I keep getting a notice of "self connecton" under my Status column.  Why and what does it mean?

See my reply in https://forum.tixati.com/support/8198  . It means the public internet IP leads back to yourself, it's working as expected.

If it's your public IP and port (one of them), then your client has successfully connected to itself while traversing a list of peers. It does nothing, just tells you about that.