The good news is it seems like that has actually been helping. I did as much of it as I could, and it seemed like the pain in my rear end slowly improved. The marks on my butt went away, and by the time Christmas arrived, I could get out of bed with almost no pain for half an hour or more. It had been months since it felt that good.
For Christmas, just like last year, my parents and my brother came and stayed for a few days. It was a really nice visit, and I enjoyed it a lot. I especially enjoyed spending time with my brother. We got to watch Troll 2 together, which is a classically terrible movie. If you like bad movies, do yourself a favor and check it out. Interesting fact about Troll 2 - there are no trolls in the movie; only goblins.
For Christmas, my brother and I got my sister a membership to a fruit of the month club, and since the fruit wouldn't be available on Christmas, Jonathan wrote a poem, and we recorded ourselves performing it and sent that to Jessica on Christmas day. That was pretty fun.
My mom brought a lot of awesome food, and that was great. On Christmas eve, Gus's family came over, and we all had Maryland crab cakes from Timbuktu. They are so good. They are what Maryland crab cakes are supposed to be: full of crab meat. On Christmas day, we had a beef tenderloin roast with horseradish cream sauce. That was also fantastic.
As I expected, when my family was here, I spent too much time sitting up, and my butt paid the price. By the time they left, I think my pain was almost back to where it had been before all the time I spent in bed. It's hard to tell. I still had better days and worse days, but it seems like maybe the bad days weren't quite as bad.
Anyway, I stayed in bed as much as I could until New Year's Eve yesterday. My college friends, Bobby and Justin, came to spend New Year's here. We used to live together in college, and it doesn't matter how long we're apart, when we get together, it's like we never left. I don't know if you have any friends like that, but it's really special. I think the last time I saw Bobby was a year and a half ago when I was in rehab.
Anyway, Bobby used to do all of our cooking in college, and he brought me so much food it barely fit in my freezer. Justin brought his old NES with Double Dragon 2 that we used to play endlessly in college, and we went out to dinner and played Double Dragon all night until 3AM. I can't think of anything I'd rather do than exactly that with those guys. It was really the best New Year's I can imagine.
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| Justin, me, and Bobby at Firebird Grill |
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| Bobby trying some of my whiskey |
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| Bobby and me playing Double Dragon, the best video game 1988 had to offer |
Justin and Bobby stayed over, and this morning, Bobby made some cajun chicken etoufee. We had it for lunch, and then we packed up another gallon of it in my freezer. I have so much food right now. It's a good problem to have.
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| Bobby and Justin eating etoufee |
My butt hurt a lot yesterday, but I sucked it up because I wanted to hang out with Justin and Bobby while they were here. I expected to be incapacitated today, but it actually didn't feel as bad as I expected, so maybe that's encouraging. I'm still taking it a day at a time, but things might be looking up.
