Letters and Words

            What are these things? These letters. Shapes. Symbols. Alone, they are meaningless. Nothing more than ink on paper. Paint on a wall. The temporary manifestation of light upon a screen.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

            See? Nothing. Just symbols. Each one is assigned a meaningless sound. We put them in order so we can learn and memorize them. So we can teach them and pass them on. We call it the alphabet because we have to call it something.

            Then we multiply them and mix them up. We lay them down beside each other and their combined sounds take on meaning. They form words. Those words, made up of odd symbols and sounds, mean something to us. They have power. The power to put images and thoughts in our head.

            Tree.

            Monkey.

            Pink rhinoceros.

            We string many of these words together, giving them more meaning. A sentence. We put together some sentences to make a paragraph, with even greater meaning. The more we add, the greater the meaning. With enough paragraphs, you have a book.

            Books contain much meaning.

            The same can be said of the rest of the world. One atom is meaningless. The more atoms that get added, the more meaning they have. They could become a tree. Ink on a page. A person.

            Why, then, do so many people try to tackle the world alone? Why, when grouping together can help us find meaning, is so much effort put into defining others as different and driving us apart?

            Together we could find so much meaning.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Playing with Paint

            Returning to our renovations channel, this week has given us the start of painting (yaaaay!). While the colour scheme was selected over a month ago, it was the first time I’d ever gone to choose paint colours.

            Now, I've lived in the same hose pretty much my whole life and I grew up in a house with all white walls (at some point, one room was given blue cloudy wallpaper, my brother’s room was painted a light blue and some of the white was changed to a cream) and most of the houses I've been exposed to were along similar lines. All or most of the rooms the same colour (usually white or close enough). So, I thought, easy enough – pick a colour for the walls (white), and one for the trim. Not so.

            You see, my wife’s household is predominantly populated with people with ADD, and that means no two rooms are the same colour. White is entirely vetoed.

            It was relatively easy for my wife and I to agree on the colours for the work room and the bedroom, but the living/dining/kitchen posed more of a problem – mainly because we only had cool colours so far and my wife (and her mother) were encouraging a room with warm colours. I’m not a fan of most warm colours.

            Then my wife remembered everyone in the special features of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings talking about how great Bag End was and how they wanted to live there (particularly Peter Jackson). So, we watched The Hobbit to scout out colours and fell in love. We chose a light yellow and a dark brown for the trim – deciding to use the same trim throughout the house (at my suggestion) for some measure of continuity between the rooms.

            Those were the colours we were working with this week. On Friday, my mother-in-law came home from work to find a previously raspberry red room white with primer (when they tell you that light colours make a room bigger, it’s true!) and on Saturday it had turned to yellow. I told her that I was thinking of painting it pink next and then have it a different colour every time she came home from work.

            Today (Sunday), we painted the trim brown and, wow, are we happy with that room. It looks very much like Bag End, as desired. We were a bit worried at first because the brown paint looked a little too, as my wife put it, “baby poo” before it dried. We were also not looking forwards to putting on two coats, as baseboards are a pain to paint without painting the floor. We lucked out on both accounts – not only did the paint darken to what it was supposed to be when it dried, the first coat was all it needed. Not because it covered everything well enough, but because the way it went on had an antique, weathered woody look. It was a happy accident that turned out better than we could have hoped.

            Hopefully the next time you hear about renovations, it will be accompanied by pictures – and we’ll be done and moved in.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.