I’m finally getting better. About a week after I turned 40 I felt an all-too-familiar pain. Back in 2006 I had a kidney stone and for one day, I was in agony. When I felt it again I knew immediately what it was. And I got very upset, not because of the pain, but because it was Jack’s 8th birthday and I didn’t want to take away from it with all that I knew I would go through over the day. So, I put on a smile and dealt with it as I got him off to school. Afterwards I turned to Ann and told her what was going on and we began our day-long trip to the doctor’s office, to the pharmacy, to the place to get a CT scan. At 5 to 9 at night, we even managed to make it to the polls to vote in our primary before I had Ann drop me at the Emergency Room (on my doctor’s recommendation) where I spent the night on a morphine drip.

I spent the next two weeks in varying states of pain and finally the stone passed last night (though it hasn’t hurt in over a week -- it had left the confines of my ureter and entered my bladder) and it only hurt for a very brief, very intense moment as it came out.

Of course, now I have a wicked bad cold which is annoying. But aside from that I finally feel life returning to my otherwise battered body. I had no idea how constant pain can just wear you down (which is probably why I caught the cold in the first place -- I usually have a rock-solid immune system). So, long story short: kidney stone bad but I see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

In other news, I have the following items to share:

• Endless Ocean for Wii rocks. Jack and I both love the zen-simplicity of just swimming around and checking out the gorgeous scenary.
• Easter’s been fun so far. Mr. Bunny left Jack a nice clue-trail around the house leading to a basket and some toys in the dryer. We also went to church and then to a friend’s house where, among other things, we got to watch three little boys dance to Kraftwerk’s “The Robots”
• I’m going to be presenting at a conference this summer, I’ll have a real post about this soon. But the short version is that it’s about podcasting so I have to get off my butt and get back to podcasting so I have some practical and current experience. I’ve decided to take my game to the next level and will be investing in some real equipment. More on this later.
• A friend gave Jack “Heroscape” for his birthday. I’m really enjoying it. Not sure how much Jack likes it yet. He’s far more obsessed with his Bakugan ball things (which appear to be THE hot toy right now. He bought some on Thursday with his birthday money and when I... I mean, the Easter Bunny... went to get some yesterday, they were all sold out. I must admit, they are pretty cool.
• I’m very sad about Arthur C. Clarke. I just re-read 2001 and am now re-reating 2010. I will then re-read 2061 and maybe even buy a copy of 3001 and read that.
• My friend Jon gifted me in iTunes MIKA, Life in Cartoon Motion and it is in heavy rotation now. My God I love it. It’s the second coming of Freddy Mercury.

I think that’s enough for now. I want to get back to my book...

Tags: Sci-fi, Podcasting, Wii

Why I no blog? Mainly because I've been busy but also because we've been dealing with a lot of stressful life events. And when that happens, my desire to post dwindles to zero. Since February, we've been dealing with the declining health of my father-in-law and the rehabilitation of my mother-in-law's broken knee. The net result of which is him in a nursing home and her moving in with us (later this week). But the journey from there to here over the last three months has been fraught with all kinds of stress, pain, drama, trauma, and other fun things which really don't make for entertaining blog reading.

Now that things are starting to settle again, I hope to get back to semi-regular posting shortly. In the meantime, there's new pictures in flickr (see side-bar of main blog page) and those of you who are on my LJ friends list can read about the above stress in far more detail than I'm presenting here (there's public and then there's public...)

Gods help me. I'm playing with twitter. Now you too can stalk me!

So, I got this incredible email today asking if a certain picture of me that was found via google could be used for an article. See, for one of my co-ed fraternity composites in the years after I graduated but still hung around, I decided to have my picture taken as I was hosing a pledges blackbook (either you understand that sentence, or you don't. I am not explaining it further.) I did. And that was that. It was about 15 years ago.

Well, this person contacted me about using my picture for an article in which they need a picture of what looks like a crazed evangelical. I'm all for it so I said yes. When I posted about this to the fraternity email list (what, I'm too old to be on such a list? Tell that to all of the other alumni on said list) someone asked if I should update the picture. So, I figured, why not?

Technorati Tags: madman, phitau

In the “Funny or Disturbing” Category we have the spam I just received. (Click for full size version)

Kudos to gmail (through which I route all of my mail these days so I can read it at work and at home) for having excellent spam filters and trapping this one. I only caught it doing a routine scan of my spam folder to find any false positives.

Now I need to wash the joining of “Smegol” and “Sex Partner” out of my head.

Technorati Tags: humor, funny, spam