Sometimes, a closer look pays off.

You know how sometimes - maybe especially around the holiday season, when there's so much to do - you can get into a head-down, blinkers-on, hurry-hurry-gotta-check-the-next-thing-off-the-list sort of rhythm?

Well, maybe you don't, but I do, especially in the day-to-day work week.

Every morning on my way to work, I pass display cases full of young peoples' art. Every night on the way out (seems like always late as I'm trying to wrap stuff up before I head out of town for a little while next week), I pass the same cases.

So every morning, every evening, and frequently twice at lunchtime, I was seeing this case with the curious dress in it, but not really looking at it.


Yes, I'd glanced. And having grown up on an island in the Pacific, my brain, with that one glance, thought "Neat. It's a dress made like a Maori dancing skirt" --


and having categorized this new thing I was seeing in my comings & goings, went on to Getting Stuff Done.

Eventually, a few nights ago, I looked just a tiny bit harder at the dress as I was on my way out the door.


and then I did the most classic double take I can remember doing in ages.

It's kind of fun, being made to do that by something you've been walking past two to four times every single work day for quite some time.

Walked out of the building laughing at what a good joke the young lady who made it had managed to play on me.

BTW speaking of young folks and culture, I found the Maori dancers on a site I enjoyed browsing - it's a project that paired a number of schools in England and New Zealand. It's pretty old & there are a lot of broken links but I really enjoyed reading the Lytton Schools "What We're Really Like" page. Fun info - sort of reminded me of the kids in the halau that danced at the Bishop Museum when TQ and I went to Hawaii last May.