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

[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.