Little Found Notebook

Remember that notebook I lost a few weeks back? Today, I found it. I had just finished writing the first blog post of the day and was trying to decide what to write for the next one. I got up to go into the kitchen, returned to the office, and sat in my office chair. I swiveled toward my right and something on the floor caught my eye. There was a notebook there. It hadn’t been there a minute ago. I picked it up and it was my little lost notebook!

I was delighted to find it, but also puzzled. How did it get on the floor next to my desk chair when it hadn’t been there just a minute earlier? It occurred to me that maybe my kids had been playing a joke on me, but I quickly dismissed that idea. Something else had to be going on.

When I first realized the notebook was missing, I retraced my steps. I looked on my desk, I looked on the floor of my desk, I looked on my chair. Nothing. I checked other places in the house that I had been. Nothing. I finally concluded that the notebook must have slipped from my pocket on my morning walk. I figured it was gone for good.

Kelly suggested that maybe my notebook had gotten sucked into a time vortex and was returned safely this very evening, possibly from the future. I checked, but if it was lost into the future, no one bothered to write anything useful.

I sat here pondering what might have happened, and I finally came up with a plausible solution.

I keep my notebooks in my back left pocket. I am frequently seated at my desk doing work. I suspect that while seated, the slipped out of my pocket and fell behind the seat of my chair. There is a curved piece the goes under the seat of the chair, and there is plenty of space under there for the notebook to have hidden. I have reproduced this situation in the image below:

Now, because the piece of metal is curved, the notebook would have slid towards the center. That would explain why, when I first lost the notebook and looked at the chair, I didn’t see it. It was hidden beneath the mesh of the seat. What makes this all the more plausible is a little bit of physics. My chair sits within a U-shape surrounded by my desk and other surfaces on three sides. I frequently pivot this way or that through out the day. Moreover, I frequently spin to face the opposite way to get out of my chair. All of this spinning and pivoting gradually forced the notebook closer and closer to and edge. When I got up earlier this evening, that was the final straw. The notebook fell from its hiding place to land on the floor beside my chair.

I’m glad I found my notebook. Now I need to figure out what to do, continue with the once I started in its absence, or switch back to the lost one. Decisions, decisions. At least one decision was eliminated by this discovery: I now know what to write about for my second blog post today.

Written on March 8, 2022.