Not tink but SHWOOM!

Glass is a pretty remarkable material – though not as some claim a super cooled and super-viscous liquid. It is in fact a solid - an amorphous solid, but a solid nonetheless. An amorphous solid is a solid without any crystalline structure – which means that when it breaks, it just breaks in any old way rather than along facets. Actually, that is not entirely true. Amorphous substances (like obsidian and glass) have a tendency to break in a curved fashion – following the shock wave passing through them.

Glass is also quite durable and can survive quite a bit of knocking about – until enough micro-fractures and stresses have build up in it and poof it shatters for almost no apparent reason. Which is what happened to me this morning a few minutes before leaving the house.

I was helping JJ brush his teeth when I put the rinsing glass into the sink – out of the way. It slipped and fell a fraction of a centimeter – something you would expect to go tink, but not much more. In my case it literally exploded. Sending glass flying all over the bathroom and out into the hall. The flying glass ended up scratching / cutting me in two places on the right arm (fortunately, I am left handed, so I could deal with my injury – okay, okay, they were really small cuts, that slowly and reluctantly seeped a little blood).

What astounded me was how the glass had broke (I suppose I should be thankful none of it landed in my eye), it broke in little pieces - like safety glass should (safety glass is designed to break into small squarish, not too sharp pieces – not long shards) – unlike safety glass, these were sharp. And, as mentioned it sprayed out of the sink all over the place, rather than being confined in the sink bowl.

So, I had to check that JJ was glass free, pick bits of glass off me, carry him out of the bathroom and then quickly vacuum up and leave to drop the kids off and get to work.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Luckily the kids are ok!!

And I hope that ur cuts are healed too..

Gd day!
Wow, I just noticed how you had varying font sizes in your post title. How did you do that?! Inquiring minds wanna know... :)
Richard said…
sassymomma: thanks for dropping by. Actually, I’m fine and so are the kids. It did take me 45 minutes to finally clean the bathroom to my satisfaction that there were no more bits of glass. Ha ha, such an exciting topic. My cuts were really, really minor. Thanks for the concern.

MIO: You can use HTML tags in the header. The relevant tags are small and big.

Don’t forget to format them like HTML tags and close them properly. Each placement increases or decreases the font size by 1.

You can nest the tags, so you can do small small small or big big big

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