Have you experienced the seemingly miraculous recovery of a lost item?

That photo is creepy.
I can’t say I have ever experienced such an unusual recovery.
Stories like that are cool.

Back in 1986 I won a 6th place medal at the San Francisco Marathon. It was a beautifully crafted peace of art.

I went to the post race party to have fun not knowing how I placed in the race. I was called up onto the stage to collect a 6th place medal. The race director shook my hand and congratulated me and told me that my medal had been lost. I said that’s cool and proceeded to forget about the medal and to enjoy the party.

5 years later on the spare of the moment my woman friend (now my wife) said that she wanted to do a fun run around San Francisco’s Lake Merced at night organized by the “Pa Ma Kids” running club. My future wife came in first woman and I was first place man.

I didn’t expect the awards to be anything worth keeping. Especially when the race director announced that the medals that he’ll be giving out were left overs from previous races.

I received a very cheap looking generic victory medal and my future wife received (you guest it) my long lost 1986 San Francisco 6th place medal in 35–39 class. Shown here

It looked familiar as I won 2 others just like it in the 1987 and 1988 SF Marathons. When I checked the engraving in the back I about flipped. It said 1986 San Francisco Audi Marathon, 6th place 35–39 class.

I burst out with a “THAT”S MINE AND I”M TAKING IT!!!”

It was easy to prove that it was mine with the folder of old race results that I kept.

That’s exactly the kind of amazing story I was hoping for, @gondwanalon! Thanks.

@gondwanalon , Before reading your amazing story I had thought about telling one involving a long-lost TV remote.

No. Wow.

I think I’ll just thank you and be on my way…..

I don’t know if this is what you are looking for but our farm cat ran away when we got a dog. We had the dog for about two years and then it got hit by a car and died. The next day “the cat came back!”

Oh, man…..works for me…..

@janbb – how can you answer that without reference to this old camp song:?

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@elbanditoroso That is the reference!

My sister has a good story like this. She teaches strings and one of her adult students had a dog named fin that she fell in love with. She always said she “wanted a dog just like fin” She decided to get a dog from the local rescue and when she was looking at the dogs there was fin staring at her wagging his tail. She found out later the previous owner could not take care of him and took him to the shelter.

I’ve got another truly amazing and absolutely true story about an incident that happened to me while taking a chemistry test 25 years ago. Do you want to read about it?

yes

no

OK….I’m sorry…..........yes

OK here you go:

A miraculous thing happened to me on a chemistry test while I was enrolled in the Advanced Medical Laboratory Course at the Academy of Health Science (Ft. Sam Houston, TX) back in August 1992.

The instructors had very strict rules on chemistry tests. They did not give partial credit for problem solving work or for answers that are close to being correct. Answers had to be written in the correct significant figures and rounded up or down depending on the problem. Anyone caught cheating would be immediately expelled.

X osm/Kg = 1.86 Na (_____mmol/L) + 0.056 glucose (______mg/dL) + 0.36 BUN(_____mg/dL)

Any way while taking a test I forgot the standard coefficients (constants) for solving an osmolality problem (formula written above). No big deal I thought as I felt confident that I did very well on the rest of the test. But I had 5 minute before the tests were to be collected so I tried to remember the coefficients. (They actually were 1.86 for Na, 0.56 for glucose and 0.36 for BUN)

I was sure of 1.86 was correct for Na and I used 0.030 for BUN and another off the wall number that was completely wrong for glucose (can’t remember what it was).

I knew that two of the coefficients that I used could not possibly be correct. Yet I sat there and watched my hand plug in the erroneous numbers into my calculator. The calculator gave me an answer that I was sure was wrong. But I wrote it onto my test and handed it in to be graded.

I was floored when I learned that my answer was correct even to the significant figures. When I told this to my fellow students they did not believe me. 

Good thing that the instructors did not look at how I got the answer because there is no way I could justify it. The instructors would say that I copied the answer and calculated backwards. I would have surely been expelled.

This is unsettling to me even today (25 years later). The odds of getting the correct answer the way I did it seem astronomically high. Like one in a million trillion or so.

Forces me to consider the possibility of divine Intervention.

It’s been said that “I’d rather be lucky than good”.....

P.S. What exactly is an ‘osmole’, and how does one go about counting it ??

An osmole is the number of dissolved disassociated ions or particles in a mole of solution.

Osmolality is determined by multiplying the solution’s molarity (moles/L) by the number of osmoles in the solution.

example: Osmolality = moles/L X (amount of dissolved particles )

Molarity = moles/L

A 1 molar solution of Na has 0.14 moles/L But if Na is from NaCl then when it is dissolved in water if generates 2 ions per molecule. Therefore the osmolality of a one liter of a 1 molar NaCl solution would be 0.280 osmoles/L

And…here’s another ring story, spotted in today’s news.

I have a ring story, but it’s nothing alongside these.

I’ve lost my glasses in the ocean and they washed up in front of me an hour later.

@gondwanalon That’s what I thought.

Just verifying.

Thank you.