Plantar fasciitis...I haz it

Anyone else out there walk like a zombie first thing in the morning?  And I don't mean just because you haven't yet received your coffee infusion.  The arch of my right foot aches-angrily-in the morning but it usually gets better after a few hours.  I've been getting by with stretching and some insanely poignant and painful massage directly where it hurts, here:

Yep, a gross foot, clearly I run and wear boots all day

but I might start taking ibuprofen more often.  And I was just getting over several months of knee pain, so I feel a cozy familiarity with this, never straying too far from a nagging pain while I run...argh...

The pain is just bad enough to sometimes convince me on rainy and early mornings to hit snooze and not run.  It's hard to get up early, harder still when thunderstorms lurk outside, and the morning run is a complete casualty when you add a pesky pain into the mix.

If stretching and ibuprofen and some relative rest don't help, then I might try those dreaded night splints, you know, the ones you see in Sky Mall.  And after that, there's always a corticosteroid injection but I will never let it come to that...pointy needle into the arch of my foot, why no thank you.

The plantar fascia itself is kinda cool, and not just because I see a lot of foot and ankle problems so I'm pretty familiar with the anatomy there at the business end of our legs.   There is actually more to plantar fasciitis than you'd think, it's not just an inflammation of the bottom of a foot, in fact, lots of studies would hint that it's not really inflammation at all and it might just be little tears in the plantar fascia there along the bottom of our feet.  As we get older, or fatter, or increase our level of activity the overuse and overstress causes the tears and hence the pain.  Though the PF spans across our feet, every time I've seen someone with PF, and in my own feet, the pain clenches down on the same spot- along the medial surface of the arch, but also close to the heel.  I try to massage the area, violently, but that seriously hurts.  Some folks roll a tennis ball under their arch while seated in a chair, and damn, that hurts too.  Just a warning.  

Some smart people think it might not even be a fascia problem at all, but a muscle that's irritated.  Hard to say.  

Maybe it's just time for new boots?

I wonder if my knee pain caused me to run out of my normal gait pattern and somehow I've brought this nonsense on myself?  I seem to collect lower extremity pain in seasons and constellations.  If history proves itself, right achilles tendinosis is up next...I'll keep ya posted!

Any tips or remedies for helping me out of this plantar fasciitis/fasciosis mess?