(no subject)

[the_rck]

It's very strange playing solitaire in black and white. My brain has gotten used to relying on the red and the black to signal the difference between suits, and I find myself mixing them up without that cue. I somehow don't see the shapes now.

I did watch a couple of episodes of Avatar on my laptop yesterday. Delia was using the TV for something else, and I wanted to be able to take the DVD back to the library. I could mostly follow what was going on, but everything was muted and brown. There were things that I could tell by the shading were supposed to contrast heavily with each other but that faded into each other.

Delia liked her dance class on Thursday. It was pretty laid back, and she was probably one of the oldest kids in the class. I think she has the motor control to do everything once she learns what's expected.

I'm going to have a hard time with it, though. I'd been hoping that I could not go, but I don't think that would be fair to Delia. The accompanying adults are fairly involved, to the point that it's a little hard on those who've got two kids because they can't work with both at the same time. There's a lot of up and down that I simply can't manage. I feel weird standing up when everybody else gets down on the floor, but getting up again is hard.

The class is also creating difficulty in scheduling our cleaning lady. She normally comes at ten (except when she comes later because another client needs her desperately. Since I know the other client and her need really is greater than mine, I don't object too much), and we don't get back until about 10:30. This week, she didn't understand the message (relayed through someone else) asking her to come after 10:30 and showed up at 10 and then again at 2. I felt really bad about her coming twice and tried to pay her for an extra hour because the bus time investment isn't trivial, but she got very angry at me over that. Which made me feel worse because it meant that I'd insulted her.

We're getting a key made for her. We haven't done it in the past because she's said that she'd rather not have one and because she's had trouble with our locks the few times we've asked her to lock up after herself. For next week, however, she said that she'd just come at 2. I prefer to have her visit over earlier in the day, but... ::shrugs::

I'm working on my December/January book logging so that I don't hit the end of the month and suddenly have a lot of books to do. I'm going to try to write up books faster this year as even a week can be long enough for me to lose track of details. I'm going to try to keep logs to one month at a time. This one has stuff from December because I was still catching up on the huge backlog of entries and didn't go back to write up things that I read from parts of the alphabet I'd already posted. That is, the books in the next log that are from December will all come from early in the alphabet because there weren't upcoming entries for me to fold them into as I caught up earlier this month.

I'm also thinking that I may log things that I start but don't finish. Some of those will be commentary about what in the book didn't work for me, and some of them will be reminders that I want to go back to the book some day and try it again. I'm not sure what the threshold should be for logging things. I definitely don't want to log things that I only manage a chapter or two of (except when I do log them). And what's enough to count a book as completed? I've been counting some books that I dislike if I managed 2/3-3/4 of the volume, but I'm not sure that's not cheating or that it's fair to the book. On the other hand, if I dislike something, it takes a lot less of the book to know that than ¾ of the text.

I'll probably simply log abandoned books if I have something interesting (to me) to say about them and not log them otherwise. Does that seem reasonable?

Comments

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, Solitaire and colors and brains have a very weird relationship with each other. A zillion years ago in a former life, when I worked at an office, some customer of my office's decided that they wanted to train people to be more open minded about new ideas, and so they sent over a video that was supposed to do this. I don't think the video accomplished anything useful, but it did have one part that fascinated me. In the video, they flipped quickly through a deck of cards and asked if there was anything strange about them. Nobody in the room thought that there was. So then later they flipped through the deck more slowly, and again nobody picked up on anything wrong with the cards. Then they did it again really slowly, and still the cards looked okay. Finally the announcer pointed out that the red suits were printed in black and the black suits were printed in red. Once he said that, I could totally see it. Before he pointed it out, my brain just automatically "corrected" the cards to their proper colors. I remember being just barely conscious of thinking that the film that we were watching was a bad print where the colors looked weird, the first time I saw the cards, but then after that I really didn't notice anymore.

Anyway, that is very different from what you were saying about the solitaire cards in black and white. But what I find interesting is how our brains cue in on what card we are looking at. I figure we've all seen playing cards enough times that we don't need the full set of cues to mentally decide which card we are looking at. I find this intriguing -- I'd love for some psychologist to do studies on this so that I could read the reports. :)