Ain’t that a kick in the…

So, I finally get over tooth pain from an abscess, Andrea comes home, we prepare for a local getaway weekend for our anniversary (27 years on March 29th, I’ll thank you!) and I suffer a flair up of a recurrent affliction. Grrr.

How to say this? Uh, epididymitis is not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. Okay, sure I would if I had a worst enemy…and the enemy was a “he”. First time I incurred the wrath of all the fertility gods combined was in 1989, and I’m not sure what triggered it this time but I went from “okay” Thursday afternoon to “groan” later that evening to “yes, dear, you’re right… we need to go to the ER… I’m not arguing any more”.

Andrea and I went to the opening of the Plano Art Association‘s 125 Show (a juried, annual event open to all artists who live within 125 miles of Plano, TX) on Thursday and then off to pick up some things for the weekend. By the time 07:30 p.m. rolled around, I was in a wee bit o’ discomforting state. And, still denying the trend, my thought was to call my doctor in the morning, pick up a prescription and be on our way to Fort Worth. Yeah. Right. That simple…not. While packing, Andrea saw the repeating grimaces and knowing my normal pain threshold to be high, told me in no uncertain terms that we were going to the ER. Remember? 27 years, right? She got no objections from me. So just before midnight on anniversary eve, our personal paramedic Colin drove us in his new (well, new to him 2006) Subaru WRX to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Rockwall. Not the most comfortable ride for a man whose nethers need not have been jostled, but I endured.

On the way over, Andrea and Colin were discussing what to say if we got pulled over… If a male cop, just tell him my condition and he’d probably run escort. If a female, Andrea would feign labor. In the back seat, I only heard part of the conversation over the exhaust roar and was thinking, my luck it would be a female doc. Which it was. Modesty be damned when in pain, right? She confirmed the diagnosis – during which I stood up in the stirrups and grabbed her bottom lip – and, after I retrieved my fingernails from the ceiling, she ordered up an ultrasound to make sure nothing was twisted down there. But first…they gave me morphine! And I had no idea how welcome it would be.

Wilson…still! (oh yeah…and dances, movies, books and beer)

It’s been a tough few weeks for us. A lot of unwanted drama, mostly from a particularly toxic person but I’m reserving my observations on those issues for another, more serious blog post. I haven’t even checked on my blog stats lately and imagine my non-surprise to see that Mr. Robert Anton Wilson still drives the google search hits. So guess what? I’m mentioning him again.

And with that gratuitous search engine plug, moving on…

Roku and Plex Media Server

We’re really happy with our Roku player and last night, Andrea commented that we haven’t changed our watching habits…so why did we take so long to cut the cord? Comfort with the known, I guess. Now, we’re comfortable with the Roku, and I’m working around the quirks of Plex Media Server so that we can watch both our recorded shows and the ones I’ve extracted from our DVDs.

And now that I’ve completed my collection of Bugs Bunny shorts…and I do mean completed – every Bugs Bunny cartoon, including the proto-Bugs shorts…, I can now watch them all in order of release: from April 30th, 1938 to Bugs’s birthday (July 27,th 1940) all the way to July 16th, 1964. I’ve also got all of the lesser specials, collections and others that came later. As for watching them in order, well, I like to do that. I took two years to watch all of the Twilight Zone episodes in original air order. The “complete” is not without additional work, though. I discovered, though, that several are in .FLV format which I’ll have to convert to something Roku and the Plex team can understand.