On neurological sciences and the uncommon Stormdog

I rather liked Dr. Book, who I saw at Froedtert yesterday, but she is not a specialist in the sorts of things I have going on. She's interested though; she said that's she's never seen a case of developmental rather than acquired prosopagnosia herself and was very interested in my history and experiences. She might be interested in talking to my parents and to Moira too. She was surprsied that I've never had a full battery of neurological tests done, so we're doing that. I had to wait 'till March for an appointment for testing, but they want me for 8 hours to poke and prod me and scan my brain. I'm kind of excited about that!

We did memory and face recognition tests, as well as a navigation test. She asked me a lot about my direction sense and had me try to get back to the lobby from her office, then back to her office (which I did ok at, but I kept thinking her office was on the wrong side of the hallway for some reason.). Plus I kept getting mixed up about what direction things were in in relation to where I was. I couldn't tell her what cardinal direction the parking garage was in in relation to the rest of the building, and could only get there by landmarks and memorization. She kept a copy of the 'No Shortcuts' story I left with her as she wanted to read it, though she didn't have time to go through it at the time.

She also said that there is a person at Froedtert who specifically works with prosopagnosia, but he's a researcher rather than a clinician. He may or may not want to see me at some point.

I guess there'll be more to know after the testing. I'm excited about spending 8 hours getting questioned and brain-scanned. I really am! I just wish it was sooner.

I still have this paranoia that they're going to hook me up to all the machines and find that nothing is really wrong with me and tell me that it's all in my head. Which I suppose it really is anyway, but you know what I mean. I often worry, when I see signs of illness or dysfunction in myself, that I'm seeing much more than is there and that I'm wrong in thinking anything is abnormal. It's a sort of instinctive fear that I really don't know what I'm talking about I guess. How about you?

And now for something completely different

I have set up a simplistic bit of track for my Spacewarp layout composed entirely of pre-assembled sections of track. I can't really make any new sections of my own due to the issue with the cross-ties breaking. But I wanted something I could set up and play with a little bit, even if it's only by manually carrying the ball up from the bottom of the foot-and-a-half section to the top, over and over again. Which I've been doing every evening. Because I am a huge dork.

I have also constructed a single, complete elevator out of the two sets that I have (the Ebay ad copy suggesting the set I won contained a complete elevator was misleading, though I do have nearly two complete ones). I'm planning to take extra spiral parts from one and figure out a method to extend the height of the one I built with them. I also have to figure out how to attach the small motor to the elevator when the drive wheel on the lift is at ninety degrees to the drive spindle on the motor. Hmm...

But anyway, here are a couple pictures.



This is a view from the front. The curves of track piled over the Spacewarp box in the back are not involved in the layout; they're just hanging out, as it were.



Here's a view from above showing a sphere, blurred into a silver line by exposure time, running on the track.

=========

My dog is snoring in the hallway outside the computer room. This is unbearably cute! *bounces*

And now it's off to catch up on Quicken and my bank account. Whee!