qpmarl blog

Have you ever been chewing a piece of gum and had it disintegrate in your mouth? It happened to me today. It just falls apart, it won't stick together anymore.

The first time that this ever happened to me was in Junior High when I was sick and in the nurse's office. I don't remember where I got the gum, but it was a brand that I don't often chew. It fell apart (you can tell when it's about to fall apart because it gets really soft and gritty-like, then it falls apart). It was so gross. I spit it out in the garbage can. I figured it had something to do with being sick and anti-bodies or fever or something.

It's happened a few time since and hasn't always been when I was sick. I think that it might have something to do with how long you have been chewing and what you've been eating/drinking. I think that it may have something to do with enzymes. You get enzymes in your saliva while eating and I think that chewing gum will also trigger the release of enzymes in saliva. Also, I think that gum is designed to fall apart so that if you swallow it, it won't get stuck in your intestines for seven years like all the kids in grade school said - instead it breaks apart in your stomach and is digested like anything else.


The gum disintegration was today, yesterday I slipped and fell while climbing on the steel support arms for a waterslide.

I was only about 4 feet off the ground, so it wasn't life threatening or anything. I was trying to move from a lower to upper arm. The distance was a little too far to get my foot onto the upper arm while standing on the lower. I had a few good hand holds, so I tried to brace one foot against the vertical column (from which the arms radiate) and pull myself up to where I could get a foot on the upper arm. I use this trick a lot while climbing columns (which I do often - usually without a safety harness which would be nearly useless in such situations), but this time, my shoe was a bit muddy and the column had a bit of condensation on it.

So when I jumped to pull myself up to the upper arm, my foot immediately slipped down the column, I lost my handholds, and I fell. I caught the arm I had been standing on with my crotch (just like in the cartoons), spun around it (upside down), caught something with my hand to keep from falling head-first, turned myself rightside up, and landed feet first in the mud and water. I had been wearing my clean shoes for working inside the slide (and on the columns and anywhere else that we don't want to track mud).

Now my clean shoes are all muddy. It takes me a few minutes to recover - the pain to my crotch wasn't so bad, I've been hit worse there. I scraped the inside of my thigh and twisted my knee. The knee wasn't bothering me much yesterday, but when I woke up this morning, it was quite sore and stiff. It doesn't hurt to put weight on it, but it hurts to bend it.

It'll be alright though. I got these heavy-duty bull knees or something - they've taken plenty a beating and recovered just fine. I don't think it's ever taken more than a few days for a knee to recover from any injury. Someone threw a huge rock (twice the size of my fist) at me once - it hit me right on the kneecap from a side angle, taking my leg out from under me. And I landed on the knee that had been hit. It was sore for a day or two, then it was fine