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.

[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.

[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!