experiment gone wrong

The coffee cup is fine.
That missing chip?
That's been gone for many, many years.
Even if it had finally broken, I have another cup exactly like it, as I bought both cups that same shopping trip to the store on Gate 2 Street in Okinawa, back in 1982.
You know, just in case one broke.
Now, both cups are fine, but two of my breakfast plates are shattered.

What happened, you ask?
Well, in preparation for the pouring of freshly brewing coffee, I had withdrawn the clean, unchipped cup from the dishwasher to place on the coffee stand. I noticed the cup felt abnormally cold and wondered if that meant the dishwasher was open to the outside air or if the cup simply seemed to be colder.
So, I opened the cupboard where I keep all my coffee cups. They're on the lowest shelf, in that cupboard above the kitchen counter.
Reaching for the duplicate, but chipped, unicorn-bedecked cup (to do an exact thermal comparison), my clumsy hand instead managed to allow it to skip across the shelf...
and drop down onto the counter...
where it directly broke one breakfast dish before bouncing onto the edge of a bowl atop the other...
causing that dish to also shatter.
It all seemed to happen in slow motion.
But the chipped cup was fine.

What about the temperature of the ceramic?
Was it the same as the one from the dishwasher?

Um... what?
No, no, the one that was in the cupboard was notably warmer.

The two dishes which broke were "Pomegranate" and "Peach".
They were my favorites, of course.
My breakfast dishes were the four dessert plates I had bought at Angela's yard sale, several years ago, when she and her daughter were moving out to Richmond Hill to live with her parents.
Now, "Apple" and "Pear" remain.
Ah, well.
I guess I will simply need to wash dishes more often.
And maybe not keep dirty ones on the counter.