Life at the Satz homestead has continued busy. The nonstop painting of last week segued into a rained out Monday. AND the conclusion by the window guys when they arrived that “the window is bad”. Something about size …
And when I asked “How many are bad?” the guy who speaks 95% Russian and 5% English replied “All”.
Uh huh. All of them, eh?
After a pause for “I must call my boss” I was left with an on-phone conversation with the local supervisor of the project (who DID speak English) and we had the amusement of talking through the exterior trim issue purely verbally. As you might guess, I wasn’t going to rely on weak sauce words when pictures would be SO much more helpful and so I took some pics, annotated with Photoshop, texted to him and then continued the conversation.
Turns out that he’d ordered what’s called brick moulding because that’s what’s on my original wood windows. Somehow, although he knew we were ordering vinyl windows and they’re constructed completely differently, he didn’t change the trim to match. Which turned out to be extra bad because my first floor windows have that semi-circular piece above them which means the custom crafted PVC semicircular surrounding trim (already delivered) wouldn’t match.
And so today, an extra large crew arrived to make new semicircular trim pieces on site and also to replace the eight windows in front along with the huge foyer window as well. To remove ALL THOSE WINDOWS on a day which began at 17 degrees F …
My furnace had a panic attack from the sudden demands placed upon it.
The hours rolled by and it’s now 1:30 and the banging and whining (sounding like a dentist’s office that specializes in cave trolls) is still going strong.
But I won’t let all this color my outlook. Rather, I’ll let it color YOURS. Or, more precisely, once again delve into the wonderful world of color and our inability to know what the heck is right in front of our eyes.
Yes, it’s time for Satz Talks About Stuff!
Witness my favorite example of color confusion. What you see here looks like a Rubik’s cube, with a side length of five squares, yes? Red, green, blue, white and yellow.
So what’s the deal? The deal is that for the cube on the left there are no blue squares on the top and for the cube on the right there are no yellow squares. The respective colors blue and yellow simply don’t appear.
What’s that? You don’t believe me, I can tell. Okay, just watch the video!
Pretty nifty, isn’t it? What we thought was blue on the left and yellow on the right were actually a 50% gray. The gray “becomes” yellow or blue when placed appropriately next to different colors. Your brain creates a color that really, truly, isn’t there.
And just so you know, the original image, sans the gray squares moving off, was posted by R. Beau Lotto, a smart guy interested in neuroscience. Credit where credit is due!
Artists have long used the fact that colors, umm, color other colors, albeit in a more subdued fashion, by carefully choosing their background colors and surrounding colors to suitably influence the colors they’ve chosen for their primary point of interest. I see the effect every winter with Buzz, my little doggie. He looks as white as the driven snow when he’s inside.
But take him into the actual snow and suddenly he’s a dirty shade of, well, something!
And now, given the turmoil of the past week, I’ll hand it over to your pal, Nicky!
Nickyitis
Hope you all have a great holiday break and I’ll see you again in 2024!
That does sound like a tough week. I hope a little Christmas cheer will make it all better! Merry Christmas to you and the Mrs., Crowden!