You know how that tree fell on my house? And then Dad and Paul smashed one of the back windows because they didn't understand Newton's Three Laws of Motion?
Well, clearly we had to file a claim with our insurance company.
Mr. Insurance Agent Guy told us an adjuster would call us, talk to us, visit us, verify that, yes, a tree DID fall on the house, and then we could get things fixed. But as I told you earlier, Insurance Adjuster said, "You are too far away for me to travel to you," and "I will have this reassigned." We were told to wait. A new adjuster would get in touch with us.
We waited. Nothing.
After the two weeks Insurance Adjuster told us to wait, Mom was suspicious. She called. Mr. Insurance Agent Guy was in shock. No one had been to see us yet? So he called the office where Insurance Adjuster worked to find out what had happened. Then Insurance Adjuster called us.
You see, when the case had been "reassigned," it was sent away from Insurance Adjuster. And then it was sent back. Basically, it was "reassigned" to HIM, so really, it had not been reassigned at all, it was just a bureaucratic black hole, like the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit.
Insurance Adjuster guy had clearly been yelled at by Boss Insurance Adjuster, because he made it very clear that this was in no way his fault.
(I'm just not even going to say anything else about that...you know what I'm thinking.)
Mr. Insurance Agent Guy was Unhappy about this Situation. So, HE is going to come and tell us we can go ahead and fix things. So that's good. Something can finally be done, right?
Except, no.
Yesterday, Mom was walking Darcy. Dad was with her. Darcy was sniffing and chasing things and running around. Dad and Mom were looking at the tree from the river bank, not from the house the way we usually see it.
They noticed a few holes in the tree. No one had seen them before, due to the giant branch that used to obscure them, but there they are. Who knows where they came from. Do birds do that? Raccoon? Squirrels? Whatever.
But Mom noticed the holes in the tree weren't ordinary holes in a tree. They were moving, sort of. And so was something in the air around the holes and--oh.
Crap.
You see, when the tree decided to die, because clearly it was a choice by that tree to screw with us, it had become a home to various woodland creatures. I know birds have nested in it, definitely squirrels, but they have all moved on. The new family that's moved into the tree is about 40,000 strong, and I hear their mom is giant, fat, and lazy. Also she bosses everybody around while she lies back in her cell all day, shooting out babies.
Because she has her own cell, in the BEE HIVE where she LIVES.
At this point, Nature is flipping us off. Nature is mooning us. Nature is making obscene hand gestures, and we are Its target. Nature was like, "You like falling asleep to thunderstorms? Okay!" Then Nature said, "You love trees? Really? You planted so many! You must love them! So have a tree!" And then it hurled one on the house. Now it's saying, "You wanted to save the bees, didn't you? So SAVE THEM." And it gave us an entire hive of bees to take care of.
Because you can't just kill bees, what with that hive collapse thing.
Now, none of us have seen the bees up close, so maybe they aren't really honey bees. Having honey bees would kind of be a good thing, because they are having so much trouble, healthy hives are great to find. I'm sure someone would want our bees, in that case.
And I suppose it's great that we didn't send some guy up the tree with a chainsaw only to have him come running down, followed by a swarm of angry bees.
If our luck stays the same, though, these bees are Africanized honey bees, otherwise known as Killer Bees.
No one will want to get rid of our deadly-deadly bees. They will want to leave them alone, and it will take us even longer to get the tree, which is dead and could fall down at any moment, cut up and taken away.
This is what will happen. The tree will fall down. On the house. Through it, really. A swarm of angry, deadly-deadly bees will rise up out of the tree and come for us while we are sleeping. We will try to run, but only the cat would escape because Dad is a bigger target and the rest of us don't like running, plus I have asthma, so I would probably die first, swelling up like a giant Laura Balloon, just like that Violet Beauregarde girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I will be a blueberry-shaped corpse, and they won't be able to fit me into a coffin, so they'll have to have one custom-made for people shaped like berries.
What do you even do to get rid of bees? I've never needed to try to make them move before. I mean, bees won't move to a new place because they'd be in a better school district or to be closer to family and yarn stores. Can you bribe bees? Can I get a new bee-house for them and say, "Here bees! Come live here, and I'll give you THIS," while I show them a giant flower I bought from the garden supply store?
Do you think that would work?
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label physics. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Dad's Rooftop Adventure
Darcy has a phobia. She is thunder-phobic. She has doggie brontophobia. It developed last spring, when we all went to bed with our respective bedroom doors closed, but without Darcy inside one of the rooms. During that evening, there was a horrible storm, and the massive amounts of thunder and lightning terrified her so completely, she cannot forget the trauma.
Lately, her anxiety has been escalating. She is now also afraid of rain. Ombrophobia.
Yes. Darcy has a doggie anxiety disorder. I know this because she has puppy panic attacks, during which she shakes violently, pants, goes to dark enclosed spaces to feel safe, and sometimes throws up.
All Darcy's fears were realized on Tuesday night. She'd been panicking for a while before the power went out. Seconds after the house was consumed by darkness, the wind picked up.
Standing in my room, I heard something slam into the house and I knew, deep inside, that a tornado was currently rending the house into tiny pieces, including the gorgeous new kitchen floor and probably most of my family.
When no more horror followed, I got back up and made my way to the basement, where death was slightly less likely. We got Darcy downstairs, her poor doggie panic attack in full swing, and Dad recovered from his rude awakening and followed.
After a few minutes, we could tell the worst was over, so we creeped back upstairs (excluding Darcy, who was hiding in the cupboard under the stairs--yes, we have a cupboard under the basement stairs just like Harry Potter lived in back in the Dursleys' house). I mostly just stood there, because I had dropped my flashlight when the giant noise came. Mom was using a flashlight to peer out the picture window intently.
Because there was a tree on our roof.
Well, on and a little bit in.
The giant oak tree outside our window had split apart; part of it was left standing, the other part had landed on our roof like that plane fuselage from Donnie Darko. Except Donnie wasn't killed this time, mostly because we don't have a second floor and Donnie doesn't and has never lived with us, because he's a fictional character. Actually, no one was killed. And the tree wasn't in our living room or anything. It stayed outside, we thought, but we couldn't be sure.
So before the lightning had ended, Dad went outside, got the METAL ladder out, propped it against the side of the house, and climbed up onto the roof with a flashlight to see how bad the damage was.
Luckily, he didn't so much need a flashlight, because the lightning was bright enough to allow him to see. Also, it was constant, so nature provided plenty of light to work by. Never mind the danger of being struck by lightning, or anything. Apparently, Dad believes he is immune to the effects of lightning.
Now, the last time Dad went up on the roof, this happened, so Mom wasn't so happy. With each branch that Dad hurled off the roof, Mom gasped, thinking that the falling branch was her husband, struck dead by lightning. Or just falling off the roof, which is pretty much his hobby.
Paul, convinced that with each passing moment, the likelihood of one of our parents' deaths increased, went outside and climbed up on the roof too, then quickly came back down to announce that we needed tarps and the staple gun, so that we could cover the hole in the roof. Dad reported that the hole was about the size of his thigh (not so big), but that it would cause damage if we didn't cover it. Also, he said, he needed his chainsaw.
Mom and I were willing to go to Walmart to get tarps. None of us were willing to get the chainsaw. Still, Dad was convinced. His mood always becomes...unpleasant when something like this happens. But he kept calling for the chainsaw, until finally he went down to get it.
At that point, I tweeted the following:
In the morning, we discovered that in addition to the hole Dad found, there were several more smallish-sized holes in the roof. Also, a cracked support beam.
Also, when the tree hit the house, it did so with enough force to cause our ceiling to bow. And the nails driven up into support beams? They were pushed down out of the beams they live in, so now we have several exposed nail heads on the ceiling, which I constantly think are giant spiders coming to kill me. This is more frightening than the prospect of the ceiling somehow caving in.
Dad called his friend Jeff from church, who was also directly involved with Dad's Silver Surfer Wipe out back in November, and Jeff came over to help clean up the damage and patch the roof. This wasn't really what the insurance company wanted, but hey--it's been over a week, and have they sent a claims person to our house to even look at the damage? Nope. So they fixed the immediate problems, to keep water from coursing down on our heads as we watch television.
Dad and Paul cut the remaining chunk of tree into smaller chunks, which they pushed off the roof.
That would have been great, except that one or both of them flunked elementary physics, leading to further complications.
See, the tree was hanging off the house like this:
The skinny part of the tree, which was hanging over the edge of the roof, was problematic. Dad and Paul decided the best way to remove that section of tree was to cut it, push it, let it hit the ground, then keep pushing it until the end they cut fell away from the house and landed on the ground. Then, Dad and Paul would finish cutting it up and moving it away from the house.
That was what they wanted to happen.
Do you know Newton's various Laws of Motion?
My family doesn't.
This is why I can never leave the house.
Objects, whether they be shoes or strawberries or giant hunks of trees, all have mass. Mass means they take up space, have some kind of weight, and whatnot.
When the forces of nature are at "equilibrium," then whatever the thing is, the thing wants to stay where it is. That's balance. Everything wants to not have to move. Like me. I don't want to have to move. Do you?
If equilibrium didn't exist, like if we had no gravity, I could throw my shoe and it would keep flying away in the direction I threw it forever, or at least until it hit something that made it change directions. That's inertia. Bill Nye says inertia is a property of matter. I remember. But because we do have gravity, it fights the inertia, so if I throw my shoe right now, gravity will make it stop, probably pretty quickly.
The reason my shoe won't go very far is because I am a total wimp, and you need lots of force to make things move fast and far away from you when you throw them. That's why major league baseball players take so many steroids.
To make this Sciencey, that means the mass of my shoe, multiplied by the acceleration of me throwing it, will equal it's force. That looks like this when you Math it:
Fnet = m * a
See?
The giant chunk of tree has mass. Lots of mass. Dad and Paul provided a force when they shoved it down off the roof.
But here's the thing. This is where we get into the Big Physics. If the force isn't great enough to combat, say, gravity...then you end up with something like a pendulum. The mass of the big thing has an impact on the way it moves. So does the power of Gravity. You have to fight both to make a thing move. That's physics. This takes us to Newton's third law of motion, which is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Since Dad and Paul didn't account for the various forces of nature, they were thwarted totally by the mass of the tree and, you know, gravity.
They shoved the tree off the roof, as planned. It hit the ground, as planned.
But the big fat part of the tree was in the air, and the tiny, skinny end of the tree was on the ground. That made the tree swing, like a pendulum, from the fixed point of the ground.
What was in the way of the ground?
Oh. Right.
The house.
Basically, my father and brother had a Physics Fail, and the tree slammed through one of the windows of the house, shattering the window inward. Also, it was right in the spot where my mother knits all the time.
So, of course, Dad thought he'd killed Mom, and he totally would have if she hadn't been on the phone with various people trying to explain how we had a giant tree on the roof of the house. Dad ran down off the ladder, making Mom think Paul had fallen off the roof and died, because we have a bad track record with roof-safety.
Instead, Dad came rushing over and there was a touching moment, before Mom realized that Dad could have killed her, plus he'd broken a window, and now there was glass all over the sofa and the carpet, broken glass which was super sharp, and we all know Dad wasn't going to clean it up.
So now there is a boarded-up window at my house, plus various spider-like nail heads poking out of the ceiling, plus a bowed ceiling that may or may not cave in, plus no insurance adjuster guy, because the man assigned our case lives in Indianapolis, so right when he was ready to come visit us and see the damage, he realized where we lived and gave our case to someone else and now we have to wait something like two more weeks before we fix anything.
We're not angry about waiting, though. Mostly, we're just laughing.
Lately, her anxiety has been escalating. She is now also afraid of rain. Ombrophobia.
Yes. Darcy has a doggie anxiety disorder. I know this because she has puppy panic attacks, during which she shakes violently, pants, goes to dark enclosed spaces to feel safe, and sometimes throws up.
All Darcy's fears were realized on Tuesday night. She'd been panicking for a while before the power went out. Seconds after the house was consumed by darkness, the wind picked up.
Standing in my room, I heard something slam into the house and I knew, deep inside, that a tornado was currently rending the house into tiny pieces, including the gorgeous new kitchen floor and probably most of my family.
When no more horror followed, I got back up and made my way to the basement, where death was slightly less likely. We got Darcy downstairs, her poor doggie panic attack in full swing, and Dad recovered from his rude awakening and followed.
After a few minutes, we could tell the worst was over, so we creeped back upstairs (excluding Darcy, who was hiding in the cupboard under the stairs--yes, we have a cupboard under the basement stairs just like Harry Potter lived in back in the Dursleys' house). I mostly just stood there, because I had dropped my flashlight when the giant noise came. Mom was using a flashlight to peer out the picture window intently.
Because there was a tree on our roof.
Well, on and a little bit in.
The giant oak tree outside our window had split apart; part of it was left standing, the other part had landed on our roof like that plane fuselage from Donnie Darko. Except Donnie wasn't killed this time, mostly because we don't have a second floor and Donnie doesn't and has never lived with us, because he's a fictional character. Actually, no one was killed. And the tree wasn't in our living room or anything. It stayed outside, we thought, but we couldn't be sure.
So before the lightning had ended, Dad went outside, got the METAL ladder out, propped it against the side of the house, and climbed up onto the roof with a flashlight to see how bad the damage was.
Luckily, he didn't so much need a flashlight, because the lightning was bright enough to allow him to see. Also, it was constant, so nature provided plenty of light to work by. Never mind the danger of being struck by lightning, or anything. Apparently, Dad believes he is immune to the effects of lightning.
Now, the last time Dad went up on the roof, this happened, so Mom wasn't so happy. With each branch that Dad hurled off the roof, Mom gasped, thinking that the falling branch was her husband, struck dead by lightning. Or just falling off the roof, which is pretty much his hobby.
Paul, convinced that with each passing moment, the likelihood of one of our parents' deaths increased, went outside and climbed up on the roof too, then quickly came back down to announce that we needed tarps and the staple gun, so that we could cover the hole in the roof. Dad reported that the hole was about the size of his thigh (not so big), but that it would cause damage if we didn't cover it. Also, he said, he needed his chainsaw.
Mom and I were willing to go to Walmart to get tarps. None of us were willing to get the chainsaw. Still, Dad was convinced. His mood always becomes...unpleasant when something like this happens. But he kept calling for the chainsaw, until finally he went down to get it.
At that point, I tweeted the following:
And then, instead of waiting for more things to go horribly wrong, I went to sleep.Soon, limbs will be flying off the side of the roof. But will they be tree limbs, or human limbs? #ChainsawsintheDark
In the morning, we discovered that in addition to the hole Dad found, there were several more smallish-sized holes in the roof. Also, a cracked support beam.
Also, when the tree hit the house, it did so with enough force to cause our ceiling to bow. And the nails driven up into support beams? They were pushed down out of the beams they live in, so now we have several exposed nail heads on the ceiling, which I constantly think are giant spiders coming to kill me. This is more frightening than the prospect of the ceiling somehow caving in.
Dad called his friend Jeff from church, who was also directly involved with Dad's Silver Surfer Wipe out back in November, and Jeff came over to help clean up the damage and patch the roof. This wasn't really what the insurance company wanted, but hey--it's been over a week, and have they sent a claims person to our house to even look at the damage? Nope. So they fixed the immediate problems, to keep water from coursing down on our heads as we watch television.
Dad and Paul cut the remaining chunk of tree into smaller chunks, which they pushed off the roof.
That would have been great, except that one or both of them flunked elementary physics, leading to further complications.
See, the tree was hanging off the house like this:
(Click to embiggen)
The skinny part of the tree, which was hanging over the edge of the roof, was problematic. Dad and Paul decided the best way to remove that section of tree was to cut it, push it, let it hit the ground, then keep pushing it until the end they cut fell away from the house and landed on the ground. Then, Dad and Paul would finish cutting it up and moving it away from the house.
That was what they wanted to happen.
Do you know Newton's various Laws of Motion?
My family doesn't.
This is why I can never leave the house.
Objects, whether they be shoes or strawberries or giant hunks of trees, all have mass. Mass means they take up space, have some kind of weight, and whatnot.
When the forces of nature are at "equilibrium," then whatever the thing is, the thing wants to stay where it is. That's balance. Everything wants to not have to move. Like me. I don't want to have to move. Do you?
If equilibrium didn't exist, like if we had no gravity, I could throw my shoe and it would keep flying away in the direction I threw it forever, or at least until it hit something that made it change directions. That's inertia. Bill Nye says inertia is a property of matter. I remember. But because we do have gravity, it fights the inertia, so if I throw my shoe right now, gravity will make it stop, probably pretty quickly.
The reason my shoe won't go very far is because I am a total wimp, and you need lots of force to make things move fast and far away from you when you throw them. That's why major league baseball players take so many steroids.
To make this Sciencey, that means the mass of my shoe, multiplied by the acceleration of me throwing it, will equal it's force. That looks like this when you Math it:
Fnet = m * a
See?
The giant chunk of tree has mass. Lots of mass. Dad and Paul provided a force when they shoved it down off the roof.
But here's the thing. This is where we get into the Big Physics. If the force isn't great enough to combat, say, gravity...then you end up with something like a pendulum. The mass of the big thing has an impact on the way it moves. So does the power of Gravity. You have to fight both to make a thing move. That's physics. This takes us to Newton's third law of motion, which is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Since Dad and Paul didn't account for the various forces of nature, they were thwarted totally by the mass of the tree and, you know, gravity.
They shoved the tree off the roof, as planned. It hit the ground, as planned.
But the big fat part of the tree was in the air, and the tiny, skinny end of the tree was on the ground. That made the tree swing, like a pendulum, from the fixed point of the ground.
What was in the way of the ground?
Oh. Right.
The house.
Basically, my father and brother had a Physics Fail, and the tree slammed through one of the windows of the house, shattering the window inward. Also, it was right in the spot where my mother knits all the time.
So, of course, Dad thought he'd killed Mom, and he totally would have if she hadn't been on the phone with various people trying to explain how we had a giant tree on the roof of the house. Dad ran down off the ladder, making Mom think Paul had fallen off the roof and died, because we have a bad track record with roof-safety.
Instead, Dad came rushing over and there was a touching moment, before Mom realized that Dad could have killed her, plus he'd broken a window, and now there was glass all over the sofa and the carpet, broken glass which was super sharp, and we all know Dad wasn't going to clean it up.
So now there is a boarded-up window at my house, plus various spider-like nail heads poking out of the ceiling, plus a bowed ceiling that may or may not cave in, plus no insurance adjuster guy, because the man assigned our case lives in Indianapolis, so right when he was ready to come visit us and see the damage, he realized where we lived and gave our case to someone else and now we have to wait something like two more weeks before we fix anything.
We're not angry about waiting, though. Mostly, we're just laughing.
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