At least once a week one disappointed person a week gets here looking for brown recluse spider bites and photos of brown recluse spider bites. Hunny hasn’t posted his picture story yet, because well, it’s not done yet, so a here’s quick update on that story: Nearly 3 months on, Hunny’s arm is still not fully healed. He stopped applying the dressing properly for a while which resulted in a bit of back-sliding in the healing process. Since he started doing it properly again (for about the last month) the skin/scar tissue is growing back, but it’s still not closed up yet. In short: those bites are nasty things and if you suspect you may have been bitten by a brown recluse (also known here in SA as violin spiders), see your doctor as soon as possible. The sooner you catch it, the less dead tissue they will have to remove.

I feel marginally bad about the 1-2 searches a week that still reach my blog looking for smiths motorcycles. But only marginally, because in truth that really was a kak* service experience. By far the worst in my short medium-length life. But it was also probably a once in a lifetime thing, so perhaps your experience with Norm won’t be the same as mine was.

More dream snippets from last night:

• Flossing my teeth
• Putting my foot in my shoe to find a huge orange spider in there. It was made of felt cloth, but was non-the-less alive. It crawled out the shoe (once I had stopped screaming and removed my foot) and climbed up the wall.

* for the non South Africans: ‘kak’ is Afrikaans, and translates directly to ‘crap’, but really it’s just so much more than that…

The only exception is my very first car, the extra-ordinarily cool Nissan Exa, red, with pop up headlights. That car took more abuse than it gave, and ultimately paid with its life in a head-on collision with a drunk driver while heroically sparing me anything worse than a few bruises and emotional trauma.

(Nissan Exa – mine was in better condition than this, but you get the picture)

If you traipse through this blog and my old one, you may find references to tales of woe about my experiences with my Renault and of course, the Greenie story. I don’t think I posted about my trucks prop-shaft repair and clutch replacement last August, but yeah, that happened too. I like Truck, so I was willing to give him another chance. I tried hard to treat him right and make him feel loved but alas, he too seems to want to move on to greener pastures.

It started with a little whining noise in his engine last Wednesday, accompanied by some bubbling in the engine. We topped up the water, which wasn’t empty, hoping that would do the trick, but when I drove around to my folks on Thursday, the temperature gauge flipped right up to max within a couple of km’s. With the long weekend there wasn’t much to be done but leave it till Monday, so Truck spent the weekend at the folks outside in the cold, so he could take some time to contemplate what he’d done, and perhaps show some remorse.

Sadly, that didn’t work. We took Truck to his doctor (Mitsubishi Garage) on Monday. Freek (yes, that really is his name) from Mitsubishi phoned me at around 10:00 AM and started to describe to me in heavy Afrikaans – because of course mechanics are all Afrikaans here – that I have a cracked cylinder head gasket and the quote to heal Truck would be 60K. Yeah, that’s right, R60 000! That’s more than half the value of the vehicle! Of course I promptly told him to phone my husband because I don’t have anything like that kind of money available because he is also Afrikaans.

Now this would be the reason why I love my Hunny so much more this week. Not because he speaks Afrikaans or because he’s great at keeping money aside for emergencies, but because he is totally unflappable. He calmly asked Freek to fax him the quote so we could make sure that they weren’t quoting to replace the whole front-end of the truck. Well, it turns out that they were. As with most dealerships, they don’t fix anything; they just replace the broken part and any part that links to that part and half the parts that link into those parts …

Hunny then calmly phoned me and said: well, if that’s the case then so be it. But we can’t get that amount of money together today, so lets go and fetch Truck, and see what else can be done.

Freek kindly explained to us why they replace everything under the bonnet when one part breaks, something about dealership warranties, and told us that this may not be entirely necessary. He also said that we’d easily find someone else who would replace only the necessary parts and fix anything that can be fixed. I’m pretty sure his being so forthcoming with information has a lot to do with the fact that Hunny spoke to him in Afrikaans.

Hunny has since found someone else who has given us a much more pleasant looking estimate over the phone, and collected Truck to do a proper assessment of damages. Of course, they may just have stolen Truck and taken him somewhere to be chopped down for parts, but I have no problem with that. We’d probably score more claiming the insurance.

So the saga continues, but that wasn’t supposed to be the point of the post. The point of the post is what a wonderful effect my Hunny has one me. At the best of times I lean towards melodrama (No! not me?! Surely not…) and a situation like this would usually have had me in tears and regretting the day I ever got a drivers license Instead I took my cue from my husband and the pregnant chick that just got a motor vehicle repair quote that would make an Oppenheimer flinch, just took it in her stride. We’ll find another way to get Truck running again. We won’t have to re-mortgage the house for this, and even if we do it won’t be the end of the world. This man really does have the very best effect on me. I love him more daily.

On the pregnancy front: I’m 16 weeks, but AJunior isn’t making his presence felt yet. Tummy is beginning to look less mistakable for fat and I can see the “is she or isn’t she pregnant” questions in people eyes. Or maybe that’s because this week I actually started wearing maternity clothes …

My new challenge is getting myself to fall asleep – and stay sleeping – on my left side. Apparently that’s the best position to sleep in when pregnant. It doesn’t squish any organs or cut off arteries. I sleep on either my right side or my stomach as a norm. Sometimes I sleep on my back or roll onto it during the night. I never sleep on my left side. This is a challenge. I had partial success last night, but woke up with knots in my shoulders. Ah well.

Otherwise weight is pretty much the same, around 65 kgs, although energy levels are low and I’ve been getting a bit light headed. I suspect I might be having some low iron issues. There is iron in my pregnancy vitamins, but maybe not enough. I’m loath to take extra iron supplements though, because the side-effects aren’t pleasant. Anyone who has taken iron tablets will know.

My Granny is sending us some UK Pounds (at R15 to the ₤, whoo hoo!) which we’ll use for a cot/crib. We have some clothes, diapers, a car seat, a stroller and a compactum, so we’re sorted now, right? Naivety is cool.

That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for more updates on Truck recovery.

Hunny as The Great Cornholio

The resemblance is startling

1. 10 extra minutes under a warm duvet on a cold rainy day
2. A long hug from my Hunny on a stressful day
3. Smooth legs between fresh sheets
4. Warm puppies and milky puppy breath
5. Being able to calm my horse when he’s really freaked out
6. The open road, in a car or on a bike, stretching out in front of me
 Much cheaper than retail therapy, and they can’t make you feel fat

They have a ‘Eat all the Prawns you can’ special on Mondays and Tuesdays. It used to be Sundays, but I recon that was getting a bit expensive for them.

My Hunny gyms pretty hard. Recently he has upped his program, and along with that his eating, quite a bit. Gym folk call it bulking, I call it ‘Oh no, he’s hungry again’. So last night we got 2 mates and unleashed Hunny on Jimmy’s. Of the 14 plates of prawns consumed, 6.5 of those were my Hunny. I’m so proud…

Next time he wants to break the restaurant’s record of 9 plates …