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The Rest of the World Melting Away

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December 2012.  Hooray, the world did not come to an end!

These pictures were taken outside the Aquarium in Los Angeles, CA, at sunset in December.  

Here's where my life was at, at the time, leading up to my trip in Los Angeles.  I didn't document a lot in the middle to end of 2012 of my general life, so this will cover a bit of ground:

I met Karin in May 2012, and we had spent most of the summer at either my house or her apartment - increasingly so her apartment.  I would bring over my computer (as I work at home) and stay there for extended periods, working in the morning and then spending my free time in the rest of the day with her.  By the beginning of the fall, when Karin started her last year of college, I was pretty much living at her apartment with her.

At the beginning of November 2012, a few things happened.  There was the presidential election, and directly prior to that, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast.  Conveniently enough, a group of my friends that used to be in my "film circle" from New York had just moved to California perhaps a few weeks before Sandy.  Sandy was weird for me to observe from afar, as much of my facebook friends are East Coast based, and I began to see first hand accounts of people's childhood or current home be completely obliterated by water damage/flooding.

Right after Sandy, and during the presidential election, I had become suddenly ill.  I rarely get sick, when i do, it's usually once every year or two, and it's usually tonsillitis.  In this case, it was something with my throat but exactly what wasn't clear.  The first few days I had a bad fever, and issues with my throat, I recall.  I started to have a lot of phlegm/buildup that I had to constantly spit out, and sometimes breathing became difficult - particularly at night.  The first few days I was trying a different cocktail of OTC medications for my symptoms, but they weren't helping entirely in the way I needed, and there were a few times where I simply couldn't sleep.

Even after I recovered from being "sick", I had persistent issues with my throat.  In general, during the day, it would suddenly become difficult to breathe full breaths, and trying to do so caused a pain in my lungs - as if they were filled with rocks and hit a barrier when trying to expand past a certain point.  It would come and go but particularly for most of November to mid January, this issue was a dominant force in my life that affected what I did and how I could do it.  It made me feel as if I now had a "condition" rather than being sick for a really long time, and would spend large amounts of time doing internet research (i.e. reading other people's paranoid conclusions about themselves and their symptoms) about what I was experiencing.  

Eventually, we concluded (with my symptoms, as well as symptoms we both shared, like an occasional terrible itch while in the apartment) that the causality was mold, which had known to been in the complex elsewhere and was clearly in the apartment in places like the windowsill.  It's not an uncommon problem in Portland, where it is quite often damp for most of the cold months of the year.  We knew we needed to move then, but the apartment lease wasn't up until May of 2013, and my home rental wasn't up until June.  Karin's apartment was right down the street from her school as well, so we stayed there until the lease was up and made an effort to keep the apartment as clean as possible, as well as getting some air purifiers for the main rooms.

In December 2012, for the Holidays, we visited Los Angeles, where Karin grew up and her parents lived.  I had never been in California previous to this trip.  As I wanted to see parts of California from the ground, as well as needed to bring my imac desktop with me to keep doing my job, we decided to drive rather than fly to Los Angeles from Portland, which took two 6-8 hour days worth of driving with a hotel stay in-between.  

My symptoms were still basically just as bad and I had become reliant on anti-histamines to get me to sleep - which I tried to alternate between using and not using so that my body didn't become too resistant to the effect.

When we got to LA for our two week stay, my symptoms steadily improved, but never completely receded - they wouldn't really until after we moved from that apartment to the one we currently live in elsewhere in Portland.

In our two weeks in LA, we ate out quite a bit, and tried to visit some museums and notable attractions in the area, so I could get a sort of "full" LA experience.  Also, there wasn't much to do while at Karin's parents' home besides watch television, so it was nice to go out and do things.

Over 2012 to early 2013, I had steadily gained a lot of weight back that I had lost in my "fitness crusade" from late 2011 to early 2012 - just around the 20-30 pounds of extra weight that was the difference between "normal dude with a large frame" and "lean fitness guy with a large frame).  I had been trying to maintain my fitness but the sort of honeymoon phase of living with someone you love and being indulgent got the better of my habits, and my illness made it difficult to be meaningfully physical.  2013 was a little more of the same and only now in 2014 have I begun to recapture the sort of feeling and discipline towards my fitness that I had a few years ago - here's hoping that I can keep that up now.
Image size
1000x667px 380.68 KB
Make
Canon
Model
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Shutter Speed
1/8000 second
Aperture
F/1.4
Focal Length
50 mm
ISO Speed
320
Date Taken
Dec 29, 2012, 7:16:06 PM
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