Falling objects

Gotta catch the ball!

I’ve long known that a falling piece of toast can land only one way… jam side down. And, most likely, on one of the many clumps of Fiona hair that no vacuum cleaner in the world can quite overtake.

Last night, I made another incredible discovery. It would have merited further experimentation, but I was going to run out of socks… You see… I discovered that dropping a rolled up pair of socks from any point in my master bathroom results in said pair of socks landing in a water dish.

I was, given this discovery, further surprised to learn that there are only three water dishes in the master bathroom and that one of them was on the counter. And it’s not a small bathroom by any stretch. Including the closet, you could fit a large portion of my parents’ first home into our bathroom. In the end, it all just meant that I had to run a load of laundry to get a clean, dry pair of socks.

This phenomenon concerns me, though. You see… I have an amazing ability to encounter localized pockets of enhanced gravity. That’s a euphemism for “When I go mountain biking, I tend to encounter the ground with some frequency,” or even, I suppose, “Given the opportunity, I’ll probably fall down.” Fortunately, dirt is soft, and my most serious bicycling injury to date involves a painful bruise on my breast bone.

However, given my new knowledge that gravity doesn’t always pull straight down — that is, that there might be more prominent nearby gravitational bodies than this Earth we wander around on — I’m concerned that I might encounter something more dangerous in the woods this spring. What if, for example, a localized pocket of enhanced gravity formed in the middle of a tree. Come to think of it, I may have witnessed just such an occurrence a few weeks ago when TT-Bob came flying off his bike near SMU… There must have been a gravity pocket in that light pole overhead! That really does explain a lot.

I’d prefer to continue falling down, though.