Weird health thingie

Last night I made fried rice, with mixed veggies and Chinese sausage, for dinner. Within a minute or two of starting to eat, shalmestere said the epithelial cells in her mouth were doing something funny, and her sense of taste was off. I replied "Me too: I'm not noticing taste problems, but it feels like there's something stuck to the insides of my gums, yet when I try to scrape it off, nothing comes off." After a few minutes, including swishing water around in our mouths, the weird gum sensation went away.

Neither of us had any subsequent gastrointestinal distress, so it wasn't the sort of food poisoning that makes you sick for 24 hours.

I imagine it was an additive in the Chinese sausage, which was a different brand than we've bought before. But has anybody else encountered this particular symptom?

Dream journal

Our car had been in the shop for a while, due to an accident, and when it was ready I returned our rental car to the agency (whether car rental, insurance, or both, I wasn't clear), which was staffed by a big friendly guy with a Welsh accent and short sandy-blonde hair.

Back home, my brother Paul was visiting for some reason, and when we all got up in the morning, he went to drive home, and we heard his engine revving outside. And revving. And revving. I went outside to see what was wrong, and he was trying to disentangle his car from ours: apparently the early-morning garbage pickup guys, in the course of picking up a dumpster, had mistakenly snagged his car and dropped it on top of ours, which now needed to go back to the shop, and we needed to talk to the rental/insurance agency again.

I arrived just as the big friendly guy was greeting a group of high schoolers who were there for a field trip. It turned out they were all from Wales too, so they chatted about missing Wales.
He asked the kids "So what do you do when you're really pissed off and you're far from home?"
"Well, to tell the truth, we don't go down [from] Wales very much. What do you do?"
"I go to Utah a lot."

[It's difficult to imagine two places on Earth more dissimilar than Wales and Utah, but I'm just reporting what he said.]