Adventures with Science

If any of you reading this have small children (and I know at least one of you does), I offer you a free response to the complaint, "This science stuff is so boring/stupid/hard. Why do I even need to know it, anyway?":

You want a big house with a big yard, right? Then you are going to need a riding lawn mower. When that riding mower gets stuck on top of a log with its wheels spinning in the air and you're home alone with no one to help you get the tractor down, you'll be glad for science.

We'll gloss over exactly how I got myself into this situation, as that was one of the least entertaining parts of my day. We'll just start with me and the riding mower five feet from the barn door with the right set of tractor wheels suspended a good six inches above the ground, owing to a chunk of firewood lodged firmly under the mower deck. A half hour of yanking and shoving were getting me nowhere. I could get the tractor tipped over far enough that it was no longer resting on the log; however, that took all available limbs, leaving nothing left to remove the offending piece of wood. I could shove the tractor back and forth a little, but that really only pivoted it around the log. I even tried to dig under the log, only to find that a previous owner of the house had at one point laid something asphalt-like by the barn entrance that had since been covered by about 3/4 inch of dirt. Obviously, brute force was not solving this problem. I could wait for Elie to get home, but the last thing I imagine he wants to do after a day at the office is heave lawn equipment. Also, he might ask questions I couldn't answer, such as "Why is our lawn mower on top of a log?"

Wait a second, I said to myself as I tried to heave the tractor up by another angle. You may be a borderline-unemployable housewife, but you're smarter than this. I always talk to myself in the second person.

This is where that science comes in. The lever is one of the six simple machines (the others are wheel and axle, inclined plane, screw, wedge, and pulley). I may not have been thinking torque equations, but I did finally remember that if you wedge a 2x4 under the tractor and over a log, you can lift the lawn tractor up with a minimal effort, while maintaining an angle that allows one to remove the obstruction under the tractor.

Then, of course, I got the tractor wedged on the lever, having placed the fulcrum a little too close to the load. Maybe I should have been thinking about torque equations after all.