Your Backup Hobby

Black Barney wrote: If money was no object what would your hobbies be? I think I would take up flying. Planes, copters, gliders... would all be fun

I sure as shucks wouldn't be grading papers on my weekend, that's for sure. I would:

1. design large, weird assemblages and then pay other people to build them. Kind of like Damien Hirst or Edward Tufte [there's a book about artists who pay others to do the work]

2. fund a buttload of open source applications to solve problems that I face. Apps that don't exist

3. support effective programs among the underprivileged, primarily health initiatives, including something about guns.

4. make some movies that don't exist that I want to watch

5. Open a book/game shop whose only goal would be to break even some day

6. Travel a lot more

7. Upgrade my camera gear, which right now consists of my phone (thanks, person who walked off with my full camera bag in Oregon)

[update: someone gave me a camera body and I scraped together money for a nice 20mm lens]

Can I help with no. 4?? What a cool idea, to contribute and make art. That's far less selfish than what I would do. I'd pull a Travolta I think (not the ghey thing, the home air terminal thing)

Have you given any thought to what kind of movies you'd like to make? I wish I had thought of Rogue One

You know My Dinner with Andre? I want to make some low budget, super smart, talk-heavy films that are themed around science fiction and weird reality. Maybe relationships in there too. So smart, low budget science fiction. Think Primer.

I regret asking.

For the past couple of months, shovelling snow out of the driveway. Some more to come this week after a weekendful of snow - I think I'll upload a picture of my house later on. It's close to the near-record 2008 for sure. My house being set at the end of a curve doesn't help, I get twice as much pushed on from the street snow "removal" as neighbours. Since our street isn't too busy, we're near the tail-end of the snow removal job and few cars tamp it down, so quite a few low clearance cars can't even drive out on heavy snowfalls like we had yesterday.

I shoveled a bunch last night and I couldn't BELIEVE what I woke up to this morning. I open my front door, and it's almost up to my knees, no it IS up to my knees. I almost slipped down my stairs cuz I couldn't see the ice on the bottom. They haven't cleared the walkways either so I had to scale two snowbanks that were at least five feet high. I haven't done that since I was a kid. It doesn't feel as fun as it used to be.

Anyway, i got a ton of shovelling to do. i had to bring my girl back to her mom last night and it's usually an hour each way. Took four hours last night. I couldn't see the road or the shoulder so I was using the powerlines as navigation on where to drive with my Subaru. It was like driving through a plain or something.

At the end of this year or next year, at the latest, I'm probably going to change my all-wheel-drive Forester SUV to a Camry Hybrid. I don't know how I'll handle winters anymore. I don't even shovel the snowbank at the end of my driveway, i just drive over it right now. it's fun. I feel like the Dukes of Hazzard. I'm thinking of painting a confederate flag on the front of my car.

I spent almost an hour last night shoveling, even if it wasn't done falling, came in at 9:20 after working up quite a sweat. We hear a snowblower at 10:30 - not to be outdone, another snowblower started up soon after. Next-door neighbour was away for a few weeks, came back in the middle of the night to a foot of soft snow over the crust from last week's hail/freezing snow. Seemed they used someone's snowblower (impossible to shovel off) also but it didn't wake us.

At 1 in the morning my girlfriend looked outside and said it stopped snowing, but on the radio at 6 they said it was still falling. Fortunately there was very little to clear from my driveway this morning, maybe a couple cm.

Traffic was pretty light this morning - I guess lots of people stayed home.

We need heating asphalt/concrete of some kind for our roads. Some would scoff at the energy needed to power such a feat of engineering, but consider the gas spent to power all the big snow removal machinery (which is far from ideal looking at the state of the roads) and I don't think it would be so bad.

This.

At first I thought it was the end of The Blair Witch Project ..... then I realized it's just a shower

I track my hobbies by expenditure. 5 years ago it was 18th century mil. history books. $300 2 years ago it was hobby electronics. $250. Last year airbrushes and paints. $200. This year, trail running $200. Next year? I think I'll be busy remodeling the kitchen and bath of a house we just bought. $223 (thousand).

Moved to a dedicated snow thread.

It's not really a backup hobby anymore since I take out my digital SLR maybe twice a year and the rest of my pictures are of my children for Instagram, but I was pretty hard into photography for a few years. For Christmas I bought myself a higher-end scanner to import about two thousand negatives from my first few years in the hobby.

It's been slow but interesting. Sometimes I can see what I was going for, but the execution was a failure. Sometimes I can see the concept, but it was flawed from the beginning. Often I get angry at all the scratches and bubbles I left while developing the film. Sometimes I nailed it. But mostly I wonder why I took so many landscape and flora shots when my pictures of people are so much better.

Playing music.
Bass mainly although I got back into trumpet a bit for a while there after a long absence.
Watching football (soccer).
The trumpet was brought back into the fold in combination with this "hobby".

It seems the sport of triathlon has now become an official hobby. I am planning out my calendar for this year and adjusting to the race fee shock. I'm also looking at how to feasibly purchase a Proform Studio Bike for winter and rainy day training instead of my portable trainer.

Too cold for me to do it now, but I did a lot of fishing last year, and will probably start up again this spring. I have a fishing kayak that dumps me into the water more often that it should, because I'm a rank beginner at kayaking. I might have talked the missus into buying a fishing boat, except it turns out I have to help the transmission shop owner with his boat payment.