One good bit of news is that this intermittent middle ear infection, which started happening back in December and has happened on and off several times (generally at the change of seasons...hmmmm....), most recently a couple of weeks ago, seems to have cleared up, and I've been able to clear all the crud out. I can now hear out of both ears, which is quite the boon when you consider that most of the meditation and subliminal recordings that I have depend largely on having two functioning ears.
Out of curiosity, does anyone use Skype? It's a VoIP tool that's free if you want to talk over the Internet via their client. Just curious.
OK, break's over.