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I guess since high school, if I were to sum up my life since into one word, it would have to be "nomadic". Since May of 1993, I have had fourteen address changes, post office boxes and the like notwithstanding, and I expect there may be more coming.
Throughout this, I'm going to make it a point to not actually name anybody unless they've given their permission. My reasoning is simply weird and very hard to describe. I'm not going to ask for it, but if you want to give it to me, drop me an email.
I guess we should begin at that point, then. Well, let's go back a bit. Say, June of 1993.
Around graduation, I was living with some friends out in Anaheim Hills. It ultimately came around to that it wasn't working out, so before I moved back in with the parents, I kind of wound up homeless for a bit. I suppose it wasn't all bad, it gave me about two weeks to get my head together - but I was fortunate in that it didn't last long. There's just something about sharing a truck with a mentally disabled man that'll drive you a bit crazy. Or crazier.
So it was around mid July of 1993, I think, that I moved back in with the parents in Yorba Linda. Much stress, a short lived job, a broken wrist, and about five months later, I found myself voluntarily moving in with another friend in Orange for a couple of weeks before I moved in with another friend in Garden Grove. I watched in this place in Garden Grove as the guy who was staying there subletted bedrooms to a couple of people he knew so they could start a drug rehab home, which ultimately turned into a drug house. I got out before it got really bad, and moved in to an apartment in Buena Park, and stayed there for about a year. I kept in consistent contact with precisely three people I met during this period for a number of years, and not a single one of them were my roommates at this time. Since moving to Seattle, hoever, we've kinda lost touch.
In June of 1995, I moved out of this apartment into an RV that a couple of other friends were living in - a married couple. I can best describe this period of time as "awkward", for the simple reason that...well, they were married, and I wasn't. This lasted about five months before I moved into a bedroom in Anaheim Hills, which was in a nice house that was very isolated from the bus lines. I was here for about four months before moving back in with the parents. No job, no money, and nothing to show for two years on my own kinda does that to you.
After staying with the parents for about a year, I moved out again. It was March or April of 1997, I was working for an outfit called Sanders Engineering, and a friend and I had rented an apartment. All was halfway decent unti I got layed off in 1998 from said job, and went back on the hunt. We both moved into a new place in Yorba Linda behind the bowling alley, and after a flurry of short lived temp jobs and prolonged unemployment with no income, I wound up with a job at the Circle K down off of Richfield and Orangethorpe.
Somewhere in here, I moved. June of 1999, to be exact. I moved at this time into a place I have affectionately dubbed "the sh*thole", because at the time I was living there, there was just no nice way to describe it. The house itself was this bright yellow with blinding green trim off of Magnolia Avenue in west Anaheim, nobody ever cleaned the common areas, you couldn't run the toaster and the microwave at the same time (because if the refrigerator kicked on it would trip the breaker), and there was a light in the hallway that was missing. The electrical wasn't even up to code - I had to drive my own ground in order to plug in my computer and not fear it blowing up. After I left, that was changed, apparently - but last I looked, the house was two different shades of coffee on the exterior.
Before I left, though - well before, in December 1999, in fact - I took a flight to a place called Chicopee, MA, where the woman who I married lived at the time. I met Karmin in a MUCK about two years prior to this, and it was at this time I decided to meet her in person. Flights were cheap ($235 from LAX-BDL? Hey, I'd buy that), and between Christmas money and a relatively new temp job at Bergen Brunswig, I was able to do it and make ends meet. I think on that return flight I had concluded that I was in love with her.
So onward to September 2000. I get approved for an apartment in Garden Grove, finally, after waiting for one on this low income program (I was making little enough money to do this at the time, but was still able to eat, thankfully), get moved out, and move into this studio apartment that was closer to where I was working at the time. Later this same year (New Years week), I flew Karmin out, and during her stay, I proposed to her. She flew back, I flew out to get her, and we both flew back.
In late January 2002, we moved out of the studio into a one bedroom apartment in the same complex. Shortly after this, I was let go from my job at Bergen, and shortly after this I was hired on at a firm called Legal Tax Defenders Group.
Starting in mid 2005 after leaving LTD and moving on to FedEx Kinko's, we had decided that we should work on being able to move to the greater Seattle area; having seen a remarkably small house for sale in the bad part of Garden Grove more or less cemented the decision to do so, when I saw this two-bedroom one-bath house for sale for the remarkable price of $649,000 - and down the road from that, another one that had sold for the "discounted" price of $899,000. We expected to be out by 2007 or 2008, but it seems that other plans were afoot.
In late March of 2006, I left my job at FedEx Kinko's (see more about that in jobs), and came to an odd conclusion: I would be unable to support Karmin and I on unemployment in Orange County, since after rent was paid, we would either have to pay for utilities and starve for lack of sufficient food, or be able to eat, but be unable to cook it for lack of utilities. Food stamps, as near as I can tell, wouldn't help enough. Throw onto that a rent increase that would push the rent over $800/month. (Yes, we were getting discounted rent still.) With that, we decided to just make the aforementioned move, and took a train on May 6, 2006 to rent a bedroom in Bellevue for a while, where I (and, maybe, Karmin) would get work, save up money, and rent a new place up here.
Oddly, though, the first group of people we stayed with - another nine randoms in this obscure yet hidden house in Bellevue, WA - are a group of people we got along well with. That came to more or less an end, however, when we moved to another house down the road in October of 2006, which we leased the basement of for six months. At the end of that, we mvoed up to Everett, with a couple of friends of mine from work.
It was at that time that Karmin left. Now, she had her reasons - we'll just leave it at that.
Sometime in October of 2007, I left the place in Everett, and moved into another place in Kingsgate, an unincorporated part of Kirkland, WA. It was actually a pretty decent location - pretty close to the bus line I took to get to work at the time. But in 2008, my life kind of took off. I finally got my first driver's license, my first car (a beat up late 80s model Oldsmobile), and then moved in fall to a house back in Bellevue - which wasn't off the bus line. While here, I wrecked the Olds, bought a Dodge Grand Caravan, traded that in in 2009 for a later model Plymouth Grand Voyager, and somewhere in there, started dating this girl named Heather.
...wait, yes, I bought minivans. Odd rationale - for 20 years, I was begging rides off of people to supplement the use of transit. I could never hope to repay all of them, so I can only pay it forward. The minivan does this and much more. No, I don't have kids.
A few months into 2009, I moved to an apartment in Redmond with a couple of friends (Derrek and Rebekah) and Heather. Somewhere in here, Heather and I broke up, and then I later found out that she was pregnant. This, as sort of a mixed blessing, had to be terminated. Given the option, she would have borne the child - however, by the time they spotted it in an ultrasound, they spotted it in the fallopian tubes, and the fetus was several weeks underdeveloped. They had no choice but to terminate the pregnancy for her own safety.
March of 2010 saw us moving into a house in Kingsgate, remarkably close to where I moved in 2007. A new romance bloomed, and fell apart a year and some months later - not long after I started a return to school. Heather and I moved out of that house in early 2012, into an apartment in Bothell with a new roommate after Rebekah moved to Chicago, where things went fairly sour over the couple years we were in there; in 2014, Heather and I moved to another apartment in the same complex where, as of 2017, we currently live. During that time, the Grand Voyager (nicknamed "The Catbus" died in late '12; where Heather gave me use of her vehicle (at the time, a Nissan Xterra, and later a Chrysler PT Cruiser after it died), I later bought a used Kia minivan which ultimately was traded in for a Chevrolet Sonic in late '16.
For a short while in 2016, I was involved with a woman in Oregon. That...didn't go so well and wound up putting me through a lot of psychological abuse. I'll just leave that there.
2016 is where I started to make more changes in my life to start taking care of myself. At this point, I was pretty well into my 40s - or, as some people would say, I'm getting old. Things happen to the human body, and I would rather be around for my friends as long as I can. So in 2017 I started on blood pressure pills, in 2018 I started on a pill called galantamine to help with delta wave sleep, and in 2019 I went onto anti-anxiety drugs. In there is also a standing prescription for esomeprazole (aka Nexium). Between this and a few other things, I'm getting there. The big thing in that, however, was getting a sleep study in early 2016 and getting on a CPAP.
The thing with the CPAP, though, was kidn of weird. It's probable that I have had obstructive sleep apnea to some degree since I was a child - but when I was a child in the 1980s, as far as anybody knew it was only middle-aged men who contracted it. Now, as I write this paragraph (2019), you can find equipment for children for this affliction. I've since been encouraging people to go get sleep studies - because I don't like the idea of people dying because they could not breathe in their sleep.