I had access to Lego throughout my childhood as my father gave me all of his old sets from the 70's and 80's. I got my last set as a youngling in 2005, and it happened to be a street sweeper city set. Just a small one, but I did quite like it. From 2005 until 2012 I didn't have much to do with Lego, but in 2012 I got back on the wagon because of my interest in macro photography.
2012 was my last year of high school, and I was doing a photography course, and I needed a theme to create a portfolio. Somehow, I got the (not-so-original) idea to do macro Lego Star Wars photography. Over the period of a couple of weeks I dug out my old sets, built them up, found minifigures, dusted them off, etc, and started taking photos.
Except, I needed more minifigures for my portfolio, so I looked into what sets were available. Turns out Lego started doing those little battle packs for Star Wars which were incredibly helpful for building small armies. Naturally, I continued buying more and more of the 2012 sets. So for the last two years or so, I've been on and off buying Lego, building, displaying, designing in LDD, and what-not, but the period between 2005 and 2012 is the longest I've gone without contact with the Lego world.
Oh, and shameless plug is shameless: http://zeenohs.deviantart.com/ for all your floral and Lego photography needs.