Cari and T are back from their California adventure, and life is returning to normal already at Casa McGee. While the girls were gone, those coupons that magically appeared in our mailbox the day they left came in very handy.
Not pictured is the dinner we had on days 2 and 3 courtesy of the Pizza Hut coupon. On the other days, we actually had home-cooked meals! So, it wasn’t a total culinary vacation or anything like that … but close.
(At the risk of everyone thinking I’m some kind of freak…)
I have a t-shirt that I only wear when cutting the lawn.
I have a t-shirt that I only wear when cutting my hair. (This t-shirt gets tossed and replaced 2-3 times a year.)
I have a few t-shirts that I wear when cleaning bathrooms or working around the house, because I don’t mind them getting dirty, and others that I’ll never wear when cleaning (because I do mind).
I have 4-5 t-shirts that I only wear to bed.
I have 4-5 solid white t-shirts that I only wear underneath nicer dress shirts when I’m at conferences and such.
I have about 5 nicer, “dressy” t-shirts that I tend to only wear to church in the summer.
I have about 20 U2-related t-shirts that I never wear at all.
Anyone else like this? Have certain t-shirts that serve certain purposes, like cutting the lawn? Or am I really weird about my t-shirts?
Just another day at the office for the bigtime author here. I mean, don’t we all get our picture on the same web page as Bono, Avril Lavigne, and Kate Winslet?
Who am I kidding with the fake conceit? This is awesome!!! That’s the Lifestyle section of Vecernji, a Croatian newspaper that covered the launch today of the Croatian translation of my book, U2 – A Diary. The publishers over there held a big press event because it was the first book they decided to translate, and it was covered in newspapers and even on national TV. For realz!!!
The publishers invited me to come to the launch event, but since they weren’t paying my airfare, that was out of the question. (In case you haven’t checked lately, Pasco to Zagreb with one-week advance purchase runs about $3k.) So instead, they asked me to send a 10-15 minute video introducing myself, talking about the book, what makes it different from other U2 books, etc.
During the event today, they played a highly-edited, 5-minute version of the video which can be seen here: http://www.vecernji.hr/lifestyle/matt-mcgee-predstavlja-knjigu-u2-dnevnik-video-3363.
Oh, might be hard to see on the screenshot above, but my name below the photo is “Matta McGeeja.”
Life is sometimes tremendously surreal.
After dealing with this spinning head stuff for about a month now, I was finally able to get in to see an ENT specialist today. Saw the same guy who did ear surgeries on both my kids when they were wee little ones and had lots of ear infections.
So, if there’s one condition that would just be too perfect for a U2 fan to come down with … a condition that involves dizziness and spinning heads … what condition would that be? I’ll give you one hint:
Yep. Unos, dos, tres, get dizzy. I’ve got Vertigo. Technically, I have Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo:
What are the symptoms?
The main symptom is a feeling that you are spinning or tilting when you are not. This can happen when you move your head in a certain way, like rolling over in bed, turning your head quickly, bending over, or tipping your head back.
BPPV usually lasts a minute or two. It can be mild, or it can be bad enough to make you feel sick to your stomach and vomit. You may even find it hard to stand or walk without losing your balance.
That pretty much describes it to a “T”, but I’m lucky to have not had any vomiting or nausea. Everything else – been there, done that. The doctor gave me an information sheet that also talked about feeling lightheaded for several hours at a time, which is how things were at their worst a few weeks ago — couldn’t get anything done at all.
On the bright side, it’s really not terribly serious. The most common treatment is nothing. There are some procedures that can be done to minimize the dizziness, but most people learn to live with this. As long as I control my head movements, I should be okay. Driving isn’t a problem. Yardwork has been okay. Playing with the dogs, the kids, doing the shopping – all good.
I’m supposed to monitor my dizziness for the next week — which way am I turning my head when I get dizzy, what position am I in, etc. And I’ll see the doc again late next week and we’ll decide what, if anything, needs to be done.
Thanks to all who emailed after the last post about this. Really appreciate the thoughts and support. Now if you’ll just tell my daughter to stop walking around the house singing, “Hello, hello, you’ve got a disease called Vertigo,” everything will be much better!
Comments off
“Follower” counts on Twitter are highly overrated. There’s limited value in having tons of followers that you don’t know and don’t converse with. I consider myself blessed to have as many followers as I do (see right), but the truth is that I don’t know most of them, don’t speak with most of them … and, frankly, don’t have a clue why so many people follow me.
But numbers are numbers, and this post is all about numbers because, for now, I’m more popular on Twitter than a bunch of Seattle Seahawks! Like, for example, Walter Jones and Nate Burleson:
I have more followers than both of them combined! I’m also ahead of the two TJ’s — Houshmandzadeh and Duckett.
I’m even more popular than 1st-round draft pick Aaron Curry, whose Twitter account was listed in the latest ESPN The Magazine.
But my glory comes to an end there, sadly. For I am nowhere near as popular as Matt Hasselbeck.
Still, five out of six ain’t bad, right? (Not that I’m bragging or anything.) Let’s hope the Seahawks do better on the field than they’re doing on Twitter. Just sayin’….
I tested myself last night (Thursday). I hopped in the car and drove three hours to a remote part of Idaho to see Collective Soul do a tiny, little warm-up gig before their main tour starts next week. They advertised the show as being in Coeur d’Alene, but it was actually closer to Worley, Idaho, about a half-hour south of CDA.
I’m still fighting the spinning head thing, but mostly in the mornings. (I see an ENT specialist next week.) Usually I’m doing pretty good by about 11 a.m. each day. At the show, I didn’t have any dizziness issues … but my McDonald’s dinner wasn’t agreeing with me, and since I decided to join the crowd and rush the stage during the third song, I was surrounded by people, getting very hot and sweaty, and extremely thirsty. I left the mob at the front after the band’s main set and found some ice water. Then went back and watched a bit of the encore before calling it a night and leaving early. (No, I’d never leave a U2 concert early.)
That’s a six-hour roundtrip drive to watch about 80 minutes of live music. And it was all worth it because I got to hear “The World I Know” live — surely one of the best 4-5 songs ever written. I could listen to that 20 times in a row and not get tired of it. In fact, if you check my Last.fm profile, I probably have listened to it 20 times in a row!
|
|
Other than being a little tired from the long drive, and having a small headache, the test went well. But hopefully they’ll play somewhere a little closer next time.
Here’s my full set of Collective Soul photos on Flickr from last night.
“Vertigo” was too easy to use as a title, so I chose a relatively obscure U2 b-side from almost 20 years ago as the headline on this post, and then edited it since I’m a guy.
This has been one of the strangest 10 days I’ve ever had. There’s something wrong with me, and I have no clue what it is. It’s very possibly nothing more than a virus, and deep down I think that’s the case. But it could be something entirely different and more serious, too. Hope not.
A couple Wednesdays ago, while I was reading with T before she went to bed, I suddenly got dizzy, felt faint, and my head banged against the wall in her room. It settled down after about 10 seconds and I just chalked it up to being tired and the hot weather we were having. Then it continued the next day, and the day after that — dizziness, lightheadedness, headaches, etc. Then it got better for a couple days, then it came back again, and that’s when I finally went to urgent care.
The doc there didn’t seem too confident, but he thinks it’s some kind of inner ear imbalance/infection, combined with allergies (even though I haven’t had allergies since I was a kid). So I got a couple prescriptions from him and have been taking them for three days now. I’m still waking up dizzy and groggy in the mornings, but the past two days I’ve felt pretty good in the afternoons and evenings. And here I am writing a blog post after midnight, so that’s a sign that maybe things are returning to normal.
I had to cancel plans last week for a quick trip to Seattle with the family (although this dizzy stuff wasn’t the only reason), and canceled plans again this week for a conference in Seattle I was supposed to attend. I’ve already canceled a webinar I was supposed to give in a week or so, and I’m wondering if I’ll feel up to driving to Coeur d’Alene on the 18th to see Collective Soul.
I’m not even sure why I’m posting about all this. There are several people I know, some very close to us, who are dealing with much more serious health problems (think cancer) and I’m not looking for sympathy. I think there’s a two-fold purpose to this post:
Anyway, not trying to make a big deal out of anything or look for sympathy. Just felt like talking about this craziness that’s been going on. And felt guilty about not writing a blog post here in more than two weeks, too.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Comments off
I ordered my Google Profile Business Cards at about 1:30 am PT on May 1st, right after I wrote the story about them on Search Engine Land. And here we are, 7 business days later, and my cards have arrived.
Not sure exactly what I’ll do with them, since I haven’t bothered to do much with my Matt McGee Google profile page. Plus, I already have biz cards for Small Business Search Marketing, the four local blogs that Cari and I write, and even @U2. It’s not like I’m desperate for more business cards, but seemed kinda cool to be one of the first to order the Google cards.
Just to follow-up on last night’s post about haircuts and lawn care … Sean took this photo of me while I was out in the back yard yesterday. He’s loving his camera.
I have a lot of them coming up again this year. Not as many as last year, which was completely ridiculous. But still, it’s looking like I’m traveling at least once every month for the first half of the year.
And then the U2 tour starts in the second half of the year, so who knows what’s going to happen then.
Thing is … I think this may need to be the last year of so much work/business travel for me. I love going to the search marketing conferences and seeing all the great friends who I usually only trade emails with, but I practically go “off the grid” when I’m gone. The email backs up, and that’s a problem when you get about 200 emails per day (as I do). And I get no client work done, no personal work done, no U2-related work done, etc.
Most of all, every time I leave, I miss Cari and the kids more than ever. For a variety of reasons, I’m quite aware these days that our time is limited, and no one ever lay on their death bed thinking, I wish I’d spent more time traveling and working. I just don’t like being gone so much.
So I’m thinking next year I need to not be.
