Jim's quiet musings . . .

I'm picky about who I sideline on this damn blog. I gotta have a FEEL for the blog, It's gotta MOVE me. This one looks damn promising...it intrigues me, so I'm gonna be watching it. This gal strikes me as pretty radical and besides, she doesn't seem to like men and that alone ALWAYS gets my attention. Her site is affectionately called: JUST BITE ME!

I wear a flyfishing hat with that aphorism emblazoned on the front.

God, I love it.

So!!! The latest news on the Jeeemeister front is my total immersion into the world of Yerba Mate. As you all know, Eve, my African princess, turned me on to the popular South AMERICAN ......NOT South AFRICAN...... pastime of Bombilla sipping the strangely exotic Yerba from a Mate gourd.

Well, traditionally for me, I tend to take new experiences to untested and wonderfully exotic levels of obsessive-compulsiveness. In following through with this tradition, I ordered three gourds (some of them rather ornate and relatively expensive), two bombillas (one with an Argentine seal and one gold-plated one), a kettle and not one, not two, not three but FOUR packages of Yerba.

Packages?

In the U.S. we are not on the metric system. In the rest of the world, a kilo is the standard dry weight measure. These packages are LARGE. Two of them are a kilo or 1000 grams. Equal to 2.2 pounds U.S., for all my North American readers. The other two are slightly smaller, at only 500 grams.

Doesn't mean anything to you, you say? Well, perhaps my PC to PC conversation with Eve tonight will ring true......

Eve says, "Oh my God! One kilo package will last me six months!"

So, Eve and I figure I am good for at least three years or more.

The thing is, I took a gourd, bombilla and a 500 gram package of Yerba into work today and decided to give it a try. Everybody said, "What the hell are you smoking?" as the apparatus tends to resemble a bong of sorts to the folks I work with.....that's what you get when you work with a bunch of ex-drug addicts.

The folks who tried it, myself included, all ended up making an awful face and commenting, "Yuck! It's bitter!"

Great.

So now I'm stuck with three years worth of bitter Yerba Mate. Knowing me, I will FORCE myself to like it and acquire a taste for it. Eve tells me that I will only gain from this experience and to forge ahead! Given her latest accomplishments in life, I have very little doubt in my mind!

-Jeeem-