Today I discovered

[mme_hardy]

 ... that my house, which I had always vaguely assumed was on an east-facing slope, is actually on a north-facing slope.

I found this out by installing a compass app and saying to my husband, "Hey, this compass app is broken!"     Apparently it isn't.   All these years, I figured that "My back window looks across San Francisco Bay to the other side" meant that I was looking east, or some variation on it.   Somehow I reconciled this belief with the knowledge that on both solstices the rising sun shines in through my bedroom window, which is at a right angle to the back slope.

I can only say "Duh". 

Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

My internal compass has been skewed ninety degrees ever since I moved to the DC area. I am convinced that west is north, even when I am looking into the sunset.

[movingfinger]

Odd that your gardeners never remarked on it. I guess your place is open enough that it doesn't matter much.

[mme_hardy]

My gardener is strictly for planting, landscaping, and weed/mow stuff. We never talk about actual gardening.

[sara]

Laughing quite hard. You know the bay is kind of a butterfly shape, it stands to reason that it's not all east of the Peninsula.

[ironed_orchid]

That was my thought. Bodies of water are often tricky like that.

When I moved to Canberra it took me several months to realise that the campus map had been printed with a view to fit the campus onto a rectangular piece of paper, and not with a view to making sure that North was at the top. It was only when I realised the sun kept setting in what I thought was North that I twigged, and even then it took a long time to reorient myself.

[sara]

I never used to have much of a sense of direction, and then I went to work in a business where I regularly had to find parcels that were drawn on fairly terrible maps.

I have a little trouble sometimes if I've flown into a new city, but my sense of direction and my ability to dead-reckon my way around is much better than it used to be. This has led me to think that all that "men are better than women at wayfinding, because hunting so evolution" is probably bullshit, and that men are often better than women at wayfinding because men often have jobs where they wayfind all the time and it's a SKILL at which one improves with practice. I consistently test as "male" on direction and spatial-orientation tests now, which I certainly did not as a young adult.

[mme_hardy]

A friend of mine didn't believe how bad my direction-finding memory was until she turned right into my hotel room with me, then left the room and again turned right down the hall, fondly believing that I was going back the way I'd come.

[sara]

Well, hotels are terrible because they try so hard to make it all look homogenous. If they would put different colored carpets or something on the different levels it would be much easier.

[mme_hardy]

Oh, yes. Such a very good idea!

[sara]

Distinctive silk flowers, a statue of an elephant once in a while...really ANYTHING. But noooo, it's narrow taupe corridors all the way down.

[mme_hardy]

Parking garages figured it out long ago.

If you did it right, you'd have a Downton Abbey/stately homes vibe. "You'll be on the Orchid Floor."

[mme_hardy]

I just realized -- had you already resigned from the cemetery board?

[sara]

I was actually a cemetery employee, not a board member. It seems likely that a colleague of mine will be replacing me in that position, but I'm remaining available to them during the transition for anything that's too weird for them to deal with.

My term on the other board finished over the summer, and I was really ready to be done so I didn't take up another board position. Which has obviously turned out to be a good call!

[mme_hardy]

There's um, outside, and inside. And toward-the-hills-in-front-of-the-sea versus toward-the-hills-in-front-of-the-rest-of-the-US. The directions perpendicular to those are toward-the-City and toward-San-Jose-and-eventually-the-rest-of-Califoria.

I hope I have made my sense of direction clear.

[sara]

Oh, yes, that sounds right.

When I moved to Berkeley it was very weird to me that the hills were east, because in LA the hills were north, mostly.

[mme_hardy]

That's it. That's exactly it. It always startles me to realize that all those people in proverbs and fortune-telling *knew* whether a crow was flying north or south without a second thought, because they'd lived in the same place all their lives and knew in their bones which was the north road or the north field or whatever.

[genarti]

Oh dear! I laugh, but it's the kind of thing I'd be capable of too, even though I've generally got a pretty good sense of direction. If I stopped and thought "Okay, the sun rises there, so north is over there," I'd be fine. But it's very easy to go "well [town] is north of us, [town] is vaguely that way when I'm standing on the corner down there, that's north!" and not pay attention to the fact that the road bends* or something, and just not stop to think about the data that's in conflict.

Once I've stopped to sort it out, I'll generally remember that okay, that landmark is north so we're traveling southwest right now, or whatever, but I don't always stop to sort it out for quite a while.

*I live in Boston. Straight roads at right angles to each other are a weird and disconcerting rarity.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

At some very early age I had the border between the US and Canada explained to me as being like the border between our back yard and the park in back of us, which could be seen from the room in which we ate dinner, and for a very long time after could not get it out of my head that the park was therefore north of us (instead of east, as it actually was). It coexisted uneasily in my mind with the dictum "North is toward the Perrys' house" (which was accurate from our house, but of course not once one went PAST the Perrys' house).

[http://users.livejournal.com/tesserae_/]

We have south-facing beaches here in L.A., which ar just all kinds of wrong... the ocean is west, dammit!