many tales of flickering, total failure, etc. and they seem to be exacerbated by using multiple lights on a single dimmer, which is exactly what I'm going to do.

Halogen: Standard old-school incandescent. These work great, but are the least energy effcient, though I can offset that a bit with aforementioned dimmer. And they're cheapest by far. They also get hot, but my enclosures are, in theory, rated for this kind of thing so hopefully I won't set my attic insulation ablaze (which reminds me, I need to buy myself a responsible homeowner fire extinguisher).

So it looks like I'm gonna go with halogens at about $4 a pop. As mentioned, they're the least energy-efficient by a large margin, but on the other hand, buying six $50 LED's is around $300 and it'd take a LONG time to make up the $275 initial outlay on my energy bill (I call this The Kind Of Math Toyota Prius Owners Don't Like To Consider prior to purchasing their homely glorified golf carts). Besides, I'm sure that within a year or two, LED bulbs will cost a fraction of what they do now, so I'll splurge when they're in the sub-$10 range.

I promise Mitch blog is gonna get more exciting real soon. Oh yeah, I'm about to ok the estimate for the fancy Semi Handmade cabinet doors and panels. It's super pricey there and I'm trying not to think about it (while trying to think about how cheap the Ikea cabinet guts/frames were). It's still all cheap cheap cheap in the grand scheme of fancy modern kitchens, but big $$$ for my economically inclined self.