Your Backup Hobby

Black Barney wrote: vidja games

...actually that's my main hobby. I'm not even sure board games count as my backup hobby. I think Fortress Ameritrash would be a more accurate back-up hobby.

Unless, is dancing a hobby? Or is that a sport? Are sports hobbies?

I think sports count as hobbies, either as a player or a fan as both. I enjoy following both American football and baseball quite a bit, so that's sort of a hobby.

• I play Ultimate Frisbee at least once a week, and I try to go twice, but that second game is at the whims of my children's schedules.
• I like films, and am a huge asshole about them. I'm the guy that likes those movies.
• I do crossword puzzles. Seriously considering subscribing to the NYTimes for this reason, backed up by supporting real journalism.
• I read. (ps. get Instapaper, it changes the way you use the Web.)
• I play video games. All of them.

Joebot wrote: My other hobby is Legos, and has been for 35 years. I have a room in my basement dedicated to my sprawling Lego city. I also have an incredibly patient and forgiving wife.

I really need to start building again.

R.P.Kraul wrote: Last year, I started growing chile peppers hydroponically. I have always been into gardening, but I wanted to try my hand at super hots--particularly ghost peppers, scorpion peppers, and 7 pot peppers. I also grew some habaneros and scotch bonnets. These chiles are tropical--most are native to Central and South America. They don't particularly like cooler climates like mine (Western Pennsylvania), so I turned to hydroponics to reduce the turnaround time (most super hot chiles take about 5 months from seed to yield). I was eating fresh pods last July, which was pretty awesome.

Hydroponics is a lot of work. You have to monitor PH levels and water temperature, and adjust nutrient levels according to the growth stage of your plants. You have to examine the health of your plants and purge pests (some of mine were infested with aphids). It can also be expensive--the nutrients are not cheap. That aside, I wouldn't give it up for anything. This is one hobby I'll stick with for the rest of my life.

New seedlings are already started--I planted the first batch after Christmas. They will grow in a smaller hydroponic setup in my basement. In late April or early May, I'll move them to a larger hydroponic setup outside. Then the fun begins. Keeping water temps 70-78 in hot weather is challenging.

It's a hell of a lot of work, but I get delicious fresh chiles. I slice them on sandwiches, freeze them, dry them for powder, or brew up my own batches of hot sauce.

Looks like I just found a new back-up hobby.

Chiles are great. Luckily I live in a climate right now that makes growing them the easiest thing in the world. Hot, incredibly sunny days, cooler nights, dry heat. We had some great habaneros this year.

Curious to see how they grow in the mountains of northern arizona.

Gary Sax wrote: Chiles are great. Luckily I live in a climate right now that makes growing them the easiest thing in the world. Hot, incredibly sunny days, cooler nights, dry heat. We had some great habaneros this year.

Curious to see how they grow in the mountains of northern arizona.

Habs can be a challenge to grow in soil in PA. The plants grow okay, but they tend not to produce much. Surprisingly, though, I planted a scotch bonnet that did really well in soil, so go figure. Last year's crop of habs did great hydroponically. I had white, peach, and Caribbean red.

I deeply envy your climate. The Southwest is awesome for growing.

Hell yeah. I have two garden 12' garden boxes in the backyard here in SoCal. One gets sun for like 16 hours a day. Drip irrigation for 4 minutes a day! Don't hate me, environmentalists! Our winter crops are garlic, onions, beets (oh god, so many), cilantro, carrots (shitty crop, don't grow these), snap peas climbing the trellis, some chard. I can hardly call it my hobby, I have a farmer come out and take care of it. I just eat the goods. But anything will grow here, it's ridiculous.

If watching sports can be a hobby then can doing absolutely nothing be a hobby as well?

In all seriousness I do think that FOLLOWING sports is absolutely a hobby

Well, returned to weightlifting since the office has a gym that I can us. Lifting light, nothing heavy, three times a week, plus I can do it in the morning *before* office hours.

I love re-reading books.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I've been training for about 7 years. I found a good local club about 5 years ago- all of us about the same age(30-45), professional guys who need to go to work in the morning, no one is looking to hurt fellow teammates(no MMA meatheads allowed). I had been going twice a week until I hurt my knee(meniscus tear) this past fall. I hope to start again in the spring on a more limited schedule. It's fantastic exercise, great stress relief, and good fun.

R.P.Kraul wrote: Last year, I started growing chile peppers hydroponically. I have always been into gardening, but I wanted to try my hand at super hots--particularly ghost peppers, scorpion peppers, and 7 pot peppers. I also grew some habaneros and scotch bonnets. These chiles are tropical--most are native to Central and South America. They don't particularly like cooler climates like mine (Western Pennsylvania), so I turned to hydroponics to reduce the turnaround time (most super hot chiles take about 5 months from seed to yield). I was eating fresh pods last July, which was pretty awesome.

Hydroponics is a lot of work. You have to monitor PH levels and water temperature, and adjust nutrient levels according to the growth stage of your plants. You have to examine the health of your plants and purge pests (some of mine were infested with aphids). It can also be expensive--the nutrients are not cheap. That aside, I wouldn't give it up for anything. This is one hobby I'll stick with for the rest of my life.

New seedlings are already started--I planted the first batch after Christmas. They will grow in a smaller hydroponic setup in my basement. In late April or early May, I'll move them to a larger hydroponic setup outside. Then the fun begins. Keeping water temps 70-78 in hot weather is challenging.

It's a hell of a lot of work, but I get delicious fresh chiles. I slice them on sandwiches, freeze them, dry them for powder, or brew up my own batches of hot sauce.

You're in PA? Where at? I'm in Pittsburgh.

Colorcrayons wrote: I used to breed poison dart frogs when I managed a pet shop in Helena Montana.

My GF is obsessed with frogs, so I figured I would surprise her with a large frog vivarium that is nearly automated so she could keep her choice of a dart frog breed. (running total I think is $2k)
But there are several conservation initiatives that I became involved with to prevent the extinction of several frogs breeds, since frogs seem to be the barometer of environmental distress.

So now we keep two severely endangered breeds of dart frogs from Columbia as a stop gap in case of localized extinction, they may be reintroduced. There are only 3 other labs in North America that carry these specific breeds, whose taxonomy is still up for scholarly debate. It took a lot of licensing and nightmarish governmental bureaucracy to get to this point.

She gets her frog fix, and I do my own small part to stall extinction by captive breeding and sending froglets back to Columbia when requested. This backup hobby has turned into a full time job with all the data I need to keep track of, importation of local insect fauna for feed when not supplementing with just melanogaster fruit flies as well as flora when certain species inevitably falter, and vivarium maintenance.

That is so ridiculously awesome.

metalface13 wrote:

R.P.Kraul wrote: Last year, I started growing chile peppers hydroponically. I have always been into gardening, but I wanted to try my hand at super hots--particularly ghost peppers, scorpion peppers, and 7 pot peppers. I also grew some habaneros and scotch bonnets. These chiles are tropical--most are native to Central and South America. They don't particularly like cooler climates like mine (Western Pennsylvania), so I turned to hydroponics to reduce the turnaround time (most super hot chiles take about 5 months from seed to yield). I was eating fresh pods last July, which was pretty awesome.

Hydroponics is a lot of work. You have to monitor PH levels and water temperature, and adjust nutrient levels according to the growth stage of your plants. You have to examine the health of your plants and purge pests (some of mine were infested with aphids). It can also be expensive--the nutrients are not cheap. That aside, I wouldn't give it up for anything. This is one hobby I'll stick with for the rest of my life.

New seedlings are already started--I planted the first batch after Christmas. They will grow in a smaller hydroponic setup in my basement. In late April or early May, I'll move them to a larger hydroponic setup outside. Then the fun begins. Keeping water temps 70-78 in hot weather is challenging.

It's a hell of a lot of work, but I get delicious fresh chiles. I slice them on sandwiches, freeze them, dry them for powder, or brew up my own batches of hot sauce.

You're in PA? Where at? I'm in Pittsburgh.

I'm between Greensburg & Latrobe, so we're not too far apart.

jeb wrote: I play video games. All of them.

Well yeah. I didn't list that because I figured we all did

I find it curious that my interest in tabletop and video gaming waxes and wanes every few months. So for a while it'll be all about the video games, then it'll be all about the tabletop games and so it goes in an endless cycle of geekiness.

Hm. So many things.

- Like many of you, I'm a videogame nerd, but largely just Blizzard games these days and mostly Heroes of the Storm, which has gone beyond hobby and led to me writing for gosugamers and watching way too much Twitch, as the pro league started last week.
- I did aikido for 11 years but am currently on something of a hiatus. I was teaching and training and at the dojo six days a week.
- I like films, as some of you may have noticed from Mr. White's Cinemadome series. The Michigan Theater has an unusual series going on right now, with a couple different offerings of Japanese noir every Monday night through the end of February. Some of it has been great. Some of it has been raved about by film professors and no one else.
- I, uh, read a lot. There are a couple thousand (literally; ahem...) books in my place that I just moved. But I read more on the Kindle on my phone these days, so the next move won't be worse. Hopefully.
- My girlfriend and I just bought a new house, so we're both reigniting our gardening impulse. She already has 1/3 of the backyard mapped out for elevated beds and is just about to start some seedlings. I'm looking at much of the rest of the backyard and planning a Japanese garden, especially since it gets enough shade to where much of the grass has been replaced by moss. The real trick with the rock garden section of it will be building another tool that makes manipulating the stones not too much of a trial.
- I'm a real music enthusiast (so much media!) I just picked up a few more albums (What do we call works of music these days? They're not albums or CDs anymore. Collections of files (CoFs)?) a couple days ago: Coltrane, Telemann, Slackers, Void, Kendrick Lamar, Challenger,.and Dengue Fever.
- I'm down to two cats. They're both breeds (a Devon Rex and an Oriental Shorthair), as I go to a number of cat shows to see if there's anything interesting. I've had as many as five. Not sure if I'm going to keep going there.