new site design!

After a week of hard work, I finally have a working site design that uses no tables whatsoever! Only another true web design geek would appreciate why that is important and difficult to achieve. If you are having any weird problems with the blog, please let me know.

Last night (or was it the night before?) I dreamed that Doc and I were having to teach Barbra Streisand how to use iPhoto and Painter. It wasn’t that difficult, because she was quite tech-savvy and already knew how to use Photoshop, so it was not a far stretch to teach her Painter. She thought iPhoto was very cool because she had a new digital camera and iPhoto and the camera “just worked.”

Mom was here a couple of weeks ago and told me a story about a woman that she thought was a little weird in the head. Mom had spent some time working up at the Ivy Cottage in Plano with her friends, where she used to work, and a woman came in who wanted something wrapped in a gift bag with tissue paper. But, she insisted, she didn’t want red. She was allergic to red. Pam thought that she meant that she was allergic to the red dye used in the tissue, but the woman said it wasn’t the dye, that it was the color itself. Red smelled like bad breath. Pam said that the tissue paper didn’t really have an odor, but the woman insisted that to her, the color red had a smell. Mom and Pam were like, “Okay… um… sure… whatever you say.”

So she was telling me about this later that evening, and I freaked out. The woman’s not crazy, she’s synaesthetic! How cool! I wish I’d been there to talk to her! Synaesthesia is a sort of cross-wiring of the senses in the brain, so that when you experience one sense, you also experience another at the same time. This woman, when she saw colors, also experienced smells. Some people see sounds or hear colors or taste numbers. Synaesthesia can be any combination of the senses. I, for instance, am somewhat synaesthetic for number and color. All numbers have colors in my head. I remember things like phone numbers very easily, but I don’t so much remember the number itself; instead, I see a series of color blocks in my head. Those represent the numbers.

1=white

2=red

3=yellow

4=purple

5=light green

6=blue

7=brown

8=tomato red

9=black

0=clear

And Brittney mentioned today that all numbers and letters are either boys or girls to her. I don’t know if that’s truly synaesthesia or if it’s something else, but it’s interesting in any case.