I have to say that I’m just so fortunate and lucky to have the sort of life that we get to lead.
Of course, my wife and I both work really hard to provide for our family a nice house with great central air conditioning. Yet there’s more to life than stuff. We tried to do our best in order to balance working inside the zone controlled HVAC of our respective offices with enjoying our lives. I just don’t want to be that person who finally quits working only to find out that I’m too worn out to enjoy my life. Life is actually for living not just for working. My wife and I do our best to keep that front of mind. However, that’s balanced by the fact that we stick to a budget as well. When the pandemic was at its height, we had to work from the central air conditioning of our home instead of at the office. We also had to take some pretty steep pay cuts in order to work at all. This was sort of a rude awakening and resorted in some pretty serious financial reorganization. In fact, what we spent on HVAC service plan was actually on the cutting block. Our thinking was that we had been so consistent with HVAC maintenance that perhaps we could take a year or two off to save some money. We actually considered this for a few weeks. However, since we were both working from home that summer, we decided to see just how much we could save on the HVAC cooling. That meant we sealed up the house super tight and covered up windows to stop the direct sunlight heating. Then we pushed the thermostat setting higher than we ever had.