Seeing Red.

 There are a lot of colours that are described as “red”. Many of them have a descriptor in front, such as “fire engine red” or “blood red”. Others are descriptors of a different sort such as “burgundy” or “cherry”. “Scarlet” is red, as is “crimson”. As to what it is by definition, an on-line dictionary says it is “of a color at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet”.

I love red. Bright red. I love to wear it, to use it and admire it in sunsets and roses. I have two red jackets and a red sweater and I used to have, until I got too fat to wear it, a red down-filled winter coat. I have two red hanging lights in my kitchen. If I could grow anything that flowers, I would try for red, red roses.

So, all the colours of red.

Wickipedia says that “Varieties of the color red may differ in hue, chroma (also called saturation, intensity, or colorfulness) or lightness (or value, tone, or brightness), or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a red or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors are [sic] shown below.”

Another source tells us that there are 99 varieties of red. I am not about to get into technicalities here. You can, if you have that kind of interest, find lots of information and colour charts and names of varieties here.  or here.

I have a post about ‘red’ that I wrote back when. It can be found here.  The little velvet wonder in the last photo (my grandkid posing for a Christmas card photo) in this post will be hitting her maturity birthday in a few months. She is a student at McGill and, amusingly enough, a Martlet. She is on a university sports team and the McGill identifier is a red bird, a martlet. I have a photo of this. Somewhere. Sigh.

My English as a Second Language students suffered when faced with homonyms. Red, the colour, and the past tense of the verb “to read”, are both pronounced ‘red’ although spelled ‘read’, the same as the present tense. Faces suffused with misery as I explained this, slowly, several times. The definition in my Oxford Reference Dictionary covers four inches of dense type, at eight point type or less. I have not had the courage to look in the big Webster, which has migrated downstairs, at any rate.

If you have read this far, I note that this is another rag bag, but this one filled with red rags. And, just to sweeten the mix, I will end here with a shot of my red-haired daughter in a red Stewart kilt.

Ragbag

 Like other and more organized bloggers, I occasionally want a rag bag of a post. This one will be quite raggish indeed.

First, an update on my medical fun and games. I have been measured in practically every way known to medical science and am now waiting for the verdict as to whether I can have minimally invasive surgery. This verdict will be delivered next Wednesday via a Zoom meeting with my doctor. Thankfully, some things can be done this way and the hospital people are very accommodating about it. Unfortunately, some things cannot and require me to abstain from coffee, chocolate and all other things caffeine for up to two days before trekking into the city hospital. My suffering cannot be adequately described.

Second, the mess on the desk. Still there. Between the medical stuff and the secretary for our local hall stuff, I am not in paperless mode. I actually dug out a bunch of outdated types of paper for the Annual General Meeting handouts and colour-coded them. Not that most people noticed, alas. I now have to get an updated minute book to a wonderful person who is going to back me up as secretary while I get on with the medical stuff. And I am willing to bet I can do that without printing another copy of anything, provided I can sort the piles I have. Yeah. And, as I rolled merrily along, I formatted the ad for our next event the wrong size. A plaintive email from the local paper alerted me to this. Talk about typing errors. 

More Organized Blogger just put up a post about typing errors and got a lot of comments to agree that it is a very easy thing to do. I hang on to what is described as a ‘gaming’ keyboard because it has raised pads and is the same large format as the standard machine on which I learned. It also clicks and I love that. If I try to type on a small, smooth keyboard, I make a huge number of errors. I use, as I have described in other posts, a correction app called ‘Grammarly’ to find the errors. So far, all the underlining in this post is highlighting usage. Well, except that they want me to hyphenate “colour coded”.  And so I just did.

Earlier this morning I read a lovely and lovingly written post by a former teacher about a student of hers who went in very wrong directions and has died very young. It made me think of some of my former students, long ago and fairly recently taught, who struggled. And whom I am very much afraid I could not help enough. I ended up wondering why it is the failures I remember vividly, rather than the things that worked, the successes. One does not lie awake at 3:00 am brooding about a girl who went on to a Master’s degree in your subject, for instance. Or I don’t. What keeps you awake in the small hours? Other than the aches and pains of old age, that is. 

Okay. Time to quit this and hit ‘print’. Note single quote mark. Easier than using the shift key to get the proper one. Not lying awake about that.

Junkets

 I should be cleaning the flat surfaces in my office here. It is a disaster, especially as I decided to clear some of the drawers of an accumulation of, frankly, useless junk. I was looking for a card the surgeon issued when I had my knee done. I am supposed to take an antibiotic before dental work and I could not remember the name of the [@##$$%%^&&] drug. After a long and fruitless search, during which I found a credit card that I thought was lost forever, I found it sandwiched into a card holder, one of three I was sure were empty. I must, repeat MUST, file it somewhere that I can find it again without this kind of disaster.

In fact, disasters abound, chez me. Another is a closet overfull of clothing in a lot of different sizes, some of which I am sure I will never wear again. The reason for this is that I dropped three or four clothing sizes in a hurry when I had the heart surgery. Although I quickly gained one back, I was quite happy with myself (although my GP told me to lose ten pounds) until the Covid shutdown. Between that, mobility loss from the back problems and a lot of chocolate brownies, I am now back up to my biggest clothing size. The closet badly needs emptying. I think about this, and then think about the fact that I have another surgery scheduled, and am very undecided about which clothes to pack up and give away. The smallest ones are the least used, of course. 

Another surgery. An anomaly in my lung that has been followed since 2019, or thereabouts, has finally been identified as a small, discrete cancer. Supposedly the tumour can be removed by laparoscopic surgery, with only an overnight stay in hospital. However, pretesting for this surgery is ongoing and that is why there has not been much written in here lately as the testing is at the city hospital over an hour’s drive away. We have been doing a lot of driving. The problem is that if they cannot do the surgery, or if they do and things go pear-shaped, I may be in for another long siege on the hospital food that slimmed me down last time. So, what do I keep, just in case? 

Meanwhile, the desktop is layered with Stuff. And I am accumulating a big pile of paper to be recycled as I go. I keep things. And forget what I have kept or where I put it. I just found all the back paperwork from the medical claim in our Income Tax return from 2018.  And I know there are a lot of financial records jammed in there. I print off a bank statement sheet once a month and write in any information I might need for some future query.  Who received a cheque? Who was the recipient of an E-transfer? That kind of thing escapes my memory with the velocity of light. As do numbers. I can remember what my parents’ phone number was in 1958. I cannot remember what my daughters’ numbers are now and am hard-pressed to come up with my own cell number. Why is there all this stuff in my desk when there is nothing but space in my brain?

That last description of my brain? Am I a certified airhead? Yes. Because in that space there is an earworm playing. Scarlet Ribbons for Her Hair, by Belafonte, is echoing in there, over and over. It was on the playlist in the car on our next-to-last drive to the city and it will not go away. I had hoped that there would be something on yesterday’s playlist that would overwrite it, but no. Not even the Phantom of the Opera drowned it out. (And if I infected you, please accept an abject apology). Not only on my desk does disaster lurk. The head is also overfull of mostly useless junk.