The blog of photographer Kim Ayres

Colour shifts

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Another year; time for another site makeover.

Time always gets a little confusing for me at this time of year, as the days are the wrong colour.

For as far back as I can remember, each of the days has had a different hue. They’re all rectangular, but Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays are a bit bigger than normal weekdays.

The festive season throws a spanner in the works as, for some reason, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are both the same colour and shape as Sunday; and Boxing Day is also the same a Bank Holiday Monday.

What this means is my internal mechanism has been in sync with the calendar at Christmas only about 5 or 6 times since I was born. Every other year I lose what sense of day it is completely.

With New Year’s Day being yesterday, Saturday should be over half a week away, rather than tomorrow, so the fact the kids go back to school in 3 days rather than 6 feels like they’ve been short-changed on their holidays.

Come Tuesday I should have realigned my subconscious with a notional reality.

Probably.
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25 comments

karatemom said...

it does feel that way here too..and to make matters worse..we have a city bus transit strike that has been going on since about a week before christmas. With no one knowing when they might be back it will make those returning to school/work lives next monday that much harder. This will increase the amount of people suffering the "january blahs" a lot I am sure.

savannah said...

if it weren't for the date/time feature on my computer, i'm not sure i'd know either, sugarpie! i have to use a paper calendar to keep track of appointments with post-it note on the whiteboard to check it. sometimes i think there really is no hope for me!
xoxoxo

Unknown said...

Has anyone checked to see if your brain has a shell on it? That could cause the color/shape symtoms you are describing.

Kim Ayres said...

KarateMom - I take it you're not full of New Year Optimism then...

Savannah - we had a 2009 calendar just before xmas and have turned the place upside down looking for it, with no luck. We will, of course, find it within 20 minutes of returning home with a new one :)

Carole - so long as it's got a built in DVD player, I'd be happy with a shell...

Eryl Shields said...

You have the opposite problem to me: Christmas is the only time I know what day it is. Boxing day is the shape, colour and texture of cashmere pyjamas from Norway.

Kim Ayres said...

I feel so dull by comparisson...

Charlie said...

Days, like time, are an illusion, a fabrication . . .

Cripes, imagine me telling this swill to a philospher who cannot keep track of a calendar, which is an illusion . . .

Charlie said...

Looking at our photographs, have you noticed how dis-alike we look?

debra said...

What day is it, anyway? Does it matter? It is, you, know, an invented idea, this thing called time........

Attila the Mom said...

I really love the current profile pic. You crack me up. ;-)

karatemom said...

Well..I don;t have the january blahs yet..but I don't know how optimistic I am either. I do have some plans ( not resolutions) for myself...and I will slowly start to implement them into my life on a daily basis. time will tell.

Apex Zombie said...

LOVE the new banner :D

It's interesting that you see days in terms of colours and shapes. I'm not sure that I associate them with anything.

Kim Ayres said...

Charlie - "time is an illusion; lunchtime, doubly so..." Douglas Adams. As for the photos, if you email me one of you against a fairly neutral background, I could do the same effect for you :)

Debra - everything is an interpretation. Objective reality is unknowable. Therefore you are free to make most of it up :)

Attila - thank you! You're the first to mention it :)

KarateMom - you're not writing with the passion of the enthusiast. Go out and grab life!

FLG - thank you :)

There is a thing called synaesthesia where some people get a cross-over of senses. So particular words or sounds will have colours or tastes. I think I have a mild version of it

Eryl Shields said...

Dull, you?!

I like the new look too by the way, very January.

sarah said...

a friend and coworker of mine posted a plaque above the door to our office: "use caution when re-entering the outside world"

i think this statement applies in a lot of cases.

(word verification is CONWINGE, how cool is that?)

sarah said...

oh.. and when i flew back from london more than a few years back - it boggled my mind that a full 24 hours had passed there, by the time i set foot in my home in oregon and made the phone call back to london to let everyone know i had gotten in OK..

i felt stupid thinking about it.. sometimes, it still confuses me and it's been nearly a decade.

(word verification haness, another good one)

Restaurant Gal said...

I am up to my neck in boxes and bubble wrap. I can't find my shampoo or the wine glasses I so carefully packed. I am utterly sure the movers unloaded a third extra stuff that can't possibly be mine. What day is it? Moving day from hell! Maybe today I will make sense of it all. :) (I picked up an unlocked wireless signal, which is how I got online!)

Mary Witzl said...

I feel all out of whack time-wise myself, especially since the university keeps changing their minds about which days we should have off and which ones we should not. Once we're out of January, we'll be back in real time. I'm almost looking forward to it...

All January, for me, is light grey, blue, and sometimes a little big pink. (I thought I was the only one who did this!)

Kanani said...

It seems like the holidays went on forever here. I lose track of the days and dates as well. Today is my most unfavorite day --taking down all the decorations.

But... all the best to you in the new year.

Kim Ayres said...

Eryl - is that a pressure to change the desugn every month?

Sarah - you can be forgiven when changing time zones of more than one hour. I remember flying home from Vancouver. When I left the airport at Glasgow my internal clock said it was 1am and time for bed, but the world told me it was 9am and the start of a new day.

Restaurant Gal - out of all the items you could pick, I like the fact you mention shampoo and wine glasses - your priorities in life lay revealed :)

Mary - follow the syaesthesia link I gave in reply to FLG above. As for time, don't forget as far as Einstein is concerned, space-time is actually a single 4 dimensional reality. So given your complete lack of map reading ability, I wouldn't hold out high expectations for timekeeping :)

Kanani - we usually take the decorations down on the Sunday before the kids go back to school (tomorrow in fact). For weeks the house looks so dull

Pat said...

We oldies are permanently out of a time whack. We were trying to remember when I bought my laser printer and were looking in cheque books 2 years old, when it was July 2008.
I slightly resent the interruption Christmas and New Year cause. It's as if one had been drugged and it is so much harder to get going again.
BTW your present to Maggie was ace.

Gyrobo said...

I remember first hearing about Synaesthesia in Civilization One.

You've never derived the concept of a pendulum independent of any preexisting culture, have you? That's the first symptom.

Kim Ayres said...

Pat - it feels the same way with regard to food and trying to eat healthily - 2 weeks of being drugged on excessive fat, sugar and salt makes it very difficult to get back on track

Gyrobo - Civilisation One is new to me. Is Pendullum deriving the first step towards making robots?

carlie_star said...

have read through two years of your blogs now throughly enjoying it I have put up my profile info and a pic of me now slowly getting the blog going =)

Kim Ayres said...

2 years down, 3 to go... ;)

I'm impressed with your dedication!

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