Your Backup Hobby

DarthJoJo wrote: My in-laws spent the last week and a half with us, so I put them to work. With my father-in-law’s help I now have a three-bin compost made of pallets, a garden of six filled 4x8 raised beds, a 60 m long mountain bike trail for the boys and sod on a particularly ugly patch of our yard. I still need to amend the garden soil and it’s much too late too start anything this year, but I am excited for vegetables next year. Succession planting, short plants south of tall plants and pickling recipes are all in mind.

That's awesome. Depending on what zone you're in, it's close to the time to start garlic. If you use garlic a lot, it's a great plant to grow. It's super easy and out of the ground mid summer so you can get something else in the same spot for the fall. And you get scapes!!!

I'm probably going the raised bed route next year. I have an in-ground garden that's fenced in to keep out rabbits. But it's adjacent to a light wooded area so it has much more shade than I would like. Some of the fencing is rotting too, so I think I'd have to rebuild it anyway. And the weeds creep in from the wooded area like crazy. Sadly, the soil there is halfway decent because I've been working on it for 4 years. Otherwise we have heavy, heavy clay everywhere else.

It was Amazon Days, or whatever they were calling it, and I bought a baitcaster rod and reel setup, because all the cool fishing kids are doing it. I had never used a baitcaster before, and even when following instructions I managed to get the mother of all backlashes on the very first cast.

I eventually got to where I could hit the water with my lure without getting a bird's nest in the reel, but still need a lot of practice. In theory it's supposed to be more accurate, and can handle larger lures, than a spinning reel.

ratpfink wrote:
I'm probably going the raised bed route next year. I have an in-ground garden that's fenced in to keep out rabbits. But it's adjacent to a light wooded area so it has much more shade than I would like. Some of the fencing is rotting too, so I think I'd have to rebuild it anyway. And the weeds creep in from the wooded area like crazy. Sadly, the soil there is halfway decent because I've been working on it for 4 years. Otherwise we have heavy, heavy clay everywhere else.

You may consider using cinder block for a raised bed garden. We did that at our place and it worked wonderfully. And the holes in the cinder blocks make for great flower and herb 'planters'.

Shellhead wrote:

ubarose wrote: Was talking with my Mom about Facebook on Friday. She has almost 2000 friends, and I asked her how she manages it. She said, "Mute, mute, mute."

I have 171 Facebook friends, and only two are on mute. One is on mute because he loves to re-post conspiracy theory memes. The other is on mute because she likes to re-post news items about animal abuse. We both care about animals, but I can only handle a limited number of sad stories about animals per week.

I used the extension "unfollow everything" to calm down my Facebook feed.

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfoll...egoenkliddajoo?hl=en

I've deleted my account and fired it back up about five times.

CranBerries wrote: I used the extension "unfollow everything" to calm down my Facebook feed.

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfoll...egoenkliddajoo?hl=en

I've deleted my account and fired it back up about five times.

I deleted it twice, and so far the last time has stuck. Facebook is awful. If every other company on the Fortune 500 vanished, it would cause immense disruption to the global economy. Except Facebook. It provides no value. If it disappeared tomorrow, people would carry on normally. They'd call their parents and text pictures of their kids to their siblings. Everything it purports to offer is trivially replaced.

I firmly disagree that Facebook is awful. You're using it wrong. If your friends and family are posting awful stuff to Facebook, you might want to think long and hard about each of those relationships. I personally wouldn't keep toxic people in my life, or even on Facebook, just because we share a common ancestor. And if people who aren't your friends and family are posting awful stuff to Facebook, you might want to ask yourself why you "friended" them into your Facebook feed. Just un-friend the bad ones, or at least un-follow them.

Without Facebook, I would have lost touch with too many people during the last decade. Most of my old friends and half my family are scattered across the country and even the planet. I have even managed to renew contact with a variety of folks that I had already misplaced. I even made some fairly new friends in the last couple of years, and I want to spend time with them after we get past this pandemic.

Facebook has also been a useful way for me to maintain at least a semi-active social life despite often working six days a week. Just being in Facebook makes it easier for local friends to invite me to things, and easier for me to accept. And it definitely makes it easier for me to organize my own small events, like inviting 20 people over for boardgames so we can get maybe 6 to 8 to show up.

During this pandemic, my social bubble has been reduced to not much more than my immediate co-workers, at least the several of us who still work in the office on a regular basis. That's it. Without Facebook, I would still be calling a few people and emailing a few others, but that's it. Not because I don't care about other people, but because I am busy with work and busy with projects at home and often tired the rest of the time. Facebook gives me a daily dose of social interaction for a minimal investment in time, and it's easy to fit in five or ten minutes at random times throughout each day. As a plus, three of my local Facebook friends are professional DJs, so the canceled live dances have now been replaced with streaming events where I can log in for a few minutes or a few hours, depending on what is convenient for me.

I used to miss things, events because they were posted on Facebook and I’m not a member. Friends used to tell me they weren’t posting it twice, so I could join up or miss out. So I missed out occasionally when I didn’t see them in person and I didn’t care very much.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Best I can tell my friends don’t use it to organize things now. I get emails instead, with loads of recipients.

Shellhead wrote: I firmly disagree that Facebook is awful. You're using it wrong. If your friends and family are posting awful stuff to Facebook, you might want to think long and hard about each of those relationships. I personally wouldn't keep toxic people in my life, or even on Facebook, just because we share a common ancestor. And if people who aren't your friends and family are posting awful stuff to Facebook, you might want to ask yourself why you "friended" them into your Facebook feed. Just un-friend the bad ones, or at least un-follow them.

I would have agreed with that take ten years ago, but now I'd consider that an overly simplistic and optimistic view of what Facebook is designed to do. If it was only a matter of having bad people on my feed, that's easily solved. But Facebook has been engineered to take normal people, and amplify their worst instincts through a combination of triggering outrage and fear, with no consideration other than "does it make people pay attention?" I don't care to support that kind of business model, even if in theory everyone on my feed were angels who never get sucked in.

If it works for you though, that's your business.

I gave up all social media over a decade ago. I have no regrets.

RobertB wrote: I eventually got to where I could hit the water with my lure without getting a bird's nest in the reel, but still need a lot of practice. In theory it's supposed to be more accurate, and can handle larger lures, than a spinning reel.

All of that is true. Casting setups are definitely intimidating at first, but you unlock a whole different world of rod combinations (different power rods and variable tip sensitivities). You can use all the features aggressively in the early days when you're getting used to them to prevent most birds nests. Tighten down the spool tensioner so that whatever weight of a lure you have tied on drops at a medium speed instead of just free falling. Then use the brakes (magnetic? depends on what you got) on a pretty high setting at first, too. Both of these will sacrifice casting distance until you get used to things enough that you can loosen up the tensioner a smidge and free up the brakes. Smooth, easy casting motions letting the rod do the work instead of your arms, and keep your thumb super light on the spool, clamping down the moment the lure hits the water. After practice in "beginner" mode for awhile, you'll gain a lot of feel and can ease up on all the "safety" mechanisms. Use cheap mono for awhile so that if you do birds nest so bad that you have to cut off everything and respool, you won't lose a lot of money in the process (like with fluoro or braid). Oh, and don't cast light lures into the wind.

There's a lot of good YouTube content for beginning with baitcasters.

JoelCFC25 wrote:

RobertB wrote: I eventually got to where I could hit the water with my lure without getting a bird's nest in the reel, but still need a lot of practice. In theory it's supposed to be more accurate, and can handle larger lures, than a spinning reel.

All of that is true. Casting setups are definitely intimidating at first, but you unlock a whole different world of rod combinations (different power rods and variable tip sensitivities). You can use all the features aggressively in the early days when you're getting used to them to prevent most birds nests. Tighten down the spool tensioner so that whatever weight of a lure you have tied on drops at a medium speed instead of just free falling. Then use the brakes (magnetic? depends on what you got) on a pretty high setting at first, too. Both of these will sacrifice casting distance until you get used to things enough that you can loosen up the tensioner a smidge and free up the brakes. Smooth, easy casting motions letting the rod do the work instead of your arms, and keep your thumb super light on the spool, clamping down the moment the lure hits the water. After practice in "beginner" mode for awhile, you'll gain a lot of feel and can ease up on all the "safety" mechanisms. Use cheap mono for awhile so that if you do birds nest so bad that you have to cut off everything and respool, you won't lose a lot of money in the process (like with fluoro or braid). Oh, and don't cast light lures into the wind.

There's a lot of good YouTube content for beginning with baitcasters.

Mine is a KastKing Spartacus II, now with added manliness! It has magnetic brakes only, no centrifugal brakes. Those brakes definitely work - I cranked them all the way up, and if I throw my arm out of my socket I can cast it about 10 feet.

My practice regimen so far is throw it, shake my head at how badly I missed my target, look at the spool to see if there's a birds nest that needs fixing, fix it if it's there, then reel it back in. Today would be a good day to get some more practice, but it gets dark at 6:00 now.

I decided to zig instead of zag and asked most of my family for gifts related to trying to take up fly fishing by myself. Intimidating. My greatest personal fear is fucking up and looking like an idiot at stuff, in general, so this will be a good experience from a personal growth perspective. I just have to go out there and fuck up which requires me really being assertive.

In recent months, I have wrestled with the temptation to resume working out at the gym. The governor allowed gyms to re-open last summer, along with restaurants, bars, barber shops, and hair salons. But I felt that the gym was still not a good place to go during a pandemic, for a variety of reasons. And I didn't need the extra exercise because I was doing enough yardwork and other physical projects around the house to stay fit.

But lately, I feel like I have picked up a few pounds, while the governor has closed the gyms again for at least a month. So I finally broke down and bought some very inexpensive home exercise gear: a set of resistance bands and handles. Less than $40, and usable for dozens of different exercises. Easily stored, too, compared to a big single-use device like an exercise bike or stairmaster. Some of the exercises require a post or pillar, and I've got a couple of options. In warmer weather, I can use one of my clothesline posts in the backyard. This winter, I can use one of the metal support posts in my basement.