I’ve recently built a photography archive on here, and from here on out, I will use this website as the main access to my photography. My iCloud Photostream will not be used anymore, at least not officially. The Photostream served me well due to being very easy and intuitive to use, but I got more and more annoyed by its downsides like reduced resolution, low compatibility with non-Apple-browsers, no possibilities of customizations, and no insight into page views.
So I decided to use this website as the main host for my photography. I:
- …uploaded all photos I still want to see in public to this website
- …created several sub-pages for different timeframes of when I shot the photos
- …embedded the photos there
- …built a hub-page called Archive
- …built a main page for my Photography where I show new shots and remove old ones once they’ve been on there for a while
- …created a button at the top of the site that leads to that main page and to the archive via the dropdown menu.
This took me half a day or so; was more fun than I expected! You can check everything out now, and feel free to share anything if you want to. If you wish to link to specific pictures, you can click them for a “gallery-view” which lets you link specific photos (as opposed to the complete page). In that view there’s also meta-data at the bottom right, if it didn’t get lost in the editing process.
I also extended my blog post Family by adding a section that describes the most significant individual part of last Christmas; the content is from a thread I posted on Twitter about two weeks later that I wrote because that part is a great example of what made this Christmas so important and big for me. The new content can be found under the unchanged old text below the first horizontal line (like the one above this paragraph).
As for me, I’m feeling really well! I had the most severe breakdown since the breakup in January about 1-2 weeks ago, but nothing even close to its severity happened between that breakup-breakdown and this one, which means that I went about three full months without such a deep drop – and that’s, effectively, yet another distinct sign how much better I am recently. Depression doesn’t go away, it never will; one gets used to it and finds methods to deal with its effects and triggers.
The thing that shows improvement is frequency and severity of depression’s influence on one’s life, and both have severely reduced recently for me. That doesn’t make any breakdown less awful, but long-term, they’re just an unavoidable part of life. If it doesn’t dictate your life anymore, that’s where you accomplished something. And that’s where I’m heading currently.
And, life update: The walks in my local area have grown significantly in length; I’m currently walking around every 1-2 nights, and I’m usually outside for at least an hour, often closer to 2-4 hours. Reaching 10k steps used to be a milestone – today it’s often the least I walk. My record, which happened just yesterday, just barely missed the 24.000 steps (23.982); I was outside for 4:10 hours (with a 15 minute pause before starting the last third) and walked 17.1km – the tour I walked was to, around, and back from the world’s biggest graveyard-park, the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof. I also got a new, thin jacket and running shoes from two friends recently which are a big help as my shoes are suffering a lot from my walks and my jacket is both pretty damaged and too thick for the summer.
The previous record, which has just 15 less steps (23.967) (so about the same; the step-counter isn’t perfectly accurate), was a tour of 16.4km at a length of ~4.5h. I walked from home to downtown’s big lake (Außenalster), rested there, and then back; that was two weeks ago or so.
The daily step-average of the last 2.5 weeks is ~10.000; I had my former partner at my place before that and wasn’t quite as invested in this as I am now before they spent their two weeks here (which I write about in A little help – a little hope), but I hope I can keep this up for longer as the effects on both my mental and my physical health are obvious and noticeable. When I got weighed at my last lung function test about two months ago I had already dropped below 100kg (97), I’m definitely building muscles mostly in my legs but also in other places, and I’m losing a lot of fat too – I already punched 6 new holes into my belt, and am two holes away from needing new ones again since a few days. I still have a belly, of course, and nothing can change my upbringing of sick, unjustifiable and severe fatshaming so I still see myself as a disgusting blob, but this is definitely helping as well as I can hope for.
Thanks for reading!
jatenk 