each acorn fell at a rate of acceleration of 9.80 m/s^2.

These infernal things.  Acorns give me great amounts of displeasure.  And my mower just chucks them around, so I can't just mow over them either.  Yes, I realize I'm not supposed to begin a sentence with the word "and".  And?

Every fall, I stare out at the acorn minefield that is my front lawn and sigh deeply, resigned to the fact that I will spend ridiculous amounts of time clearing them.  But this year?  No.  This year I decided to try to find the good in it.  So, I turned it into something cool.  I explained to both of my children that I would pay them one cent for each acorn they picked up, turned on some music, and went to town.  My son, the first grader, is supposed to be practicing counting by 2's, 5's, 10's, et cetera, so we counted out his acorns every which way as he gathered them.  My daughter had visions of the T-Pain app she was going to purchase with the money she earned (she has an iPod touch that she saved up for), so she was quite happy to be put to work. 

So, bopping along to music, we dug around, got our hands dirty, met a few slugs, and picked up a hell of a lot of acorns.  My son quit first, earning $1.74, and my daughter kept on for a while longer, earning $3.88.  Not too shabby.  When I started to suggest that we should mess around with estimating how many acorns we had collected by measuring their weight (measuring twenty acorns to see how much they weigh, then measuring all of the acorns and dividing the weight to estimate the total number), both of my children ran away.  

I continued on until it got dark, thinking in my head about a friend of mine who, when I said a few days ago, "god, I hate acorns", said he loves them.  To eat them, I assume.  I won't ask questions, but I saved a jar's worth of the best ones and will mail them on Monday.  Enjoy! 



The silver lining in the darkness of acorns is that my yard was partially cleared of acorns without me having to do it all myself, my children earned some money in a healthy way while increasing their knowledge of numbers, we three spent some quality time together out in the sun, and my buddy gets a rare treat, plucked straight from my front lawn. That's win times four. Booyeah.

In case you're wondering about the strange title of today's blog entry, it's there because the college class I'm currently taking is physics, and because I was pounded on by more than one bastard acorn today.  Felt about as close to Newton as I'll ever feel...which isn't very close.