So my wife and our kids head up to Sacramento to visit family over the long weekend and we stay at her grandmother's house. Grandfather has long passed on. I'm the last one to turn in for the night on Sunday and I wash my drinking glass and place it on the towel on the countertop to dry. I go to bed. I wake up at 6 AM Monday, shower, get dressed, grab a Coke from the fridge and head out the door to go golfing. About 15 minutes after I leave, my wife hears a loud crash from the kitchen and goes sprinting out to see what happened. Everyone else is still in bed and the drinking glass I had placed on the countertop is in a thousand pieces all over the place. There wasn't a piece over 1/4" in size. It was if someone had thrown the glass as hard as they could against the backsplash of the counter or run it over with their car and spread the pieces all over the kitchen. WTF? The glass sat out over night on the countertop, so it was room temperature when it shattered, but what caused it to shatter? It was the only thing on the counter and nothing fell on it. No pets. No vermin. Neither could have caused this kind of shatter anyway. It was sitting flush on a towel to dry overnight. We are perplexed about this. Again, WTF?
I suppose that the glass was warming up nonuniformly, which caused different parts to expand at different rates.
that explanation may fly if it just cracked or broke into a few pieces, but shouldn't account for the total destruction that was described. iSounds like your wife is lying to you to cover for her escapades with the asian pool boy, Skim Wit Net.
how thin/thick was the glass? Did you place it open end down on the towel? Probably vacuum effect. It imploded. It's that or maybe your wife (or her grandma) was banging the neighbor on the kitchen counter and knocked it over.
I believe the gardener's name is Turim Mai Bhush. He was probably doing Grandma. It's an ancient civilization, so they love older women.
This exact thing used to happen a lot in a restaurant I managed. From time to time the glasses would explode on the table tops for no apparent reason.. and always when no one was anywhere near them. Definitely creepy, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the scientific explanation posted. Oh, and it wasn't even an Asian restaurant.
Your wife had sneaked out to the local Vietnamese restaurant to order the soup of the day, cream of sum yun guy.
At first, the most logical explanation I could come up with was that after annoying a bunch of movie-goers earlier in the evening, some black guy broke in and started break dancing in the kitchen and knocked it off the counter, but even though that happens all the time, nobody ever broke in. It sounds as though it was just the gradual temperature change - even though the glass was washed some 8 hours prior. Everything she owns is quite old - like at least 30 years, so that seems to be the most logical explanation. Weird that it waited until I come to visit in order to break.
Check the closets, there may be a homeless Japanese woman in there. She came out to get a drink, and didn't know you had placed the glass there.