{"id":2200,"date":"2010-10-20T12:01:31","date_gmt":"2010-10-20T17:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=2200"},"modified":"2010-10-20T12:09:26","modified_gmt":"2010-10-20T17:09:26","slug":"where-im-at","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/where-im-at\/","title":{"rendered":"Where I&#8217;m At"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been an odd week and I think I&#8217;m in a weird place right now. I&#8217;m at a point where my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=2188\">Grandfather&#8217;s death<\/a> hasn&#8217;t reduced me to lying on the couch like a useless lump. But, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m cried out yet. I haven&#8217;t seen anyone from my family in person and there hasn&#8217;t been a service of any sort, so I think I&#8217;m in denial at this moment. I know I&#8217;m sad, but it&#8217;s a general malaise that manifests itself in poor sleep and a general sense of feeling off. I wake up several times a night and I have a hard time falling back asleep again. I&#8217;m tired all the time and I just can&#8217;t muster up much enthusiasm for the things that usually make me excited.<\/p>\n<p>Thank you all for your comments, emails, tweets, reaching out, etc. I need to get my butt in gear and acknowledge and thank all of you individually. I&#8217;m still feeling out of sorts, but that&#8217;s no excuse for not thanking you all properly for helping me out when I&#8217;m feeling so crappy.<\/p>\n<p>A high point has definitely been everything that I&#8217;ve been able to do for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pawsnewengland.com\/\">PAWS New England<\/a>. Your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/?p=2172\">generous donations<\/a> have brought in over $200 (and feel free to keep them coming!). And our <a href=\"http:\/\/hoperoth.com\/beerandpie\/?p=105\">benefit gig<\/a> brought in another $400 (and was a raucous afternoon of excellent music). The money from the concert was enough to save the lives of two dogs and words can&#8217;t even begin to explain how happy that makes me right now.<\/p>\n<p>The show, itself, went really well. I was originally in a tizzy because the crowd was so small. But, by the time my band went on, the place had filled up pretty well. Our set was well-recieved and we even earned some new fans from the bar. For the second time in my performing life, someone started up a chant of &#8220;one more song! one more song!&#8221; Talk about an ego boost. Luckily, we had a song that we&#8217;d been rehearsing that we&#8217;d cut due to time restraints. We played the shit out of it.<\/p>\n<p>I have some ideas about how to promote the band better and to get more gigs. I&#8217;m thinking about offering house concerts. I need to do some research. Would any of you be interested in having me come to your house to play and sing for your friends?<\/p>\n<p>I think I&#8217;ve finally turned a corner on my plantar fasciitis. I&#8217;m still in pain, but I&#8217;ve got a good system for rehabbing my foot and I&#8217;m confident that things will improve. Just by sleeping with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thesock.com\/howitworks.html\">Strassburg Sock<\/a> and doing some stretches while I&#8217;m still in bed in the AM, I&#8217;ve been able to get to the point where I&#8217;m no longer in pain first thing in the morning. Now, I just need to get the pain to stop building during the day! My foot is still full of scar tissue (I&#8217;ve been told to massage my own foot and it feels decidedly crunchy to the touch), but I&#8217;m slowly improving.<\/p>\n<p>I was gearing up for a fight with my insurer, because I was told that my PT benefits would run out on the 25th. Yeah, not so much. I, apparently, have <em>awesome<\/em> insurance. The administrator at my PT office? Not so awesome. Instead of calling to find out what my benefits were, she just assumed I had the same benefits as everyone else. If I&#8217;d listened to her, I would have been cheated out of 2 whole sessions (medically, you&#8217;re supposed to have 10 ultrasound treatments, but I thought I would only get 8 in). This might not seem like a lot, until you do the math and realize that&#8217;s 20% of my treatment that I would have missed out on. That&#8217;s kind of a big deal. Especially when your quality of life is impacted like mine has been. I&#8217;m so glad that Kristian encouraged me to advocate for myself. If I hadn&#8217;t called my insurer, I would have done a serious disservice to myself.<\/p>\n<p>I had a vivd dream, last night, that I ran a half marathon. It was <em>amazing<\/em>. My body felt great and I finished strong and with no pain. I can remember in clear detail how it felt to receive my finisher&#8217;s medal and to realize that I was healed. I grumbled about the lack of schwag that you usually get at the post-race expos, but I was happy to have been able to finish. I hope that this was my subconscious&#8217; way of telling me that I&#8217;m closer than I think. I&#8217;m signed up for a <a href=\"http:\/\/pasadenamarathon.org\/\">half marathon<\/a> in February and it would be a pleasant surprise if I was able to start training in time to run it. I&#8217;ve started using the elliptical machine at work and I&#8217;m hoping that this will build up my cardio-vascular strength to the point where it won&#8217;t be impossible to start running at a higher level when my foot&#8217;s better.<\/p>\n<p>So, that&#8217;s me in a nutshell. Things are better than they could be but not as great as I&#8217;d like them to. The good news is that they&#8217;re getting better.<\/p>\n<p>How have you all been?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been an odd week and I think I&#8217;m in a weird place right now. I&#8217;m at a point where my Grandfather&#8217;s death hasn&#8217;t reduced me to lying on the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,3,20,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-grumble","category-hopeless-idealist","category-music"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5yggS-zu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2200"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hoperoth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}