Feast of Fools

Number of books read this year for the Hundred Book Challenge 2009: 68. I CAN MAKE IT.

Number of people in my family tree: 914, and a whole block still to come when the scary lady at the Latvia State Historical Archives sends me the research I commissioned her to do. I think she may have tightly-scraped back black hair with a white streak and slink down dusty corridors in long skintight black gowns. With bats on. Also, I'm gonna have a party when I hit 1000.

Number of countries I am managing on my own at work since our Associate legged it back to his folks in the States: six. You've got to be kidding.

Number of months since I had LASIK: 5. Vision 20/20 in right eye, 20/15 in left (that's better than 20/20: I can see at 20 feet what the average person needs to be at 15 feet to see). Combined vision 20/15, or slightly better on a good day. ^_^

Number of continents I have left to visit before I'm 30: Two, but it's the most difficult two, Australia and Antarctica. When am I gonna find time to do that??

Number of awesome presents I got for my birthday: Lots ^_^

1 printer/scanner that sits in my sideboard and prints via wifi.

1 antique faience French plate with a picture of Camille Desmoulins looking like a twit, on his table at the Palais Royal, with his pistol and his hat. I'm so obsessed. ^_^

1 ginger cake with rhubarb cream icing, 1 enormous bag of pic'n'mix, and an ur-Flump. Like a normal Flump, but in a primevally gigantic sort of way.

4 DVDs of eclectic fabulousness: Pride & Prejudice (the BBC series, natch), Doomsday, In the Loop, The Wire season 1.

1 hand-embroidered bookmark with boingy things on going boing. I can't really explain it any better than that. It's awesome.

2 books, Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, who is a genius, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is ridiculous. I've nearly finished the latter already. Currently, Lizzie Bennet is single-handedly fighting off Lady Catherine de Bourgh's ninja bodyguard :-D

Posted by Jongleur at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The way my synaesthesia works (I dunno if it's the same for everyone) is that some letters or numbers have much stronger colours than others, and tend to overwhelm everything around them. Lower case 'a' is such a bright red that hardly anything around it is visible in comparison. The other letters in, e.g., 'banana', really don't get a look-in. I have to focus pretty hard to see what colour they are at all.

Lower case 'e', on the other hand, is a sort of milky transparent-ish white that doesn't really bother anyone as long as it doesn't gang up on the other letters in words without any stronger ones, like 'sheet', which is white with a splash of foresty green at the front where the 's' is trying to muscle in.

Numbers are almost exclusively really, really bright. I suspect this is not just coincidental, as numbers are more individually meaningful and I've always wondered if that affects how 'bright' they are. Synaesthesia doesn't change with age - the letters will be the same colour when I'm 90 as they were when I was seven. I rarely make spelling mistakes, because to me 'paralel' is a completely different colour to 'parallel' - it stands out like a sore thumb if you get it wrong. On the other hand, I can make really surreal mistakes and type totally different words in place of each other if they're the same colours.

True fact: synaesthesia is inheritable, and my li'l bro has it, though not as strongly as I do. His colours are not all the same as mine, but they're almost all similar. About ten years ago I told him the colours of my PIN number, and he guessed it (three digits right first time, one digit took him two tries because he had red where I have hot pink) Go figure.

Anyway. I had a lovely birthday, and the icing on the cake is that I'm NOT 27 ANYMORE, yay!! Because '2' is a lovely bright electric blue, but '7' is a really nasty muddy brown. '8' is lemon yellow, which makes 28 quite a pleasing combination. I like being 28. I'm going to love being 29, which is one of my favourite colour combinations (blue and pink - wouldn't be nice if you saw it in real life, but somehow as a synaesthetic combination it's lovely).

'3', on the other hand, is a horrible grungy orange. I'm not going to like being in my 30s. I'm seriously considering being in a foul mood the whole year I'm 37 (maybe I'll skip it and spend two years being 38).

Posted by Jongleur at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)