Ovoidance - noun, the act of avoiding all shapes but ovoids

Your father-in-law's desert country comment made me think of a time I was in the Army. Newly transferred from West Germany to Fort Bliss, Texas, I had never experienced desert. On a first drive out into the desert for a brief orientation, my "guide" pointed into the desert and said something or other about "those hills out over there". I couldn't see any hills at all. It looked like flat sand to me. It took me a few months before I could see and "read" the desert terrain and I was never ever bored by it.