Woo-hoo! 200 finds as of this afternoon. A FTF (first to find) on Thursday, another FTF on Saturday, and 14 total caches on the weekend.

Here’s some photos of us celebrating 200 at the cache site (“Vancouver Decachelon — Bramble Scramble”, GCG809):

You can check out our stats or a map of our finds.

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)