This has been making the rounds on the intertubes, but was freaky enough that I thought I’d show it here. The “source” as far as I can tell is The Daily Telegraph, but I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere else, earlier.

Look at the dancer below. Which way is she spinning?

Those who use their “left brain” more will see a dancer spinning counter-clockwise. Those using their “right brain” more will see the dancer spinning clockwise. Loosely speaking left-brainers are the “logic” types, and right-brainers are the “feelings” type. If you click the Telegraph link, they have a list describing various characteristics of each.

The neat/scary thing is, though, that after convincing yourself that there’s no possible way the dancer could be spinning in the other direction, you can actually train yourself to see it spin in the other direction!

Unsurprising to anyone who reads this blog, I saw it as counter-clockwise, and it seemed absurd that it was spinning in any other direction. Well, the other direction. And then I read some comments on another blog that one person said that if they looked at the dancer out of the corner of their eye, by turning their head and looking left, then with a little concentration, she spun in the other direction. And sure enough … it works. I can’t explain it, but once she’s spinning clockwise, I can’t imagine her spinning counter-clockwise. But getting her to shift back to counter-clockwise only requires relaxing my concentration a little bit. Weird huh?

What direction do you see?

I got a phone call from a traumatized Gwen at work around noon today.

She was calling from a drop-in clinic on Granville Street: Aidan had fallen and she thought that he broke his nose and could I come home please?

So I threw my gear on my bike and rode home. They’d just returned from the clinic and I got the full story:

Apparently, while in a store, Aidan became frightened of a Hallowe’en display, stood up in the stroller and tried to escape by going over the back of the stroller. The inevitable happened, and the stroller tipped over backward, bringing The Boy with it. Apparently he smashed into the floor face-first.

They happened to be right beside a drop-in clinic and so Gwen rushed into there and was seen by some doctor. The doctor apparently didn’t even touch Aidan (who was pretty weepy) and told her to give him Ibuprofen and watch for signs of a head injury. They headed home and had just arrived when I walked in. Aidan’s nose was pretty bruised looking, and clearly swollen. It didn’t bleed more than a trickle when it happened, and was just a tiny bit crusty when I saw it.

Aidan was in good spirits, happily playing with the “new truck” that Gwen fished out of her purse. He wouldn’t let us touch his nose, and trying to ice it to deal with the swelling was pretty much impossible too. After discussing the way that the doctor had “examined” Aidan, we decided that if nothing else, we’d feel better if our family doctor took a look at him too. So, we walked down to the doctor’s office (sometimes living in the centre of the city has distinct advantages) and snuck him in. Dr. Izen took a thorough look and told us that things were probably fine, but she couldn’t quite tell if the nose was broken or if he had a deviated septum. Of course the now crying and squirming toddler wasn’t making things easy. So, she wrote up a requisition for an xray and we walked the block to get the xray (well, ok, we stopped into Wendy’s for some lunch in between too).

At the xray clinic, it was traumatic for both the toddler and the daddy. Aidan took one look at the xray table (where the tech wanted him to lie down) and started bawling. And clinging. The boy was like velcro. We tried a number of strategies to get him into place, but he’s very determined. The xray tech called in reinforcements and in the end we ended up wrapping him up in a lead blanket, pinning his legs and arms to his side while constrained by the blanket. And crying hysterically. The reinforcement was in charge of the lower half, and was losing that battle while I was in charge of the upper half and keeping his head more-or-less on the xray film plate and parallel it. I was losing that battle too. The tech got one shot off, ran to get it developed, and then passed it by the radiologist to make sure that it was a good shot. The whole time the reinforcement and I were trying to keep Aidan on the table and wrapped up in the blanket. The boy was still hysterical. Fortunately the first shot was apparently clear enough (no apparent break!) and we were able to release the rest of the boy. I say that because by that time he had worked a leg and an arm out of the cocoon.

And as soon as we exited the xray room, the waterworks turned off immediately. He even said “sorry” to the techs.

Anyway he doesn’t look too bad right now, and hasn’t been at all grumpy. Hopefully the bruising goes away after a few days…

Aidan received a package of underwear from Grandma and Grandpa recently. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite get what they were for…

(this was his own doing)

Oops, missed it.

This past weekend was busy. On Saturday, Gwen had a choir practice, then her hip-hop class (seriously) and after that, we all packed it up and headed to Port Moody for our first geocaching event!

The caching event was the GeocoinFest Multi Event (GC14J5X). The event consisted of a bunch of geocoin collectors getting together and showing off their coins. On top of that, there were two local vendors, Landsharkz and Worldcaching, and just general cachers from around “Metro Vancouver”. It was essentially a meet-and-greet in a small scout hall with a few dozen cachers. There was also the opportunity to “discover” all the coins and a number of travel bugs by writing down all the tracking numbers of everything there, but that seems a bit like cheating to me. We’ll continue to discover only those things that we actually discover at caches.

We met some of the cachers whose names we recognized from various caches, and I have to say that I was surprised that many of them were younger than I expected. Also, a good deal of the cachers seem to be middle-aged women, once again proving that I know nothing.

We bought a number of things from the vendors, including a number of cool geocoins and some other trinkets:

• A small tube (see: buffalo tubes) that will be used as a micro cache somewhere around town.
• A first-to-find prize (a “BC in Blue” keychain) for our first cache hide.
• A neat gecko light that needs to be seen to understand.

Sunday was, of course, Thanksgiving. What I didn’t mention was that Saturday night we spent (well, Gwen spent) making rolls and pies. A few dozen rolls (that turned out better than any Gwen’s done before!), 2 apple pies, and 2 pumpkin pies. I wasn’t a complete bad husband — I peeled, chopped, and prepared the apple pie filling — but Gwen did the lion’s share. On Sunday, the turkey was stuffed and prepared before Gwen went off to church, leaving me to put it in the oven and, um, supervise its cooking.

In the end, I think it turned out pretty well:

We had Carla and Tomer, and The Vet and The Brit over for dinner and after-dinner Wii and euchre. Fun times. Bowling, Smooth Moves, and Brain Academy. Fortunately there’s no video evidence.

Monday was shockingly fine and sunny … so we went caching! We headed down to the south shore of Vancouver (on the north bank of the north arm of the Fraser) and picked up a bunch of caches. We met a group of people at a cache called “Kid Cache”. These people were huddled around a single GPS. A mother, father, a set of grandparents, a toddler Aidan’s age, and an infant — quite a sight and not exactly inconspicuous. It was pretty obvious what they were doing so we offered some assistance. The cache was an easy find (Gwen found it!) and the other caching group joined up with us as we collected a few others in the park. It wasn’t our first experience meeting other cachers while on the hunt, but it was the first time we found other caches as a group. It was fun, and as it turned out, the other cachers were newbies … the Kid Cache was only their 7th find. After 3 DNFs the day before, I think these three finds buoyed their spirits considerably.

On the river bank, there was some drift wood that sure looked like a Sad Goat:

And now, we’ve prepped and placed a cache nearby — our first! — and if it passes the review process, I’ll blog a bit about it.

TTFN!