Your Backup Hobby

Not Sure wrote:

Dr. Mabuse wrote: I have been wanting to get into screen printing for years and finally (after scoring a US National commercial) I took the plunge. This has been an amazing experience as it has been trial and error. I have had to make adjustments and modifications to my bedroom to make my own tiny print studio.

The first piece I completed was a three colour Galactus poster for my son's 21st birthday.

Nice work! Screen printing stuff for my old man was one of my first gigs, and it made me realize I really wanted to be back in school. Getting the registration on a multi-color job correct is an art in itself.

It was always a lot more fun when I was printing something for myself, instead of endless logos or (shudder) jersey numbers.

Thanks, man! Hell yes, there is a thrill I feel when the registration is perfect. I could have helped myself out more by choking the magenta more but that's okay, lesson learned.

I left pursuing my graphic design career and much prefer personal projects for sure!

Planted my first garden this spring. If the plants hold, there will be later harvests of pumpkins, butternut squash and zucchini, but halfway through this first year, I am prepared to call it a qualified success. The radishes weren't any better than what you could pick up at the grocery, but the spinach and lettuce are pretty fantastic. The leaves of both are more tender and the tastes more subtle and complete. Planter boxes of herbs have been stupendous (the boys keep sneaking basil), and my neighbor pointed out that the carrots are finally sprouting, three weeks after I gave them up for lost. Cool.

Squash family are indestructible champs in hot climes.

FISHING STORY! I'm lucky enough to have a pond in my backyard, large enough for fish. Last Saturday my daughter and I were fishing for bluegill. Sometimes, catching the small bluegill attracts the largemouth bass that live there, and they try (and sometimes succeed) to eat the hooked fish. Once in a while you get to trade up, and now you have a bass! Sorry, Mr. Bluegill.

So we're fishing, and trying to avoid feeding the bluegill to the bass that are hanging out now, because that would be just plain mean. My daughter says, "Why don't we play that bass?" Whut? Her idea is that next time we catch a bluegill, throw back a bluegill-looking lure and see if it fools the bass.

So we try it. Her idea, so she gets first crack. Sure enough, that bass smashes that lure, and she's hooked a bass. Now, she's never caught a bass before, and she's trying to bring in one of the big ones that live there. Lots of yelling from both of us. She gets it close to shore, and it's huge! Right then, it bends the snap open and gets away. We lose the fish and lose the lure. Hopefully the bass shakes off that lure; God knows they spit out lures pretty regularly.

Later on, she got one of those trade-up deals, and caught her first bass. Somehow, in all the chaos she ended up with a bass on the hook, and the bluegill threaded on the fishing line. I had to cut the line to get the bluegill off.

The moral I'm getting from this is, "Don't buy cheap snaps." Or maybe just stick to tying straight to the lure.

DarthJoJo wrote: Planted my first garden this spring. If the plants hold, there will be later harvests of pumpkins, butternut squash and zucchini, but halfway through this first year, I am prepared to call it a qualified success. The radishes weren't any better than what you could pick up at the grocery, but the spinach and lettuce are pretty fantastic. The leaves of both are more tender and the tastes more subtle and complete. Planter boxes of herbs have been stupendous (the boys keep sneaking basil), and my neighbor pointed out that the carrots are finally sprouting, three weeks after I gave them up for lost. Cool.

We have two big garden boxes. Here are my tomatoes trying to destroy their trellis:


I am southern California, so brassicas/radishes/lettuces are winter crops here. (Winter is ~65 - 70˚F). Spring means tomatoes, cucumbers, and squashes. I still have some chard and one lonely beet hanging out since winter, but you can see how the vines are dominating.


We're moving soon, and I will miss my boxes, but I think they helped sell the house, so I can't complain too much.

ratpfink wrote: I joined a curling club and am 4 weeks into a league now. It's basically the sport version of Crokinole. On ice. WIth equal amount of drinking. So... basically... it rules.

Curling took over this past winter as my only hobby. We put our game night on hiatus because I was curling 4-5 nights a week. As the glass says, I don't abuse my liver, I teach it a lesson.

Summer is vegetable gardening time for me. Had been a weird spring here. Cold and wet for a long time and then it got kind of hot. Spinach was good but bolted quick. Had a large radish crop early. I got peas in too late and the heat killed them before they produced much. Harvested a couple nice heads of broccoli a few days ago. Garlic will come out this weekend and I have been using the scapes for a few weeks now(they seem to keep forever!) Planted onions/leeks/shallots in an unfenced area, thinking rabbits would leave them alone but that turned out to be wrong. Some of them will recover I think. Peppers have been doing shitty, there's a pest or disease I haven't figured out yet. Could be some of it is I've had peppers everywhere in the last 2-3 years and I just need to give the soil a break on peppers for a couple years. Should be swimming in kale and swiss chard by next week. Brussels are looking great this year. Also have a couple tomato plants and a couple zucchini that just started fruiting a couple of days ago.

Maybe one of these years I'll deer fence half the backyard and get real serious. I think I could easily fit 8-10 32 foot raised beds where the backyard is mostly flat. That's way better than having a weedy lawn at any rate. My neighbor's hobby is mowing, he has a riding lawnmower and is on that thing at least twice a week. I don't want that hobby.

RobertB wrote: Or maybe just stick to tying straight to the lure.

Yep.

A palomar knot is very easy (search Youtube) and super strong--just a little tricky if you have larger baits with treble hooks. A uni knot is another very serviceable one.

I'm still trying to get my daughter to have the patience to get her first properly sized bass. But we're into the dog days of summer where you have to fish slow, they aren't gonna chase after moving baits as much.

JoelCFC25 wrote:

RobertB wrote: Or maybe just stick to tying straight to the lure.

Yep.

A palomar knot is very easy (search Youtube) and super strong--just a little tricky if you have larger baits with treble hooks. A uni knot is another very serviceable one.

I'm still trying to get my daughter to have the patience to get her first properly sized bass. But we're into the dog days of summer where you have to fish slow, they aren't gonna chase after moving baits as much.

Yeah, it's pretty sad if you're too lazy to tie a palomar knot. *points at self*

My daughter hadn't gotten hold of anything quite as big as those bass before - she's 19, and has been fishing for a long time, but never caught anything like that bass that got away. I think she gets it now.

Out at my place, this time of year they don't usually bite for me until the evening, unless I drop a lure on their heads. Sometimes a texas-rigged worm will do it in the middle of the day for me.

It always amazes me that they get in the mood for something, and nothing else works. I caught four bass a couple of weeks ago with a pink plastic worm. A couple of days after that it was a watermelon tube. Last Sunday they didn't want anything but the Wee Crawfish (a birthday present), and they went berserk over it - I caught three in about 15 minutes.

I started a garden in 2017, but it has been nothing to brag about. All three years, I have let the weeds run wild while I was busy with other stuff, plus there has always been at least one early torrential downpour that randomly moved the seeds out of place.

2017: I knew that I would need a 6' cube cage to protect the garden from rabbits and squirrels, and it took me until early July to finish the cage. I planted the garden in mid-May and initially just protected it with a quick wrap of 3' chicken wire secured with four metal spikes. I neglected the weeds for too long, and then the tomato and squash vines climbed the cage and blocked out the sun for everything else. I didn't get many tomatoes, but I did get several monstrous squash that were nearly the size of bowling balls. Two random corn stalks sprouted up just outside the garden, but the squirrels got to them long before they were ripe.

2018: I decided to build a separate 3' cube cage for the squash. That took until early July, plus I lost time to other projects and again neglected the weeds. I planted the squash in late May, but failed to account for how much shade they would get once the tree leaves all came in. I only got two squash of modest size, though my tomatoes did well in the main garden. And I got some random and totally unexpected sunflowers, which I harvested and put out for the local birds.

2019: My winter roof leaks turned into a spring and summer of renovation. I ripped my out 2nd floor ceilings and removed the crappy old insulation, and replaced it with spray foam insulation. Then I had carpenters install a tongue-and-groove ceiling of knotty pine. And I got a new roof. My next few weekends will involve painting and refinishing my hardwood floors. So my garden looks shabby again. Looks I will get some decent squash, some green beans, and a lot of carrots this time. The tomatoes are not faring well and the corn is pathetic. Some how there is squash showing up in the main cage again, even though I dumped a new load of compost loam in both gardens early in the spring.

Squash don't give a fuck. We've had squash grow in the dry cracked earth across the yard because some bird shit it out over there or something. Those are tough plants.

Shellhead wrote:
2019: My winter roof leaks turned into a spring and summer of renovation. I ripped my out 2nd floor ceilings and removed the crappy old insulation, and replaced it with spray foam insulation. Then I had carpenters install a tongue-and-groove ceiling of knotty pine. And I got a new roof. My next few weekends will involve painting and refinishing my hardwood floors. So my garden looks shabby again. Looks I will get some decent squash, some green beans, and a lot of carrots this time. The tomatoes are not faring well and the corn is pathetic. Some how there is squash showing up in the main cage again, even though I dumped a new load of compost loam in both gardens early in the spring.

I've heard that you need to grow a good-sized patch of corn to get it to produce properly. We grew a 10'x10' patch once, and it didn't produce much. I could be wrong, though.

A couple of years back there was some kind of tomato disease that wiped out all our tomatoes. We had to replace all the soil in the garden box.

After nuclear war/global warming, it's just going to be cockroaches and zucchini.

Resurrecting an extremely dead thread because I feel like this is absolutely something we're all doing in our own ways, in our own non-game hobbies. And I'd love to hear about it..

I got a "temporary" year-long paycut which involved mandatory "flex-time" in May for 2020-2021. So my wife bought me a fly fishing lesson in Oak Creek in Sedona for my birthday, did it yesterday, I had fly fished once before with a friend in TX and quite enjoyed it but felt like I needed some real instruction... it's a parody of myself as an middle-upper class aging white man but it fucking ruled. I need to figure out how to get just enough fly fishing equipment to practice more. I literally don't give a shit if I catch anything, I think this was very funny to my guide as I muddled through barely catching two trout and was just as excited about the endangered (barbless hook, catch and release, my wife knows me re: guide) chub I caught.

I don't know if i'd classify it as a 'back-up' hobby but i'm still pretty busy doing music despite the lockdown putting the kibosh on our gigging and touring. I have two new albums lined up for release before the year is out and along with a deep dive back into RPG's and my writing it's the thing that's kept me most sane during this mental shut-in of a year.

The best thing about it is a chance to see friends and do something collaborative as a stave to the isolation.

Oh and my other new hobby is sobriety. Six months now. Who'dve thunk it?

Andi Lennon wrote: Oh and my other new hobby is sobriety. Six months now. Who'dve thunk it?

Huge congrats.

Good job on the 6 months, Andi. Keep it up! Congrats on the albums as well.

I've set up a gym in the garage to ensure that I stay in shape and keep my weight loss happening. Been doing a lot of biking (road & MTB) and running. Gyms have opened, so swimming is back on the menu which is nice. Throwing iron around and getting miles in has been a good way to occupy the time. Trying to ditch this last stubborn 15-20 pounds.