Spine Spacer Surgery

What's that old adage? "When it doesn't rain, it pours." I had been suffering with sciatic pain since February and tried everything: pain meds, steroid shot in my spine, physical therapy, chiropractor, and nothing worked for very long. I finally found relief with having an X-stop spacer placed in my spine.

No more sciatic pain! I've got two more weeks to go before I can resume normal activity. One thing I didn't count on was that "minimally invasive surgery" is still surgery so afterward I had to deal with recovering from the anesthesia, incision pain and No BLT's—bending, lifting, and twisting. Like I could do BLT's! Four weeks out from the surgery, I am feeling so much better but I'm tempted to do BLT's and take up my normal activities.

My new website had to take the back burner because in the meantime, in spite of sciatic pain, I was committed to going to the Latino Writers Conference in Albuquerque, implementing our own Sowing the Seeds Conference, meeting a couple of grant deadlines, editing my writer's group anthology, and when I felt well enough to do anything, write poetry.

I'm hoping that now I can tackle the new website and other things that I've let lapse. I did get a blog going for my writer's group for our new anthology due out in October. The book is Our Spirit, Our Reality: celebrating our stories. I'm co-editor with my Comadre Rosi Andrade. Check out the blog at http://ourspiritourreality.wordpress.com/  We should have the book in hand by mid-October.

Internet for Artists Workshop

I was accepted for the Internet for Artists Workshop through Creative Capital and Tucson Pima Arts Council. It starts this evening and goes through all day Saturday and Sunday. I'm looking forward to seeing how I can get combine all of my internet presence to market myself as a multi-disciplinary artist - clay sculpture, literary, and performance.

I've got this blog, a Facebook page, email, and a website. I want to be able to connect them all. I hope they also offer a way to be able to keep all of them up that doesn't take too much time. That is the problem I'm running into now.

My last posting was quite a while ago - May 2009. In the meantime, life got in the way of keeping up with my postings. In August of 2009, I was diagnosed with breast cancer in the same week that my father had a heart attack and went from assisted living to a nursing home. As his primary caregiver, I had to deal with his care problems as I went through surgery and radiation. He passed away in December. The following year was a blur as I grieved his loss, went through a mild depression as a result of the stress I went through.

The internet has been a source of comfort for me the past couple of years. I kept a daily journal on Caringbridge.com about my cancer and my caregiving experiences. Friends and family offered me support. Email kept me in touch, as did Facebook. I used a web conferencing service to co-edit my writer's group anthology and "meet" with my co-editor and the contributing writers.

I know the power of the internet and I want to be able to utilize it more efficiently for personal and business use. I have high hopes for this upcoming workshop!