Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Cancer sucks

I never thought much about cancer, aside from the terrible memories from my childhood, when I watched a very good friend of mine being slowly consumed by leukemia. I guess I tried to deal with it by not worrying about it.

However, in the last few years, I've had no choice other than to give it my undivided attention.

My grandfather, the one I spent the most time with growing up, has been fighting cancer for about 3 years now and while he has won some battles, it seems the war is largely of the uphill variety.

He was admitted to his local hospital a couple of weeks ago with some digestive symptoms and then transferred to a larger hospital last week, where he underwent exploratory surgery last Friday.

The prognosis wasn't so good. He apparently is now riddled with malignant tumors. They were found in his liver, his colon, in the lining of his stomach and the doctors think there is a 90% chance he may have cancer in his lungs, too.

The only option is chemotherapy, but he refuses to go through that again. It nearly killed him the last time. Do I think this is a bad idea? No. He very nearly wasted away before and why should he go through it again? But still, cancer sucks.

Josh

Saturday, April 01, 2006

Movie addict

You'll pardon my absence, as this is one of the busiest times of the year in my profession and this is only a lull.


As those who know Robin and I will attest, we love movies and have what can only be called an addiction for DVDs. We have a whopping collection of DVDs, comprised of theatrical films, music video collections, T.V. shows from our childhoods and other oddities. I also have a well-known trove of movie trivia (quotes, release dates and an ability to link films by actors, locations and themes) taking up a large portion of my very large head. (If you've seen it, you can safely say it is quite prodigious.) This only serves to feed my need for more DVDs.


This affliction we suffer has been something of an albatross since our marriage nearly four years ago, what with a storage shortage, our move a year ago, finances and our differing tastes in genres. Robin isn't a fan of toilet humor and I really can't enjoy most period romances but we do meet somewhere in the middle, usually. Quite often, we spend an entire evening or weekend trying to decide what to watch, only to find we've squandered the time and watched nothing but the dreck on T.V.


Well, now we have had our DVR for about a year and a half and we often have a stockpile of things saved there that we put off watching the majority of. We hurriedly watch the primetime shows, like CSI, NCIS and a couple of others, but we usually find ourselves with a few Smallville and Supernatural episodes to catch up on.



I'm sure you can see the dilema the preceding paragraphs have described. We recently purchased a couple of very nice pine bookcases to store our collection on but we were already in possession of more DVDs than would fit on them. So, we again have precarious piles of DVDs stuck all over the shelves. And it will continue to grow, as there are always new things coming out, older things just becoming available or new and improved versions of previous things concocted to empty our coffers. 'Tis a vicious cycle...



The whole point of this post was to highlight our sickness and to show off our collection. Enjoy and all that jazz.

Later!