Jim's quiet musings . . .

Jeeem is Sick!



The Vernors never showed and the Vicks just left me smelling to high heaven. So, I was out from work yesterday and reluctantly made a visit to the "quake" as Eve, my African princess puts it. The "quake," it seems, is the African term for a GP or "General Practitioner." It is pronounced "qwak," which is our tongue-in-cheek term (spelled quack) for a physician who doesn't know his arse from an ant hole. Very interesting.

Anyway, I saw the same nurse practitioner that I saw last time, Carol is her name, and was placed on a fairly new antibiotic that supposedly does the trick in only five doses versus the typical thirty. It is called Zithromax. Sounds impressive anyway. Today, I am still coughing up some nasty stuff and wheezing to beat the band.

Yesterday, while home in the sick house, I contacted my African princess through ICQ and while chatting, I received a message called an "Unsupported Event Notification." This "event" turned out to be a PC to PC call and suddenly, I was listening to Eve's very interesting voice! Cool. I rummaged around for my speaker headphones and although I found them, Eve could not hear me for some reason.

We ended up chatting for quite a long period of time and I sent her an IM message commenting on her sexy, British sounding voice.....Ooooops! Eve's comment was, "LOL ....British....now that takes the bun!" Well, Bloody hell! I'm no pro at accents. It sounded British to me...but then again what do I know? Heck, I don't want to start some international event here.

"Takes the bun....." Interesting.

Eve claims she doesn't have an accent...that I'm probably the one with the accent. Hummm. Well, if we manage to figure out the PC to PC connection, using Net2phone then she will no doubt agree I have an accent. Perhaps Eve feels Afrikaans is the more pure form of language? I will admit that her pronunciation of words were a bit more clear than some of the American slang. Some of her terms baffled me though and when she was talking about putting rose petals in the champagne, it sounded like she was saying "Pickles," or "Pittles."

"We put the rose pittles in the champagne" .....now who the bloody hell has the accent? Come on Eve!

We chatted for better than an hour and it was such a delight to hear her voice. It was early afternoon here in the U.S. and well after midnight in Durban, South Africa. Eve told me some of her champagne stories and we laughed until I started up a coughing fit. She spoke of yeba mate, which is some form of tea I think, but so many of her terms are foreign to me.

Seems Johannesburg lacks a Hard Rock Cafe. Eve had never heard of the popular spot and I don't think she understood my obsession with collecting the tee-shirts from over the globe. It seems the only two HRC's in the continent of Africa are in Egypt, located in Cairo and Sharm el Sheikh. A far piece from the badlands of Durban. Oh well, Eve says she will show me the ropes in Johannesburg and I'll surely come home with some interesting souvenirs of my South African trip.

Thanks to my good friend Shirl in Michigan (land of the dreaded California Raisin lawn ornaments) for my nifty little tricks with HTML.....I am finding this a very fun venture to learn the coding but MAN does it get frustrating if you leave one little quotation out!

Well, enough rambling on here. I need to get moving and do the laundry ritual. I don't much feel like doing anything more than vegetating today as the green funk is in control of me body. Ah well, it could be worse. I could be drinking champagne in a relapse and choking on the rose pickles.

Cheers!
-Jeeem-