I have not been a professional photographer, but I love lighting.  I love the natural sun’s rays at dusk and dawn; I love the dappled light that falls in a forest, I love the contrast of light and shadow on a desert mountainside, and I love the way the sun and moon reflect their beams off the oceans’ waves.  Our house has a lot of recessed lighting.  I remember when we bought it ten years ago thinking it was so cool that it had dimmer switches.  I freely admit I am among the first to embrace new technology and for at least a year I have been eyeing a home lighting system that does everything from all those recessed lights to sconces and lamps.  They come in both white and colored.  The white is vastly less expensive than the colored.  With all the bulbs not only can you turn them on and off with your phone or voice — you can dim each one individually.  So for instance, Burk prefers a brighter light by his bedside but the harsher glare hurts my eyes.  The white bulbs in our matching lamps look completely different.  His is at 100 percent while mine hovers around half.  The beauty is you can change their individual brightness any time you want right from your phone.  Plus I have created rooms in our house so each one can be turned on or off all at once.  It’s great for when my little one wakes up before dawn but she’s too afraid to go downstairs because it’s still dark.  All I have to do is grope for my phone and turn her two lamps on in the playroom.  At night, I can just hit the whole house and it will go dark or I can select all the rooms individually.  Now, as for the colors — each individual bulb can be made to any precise shade you want and it can still also go from 100 percent brightness down to one.  So for instance, the lights in our den are set to a soothing blue.  The lights where we eat most of our meals are sort of multi-colored to suit our taste.  And this is just one light in the corner of our formal dining room.  Yes, the salt lamp under it is red but the color you see is coming from the top.  Burk joked it looked like the red light district in Paris.  This earned him a glare from me.  The lights are so darn magical!  We have at least two dozen colored lights and over a dozen white ones in either lamps or sconces.  The hubs thinks I’m the cat’s meow for getting them (which I accrued incrementally), putting them in, and programming them.  Our bar is lit in a beautiful dark blue and our master bath is set to “relax” so the lights are soothing but you can still see.  Unfortunately our front porch lights cannot accommodate them but I have just discovered our covered screened-in side porch can.  Our house looks SO COOL!  The American businessman and music publisher Allen Klein said:

“Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world.  Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak.  Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up.”

Our home now emanates varying shades of pink, red, orange, yellow, purple, blue, and green sprinkled throughout.  You can bet we’re lit.