Month and Children Colors

In previous posts I have talked about my colors for the days and numbers and words. I thought I'd share my month colors. I struggled a bit because there are 12 months, and only six rainbow colors, so I use red, blue and yellow (the primary colors and my personal favorites) and green twice and I've added brown and pink. The summer months are connected to the blooming flowers of the month for me.

JANUARY ~ snowflakes and skiing
FEBRUARY ~ love, Valentines, Jenny's birth month & favorite color
MARCH ~ St Patrick's day
APRIL ~ Daffodils are blooming
MAY ~ Forget-me-nots are blooming, which are really periwinkle, but close to purple
JUNE ~ Geraniums, I love the bright red blooms
JULY ~ Fourth of July - red, white and BLUE
AUGUST ~ Sunflowers
SEPTEMBER~ GO back to school and Laura's birth month & favorite color
OCTOBER ~ Halloween, pumpkins, fall leaves
NOVEMBER ~ Thanksgiving and turkeys (sorry Mary, even though this is your birth month, it's just not Red, your favorite color, but next month is! and your name is Mary which is after Jesus' mother, so next month really is your month)
DECEMBER ~ Christmas Red and green

I like the symmetry of March and September being green, and January and July being blue and June and December being red, and the "A" months are yellow.

Speaking of my children, they each have a color in my mind, as well. And I have a charm bracelet with a little charm person for each of them, not in their birth month gems, but in the color they are to me.

Laura
Mary
Brian
Todd
Jenny
Michael

Vera Bradley's Hope Garden

Michael gave me a gift certificate to Deseret Book for Mother's Day. When I was browsing at the store to spend my coupon I came upon a Vera Bradley notepad mouse pad that caught my eye. I thought it would be pretty and functional on my computer desk because I often just need to jot something down and look for a scrap of paper.

The pattern is called "Hope Garden" and I just love the bright and pretty colors. That got me to the Vera Bradley website and so I did little online shopping for some useful and pretty things in my new favorite pattern. I got some file folders for my desk and a journal and a cosmetic bag for my purse that is the perfect size.

Plus, I like this pattern so much I took a picture of it and made it the background for my phone.

I'm not that weird ~ there's a name for this

Trevor sent me this email which is pretty interesting considering these posts of mine: color words and number colors (where Ryan mentions synesthesia in a comment) and this one where I talk about what colors the days of the week are to me.

Finally a name for your condition, synesthesia.

Synesthesia

Imagine consistently associating numbers or letters with certain colours, or hearing a specific word which triggers a particular sensation of taste on your tongue. These are two forms of a neurological condition called synesthesia. Synesthesia is when stimulation of a particular sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an involuntary (i.e. synesthesia is not learnt) response in other sensory or cognitive pathways.

Synesthesia is most often genetic and the grapheme (letters, numbers, or other symbols) to colour form of synesthesia is the commonest. Other synesthetes can experience special-sequence synesthesia (e.g. where dates have a precise location in space), ordinal linguistic personification (when numbers have personalities), or sound to colour synesthesia (where tones are perceived as colours).

Although synesthesia is a neurological condition it shouldn’t be thought of as a disorder, because generally it does not interfere with a person’s ability to function. Most people are not even aware that their experiences of life elicit more sensory responses than other peoples might and the ones that are rarely consider synesthesia to have a negative impact on their lives.

Predictions of the percentage of people with synesthesia vary widely, from 1 in 20 to 1 in 20,000. Studies from 2005 and 2006, using a random population sample, suggested 1 in about 23 people have synesthesia. Examples of people with synesthesia include the author Vladimir Nabokov, composer Olivier Messiaen, and scientist Richard Feynman. Daniel Tammet, who is mentioned in the next section of this list, is a synesthete (in addition to being a mental calculator) who sees numbers with shapes and texture.

Michael's Shirts

Michael has been complaining that his shirts are shrinking in the dryer.

My first two reactions to this:

1. Stop working out so much and getting bigger
2. You can do your own laundry if it's going to be complicated.

But I resisted both and washed all his shirts in just Downey and then stretched them and hung them to dry. There were so many that they made the pole in the laundry room fall down, so I moved them to the banister. I couldn't resist putting them in rainbow order:

Number Colors

Alan asked me one day what color a number was. Surprisingly, as we said what color we thought each number was, they were often the same!

Well, just for kicks, here's what colors the numbers are to me:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Color Words

I like words.

I like colors.

Years ago I got this book and used the system described to mark my scriptures.

Basically these are the colors assigned to the scriptures:

Words of the Godhead
Any spiritual gifts
Parables, allegories, Isaiah quoted
Teaching of prophets, explanations
The storyline, chronology, action
The genealogy, births, deaths, marriages
Praise to God
Travel, geographical info
Words and deeds of Satan

I've used this system through two sets of scriptures and I really like it. I draw a square around each verse number and color it in the color that corresponds to what that verse is about. I like that I can just glance at a page and kind of know what's going on in those verses.

This system kind of expanded over the years to my assigning colors to words.
For example:

Faith
Hope
Charity

Recently My Dear Husband wrote a book. Actually he's written more than one. (One is a Christmas book which is coming out this year ~ there will definitely be more about that later) The most recent book is about "The Divine Nature," where he has written a chapter about each of the Christlike attributes found in the scriptures. It really is an inspiring book.

I was trying to remember all those wonderful words, and so I assigned each word a color, put them in rainbow order and I can recall them better this way:

Charity, Love, Mercy
Obedience, Submissiveness, Diligence
Hope, Virtue, Godliness, Holiness
Temperance, Knowledge
Faith, Patience, Long-suffering
Gratitude, Humility, Meekness
Brotherly Kindness, Gentleness, Easy to be Entreated
Happiness

Then I just threw in some other words that I really like, like the YW values, and their colors:

Individual Worth
Fasting, Prayer, Choice & Accountability
Light, Good Works
Repent, Change, Grow
Divine Nature
Integrity
Joy

So there you have it, my favorite words and their colors.

Happy

No, I don't have a thing for polo shirts, put when I walked past this display in Target I just felt happy at all the colors and in rainbow order no less. It's the little things.

My Favorite Things

My Dear Husband just posted on his blog a list of some of his favorite things and posed the question: What are some of your favorite things?

We're not too much alike but there are three things on his list that I would put on mine:

Reading the scriptures
Serving in the Church
My Lexus SUV

And here's the list of some of my favorite things: (besides family and the gospel)

The color blue - anything blue and especially in a pattern with white

The sky and all its colors and lights

Being tucked into my dear husband's right side with his arm around me, on a sofa or in bed

Mexican food

Pasta, especially with tomato sauce

Hugs - really good ones with people you love

Flowers, especially blue ones - forget-me-not, hydrangeas, lobelia, pansies

Fabric of different patterns and textures

Cookies

Pillows

Music

Being organized and putting things on and then crossing things off my to do list

Writing, I just like the act of writing on paper with a fine pen; I like my handwriting and I'm always trying to improve it.

Blogging – posting on my own because it feels good to make a record of our life and reading others because I am always inspired by them.

What are your favorite things?

Tagged, Again - A Repost

Kim tagged me to tell six quirky things about me, so I'm reposting a "tagged" I did back in October of last year. I actually wrote 9 things - I guess I'm kind of a quirky girl:

1. Everyday when I write in my journal I start with the date, written genealogy style: 9 Oct 2007, then I draw a box around it and color in the box according to what day it is:
Monday: Green for Go - it's always a busy get-going day
Tuesday: Blue because it's my favorite day and blue is my favorite color
Wednesday: Purple because it comes after blue in rainbow order
Thursday: Pink (same reason as purple)
Friday: Red because it's a happy - end of the week - day and I might get a date "put a red dress on"
Saturday: Orange (same reason as purple)
Sunday: Yellow because it's the Sabbath - a "Light" day

2. I like to write! Literally to write with a pen or pencil. My Mom says when I first learned to write I used up reams of paper. Now I just write words on my leg with my finger (weird, I know) just whatever words come into my head or I hear in the conversation. So if you see my finger moving, I'm writing words.

3. Whenever I'm listening to music, but especially sing hymns in church, I "conduct" the music with my toe.

4. I can only clean house seriously in my pajamas or exercise clothes, once I've showered for the day, I just don't want to do housework. So if you come by my house in the afternoon and I'm still in my pjs or walking clothes, you'll know that my house is really clean!

5. I make lists, I love lists, I think it's because once I've written something down then it's not in my head anymore and I can think about something else.
And sometimes I rewrite the list - see #2

6. When I'm eating a full plate of food I take bites of each food so that always have the same ratio of the different foods on my plate, except if there's something I don't really like, then I eat it all first to be done with it.

7. I really like to make beds and do the ironing, I like making something go from disorder to order, contrary to the laws of nature.

8. I'd rather clean than cook; I've ruined more than one meal because I start cooking and then get sidetracked by laundry or some other "cleaning up" task and burned the food.

9. I've always had a thing for even numbers, preferring them over odd numbers. For example always leaving the volume on the TV on an even number,etc. But recently I've noticed that the number three is everywhere in the scriptures and life and good design and so THREE is my favorite number, and yes, it is odd. Which has led to my newfound love of multiples of three. For example, I have three sons and three daughters and that makes SIX and three squared is NINE and the number NINE appears in my address, my home phone and my cell phone, so I had to have NINE weird things about me!