When I first moved to my house, I'd never really done a lot of picture hanging before. I learned that with drywall, it's a pain in the neck. You have to have a drill, and a special drywall screw, and you can still mess it up so the thing won't hold.
And then I discovered Command Adhesive hooks. These are wonderful for lightweight picture frames. I knew better than to use them for large (more than 11x14) pictures, but smaller ones are great.
I thought.
I had a pencil drawing of a horse that a lady drew for me when I was a kid and in love with horses. It's an awesome pencil sketch and one of my treasures. I had it in a frame, behind glass, hanging up on the wall right outside the master bedroom's bathroom curtain. (I changed the door to a curtain since you can close the bedroom's door for privacy if there's more than just you in the house, and that way the door arc doesn't make the bedroom even smaller). There's a blanket chest against the wall on the other side, leaving a narrow pathway to walk through between the blanket chest and the (other) wall, the one the picture was hanging from.
One night I woke up from a dream of hearing glass shatter. It was one of those things where you're not quite sure if you dreamed it or if it actually happened and you incorporated it into the dream right as the sound woke you up. But I was quite convinced it came from the right side of the bed, the side opposite to the bathroom. I shrugged and made a mental note to check in the morning. Pippin didn't usually go on that side of the bedroom so I wasn't too worried about him (besides, he mostly slept through the night with me on the bed).
When I got up in the morning, I checked all the pictures on that wall. Nothing was broken and there was no glass on the carpet. I shrugged and figured that it was a dream, after all.
This was before I started walking an hour every morning. The bedroom isn't well lit (what's the point?) and once I'd decided the glass break sound was a dream, I stopped paying attention to the floor and walls.
Normal morning procedure involved me going into the little bathroom off the master bedroom through that narrow corridor and cleaning the litterbox in the shower. (I use the bigger bathroom to take showers in, so this shower is where the litterbox lives.) I do the other stuff one does in the morning in a bathroom, come back out, put clothes on for work, eat breakfast and leave for work.
Pippin's morning routine involved getting up, eating his own breakfast, using the litterbox before I left, and settling into the pink room for his morning nap. I discovered quite late in his life that the reason he didn't mind going on long trips with me without a litterbox in the car was that he was used to spending the entire day not using the bathroom. He wouldn't use the litterbox unless I was in the building.
(The last surgery he had, to remove a skin cancer tumor, is one that they like to keep him overnight. I was worried about that whole bathroom issue and talked the surgeon into considering letting me take him home. The surgeon did the surgery an hour and a half before he normally started surgeries, and by the time they were almost ready to close that evening, he was willing to let me take Pippin home. When I came to pick him up, the surgeon said to me in that voice that always makes me laugh, the one where the person sounds amazed that I actually knew what I was talking about, he said "you were right, he didn't use the litterbox all day." And when I got Pippin home, I had enough experience to know to put him down in the litterbox, where he promptly relaxed his muscles and pee'd enough to make a monster litter ball.)
So anyway, back to the glass story. You've already guessed what happened. That glass breakage sound was real; it just came from the left side of the bed instead of the right side. The picture of the horse had fallen straight down and hit the floor. It was carpet, but apparently that didn't matter.
The impact shattered the glass lengthwise. It was an 8.5 x 11 picture frame, so that meant the glass was in 11" long shards. The glass had fallen out of the frame and scattered across that narrow space we both had to walk through. Twice.
I came home that afternoon from work and found the glass shards on the carpet.
To this day I have no idea how both Pippin and I managed to walk through that area, two times each, without cutting a foot to the bone, or even getting the slightest scratch. There was no room for a human foot between the shards. Pippin might have been able to, if he was paying attention ... although he was usually as sleepy and bumbling as I was in the mornings. But still. There is no way I should have been able to make it through that space twice without cutting myself.
My only explanation involves quantum physics. I didn't know it was there; I didn't observe it being there; so until it was observed, it both did and did not exist in the space.
I learned from this experience and now all my Command Adhesive-hung pictures have either no glass or glass that doesn't break / clear plastic!
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