What Are Your Hobbies?

Hello house, let's share our hobbies here and what makes them special?

 

Hobbies are sort of my hobbies. I do several things that involve hand crafts. I do or have done leather work, Indian bead work, wood carving, I braid paracord, I do metal work, I make knives, I like to tie flies and make lures for fishing... I collect books, coins, knives, fishing tackle, guns and cups and saucers from occupied Japan. I fish, hunt, shoot. and camp. I also write some poetry and a few books over the years.

I have been a lot like a hyperactive kid most of my life. I don't sleep a lot of nights and am not a big TV watcher so I do a lot of things to keep myself busy.

 

Gardening, bee keepin and working my dogs.

 

Archery slingshots softball basketball fishing kyaking hunting camping sewing

 

This is a survival site. Survival stuff is my hobby -- is for all preppers. At my age, keeping a garden going, plus lawn maintenance and house repairs, is a challenge for Mr. Ticker. Keeping the toys sighted in and clean has been slipping. Gotta sight in a slug shotgun I bought over a year ago -- now that is embarrassing. Seems I'm too busy; I feel like a plate-spinner in the circus.

 

Gardening (most of my life) Fishing (again most of my life) Hunting, (yep most of my life) Now I have a soon to be 5yo and soon to be 7 yo. Plate spinner or juggler is a good way of expressing life for me. I always think of when I can go camping and fishing or hunting then life happens and I take a weeks vacation and am working on painting the kids room.

Edit: we did start a business to sell at the farmers market. I decided to let that go. With all the rest of life. I could never catch up and sleep too. We did get around and purchase a dehydrator and a vacuum sealing systems. I could go on.

 

Cooking I love trying out new recipes from different countries. I have tried a lot of Nigella Lawson's dishes and also most dishes from Tasty channel on Youtube. At the moment, I am trying out Asian spicy dishes. Fish, calamari, prawns. Yum!

 

That sounds good

 

My hobby, if you can call it that, is information gathering. Not on just anything but on the real stuff that's going on in our world, and what's in store for us. I want to be a part of what's happening. In order to achieve that I plan on writing what I have found out based on facts and personal experiences, which I've had a lot of. I am taking writing classes at a university, so I'm pretty serious about it and it keeps me busy.

 

My hobbies are basically studying martial arts and anything related (Firearms, survival) and playing video games here and there. I do love a good game of poker, however. It's one of my vices.

 

I am enjoying the contribution from people here. You guys rock. To me, my hobbies are cooking, watching films and reading non-fiction books.

 

Mine would be the lamest here. I do gardening... That's it.

 

My wife has been wanting to keep bee's for years

 

I have had many hobbies over the years. Electronics. Martial arts as a teen. Construction, wood working, plumbing, electric, heating & air, etc. Marksmanship. History buff, US history especially. Historical/colonial living. Camping. Hiking. Exploring. Anything mechanical. Pilot training. Motorcycles. Building hot rods. Basic emergency medical interests. Homesteading. Aquaponics. I have so many interests. I wish I had time time to practice all of them.

 

Mechanics. That's one hobby of mine that is going to turn into a profession! I plan to start a mechanical course soon. It's something I always liked and that is in high demand around here. And then I plan on specializing myself in motorcycles. Gotta love em!

 

I have been a biker since the day the training wheels came off my bicycle. LOL. I've been a mechanic since the day I was old enough to pass wrenches to my Pops. I previously owned a bike shop, then moved on to owning a auto repair shop.

 

My passion is gardening, and photography. I also have interest in cooking and reaching out. I capitalised on my gardening passion and started a business designing and executing landscaped gardens.

 

Hey, that's nice indeed! In fact, my love for motorcycles began in a rather unusual way. I had to work in a very far away place almost in another city and only had my bicycle to do so. Then with a month or two salary plus a few economies I bought myself an old Suzuki. Then it was love at first ride. haha. Nice to meet a fellow mechanic

 

I forgot to mention I used to play ALOT of Paintball in the woods. Greatly increased my tactical skills & alot of respect for being shot at as well

 

My hobbies are reading, listening to music or writing one. I think reading is special to me because it helps me to relate with the thoughts of my role models.
I have also acquired a lot of helpful skills through reading. I have read about a lot of the worlds successful business figures and have started thinking differently from some of my peers.

 

I enjoy travel, although I haven't been able to do too much of it lately because of finances, but I also enjoy cooking very much, movies,sports and even doing a few arts and crafts projects from time to time.

 

My hobbies basially all revolve around my wife and kids needs and interests.
Once the kids go to school though, I'm sure I'll try and find some me time to work out what I'm interested in.

 

Well, it used to be hiking when I was diving for a living and now when I hike for a job I suppose diving is my hobby. And hunting and fishing, woodwork and stuff like ham radio (and all that comeswith that, dont wanna get to nerdy here). I collect robots also. Little toy robots, cheramic robot figurines, transformers, wall-e, star wars, rc bots, jap-bots, pins and t-shirts with robots. All types of robots. Always had a thing for them. When the kids wants me to take them to a movie they check to see if theres robots in the movie first and tell me about it. Id say 95℅ of our dvd and book collection involves robots in one form or shape.

 

I collect and use people-powered sewing machines.

CD in Oklahoma

 

Sorry. I guess I got a little carried away, but I saw somewhere that a new member needed to make several posts before being allowed into other parts of the site, so I’ve been trying to make some good posts. I’ll can it. Have a good one.

CD in Oklahoma

 

Over my years I have been very fortunate in that I've managed to turn some of my sort of hobbies into professions. I always liked puzzles and also always wanted to know what made things work. LOL, I was a terror as a kid because I was always taking things apart to "see" what was inside and made them go. Eventually I got better then good at putting them back together.

I used to clean and repair watches when I was a kid and made some money doing that. The inside of an 18 jeweled watch is truly art. I started fixing a lot of things for friends. Eventually I made that my profession and would work on and repair ANYTHING. If I had never seen something it was a puzzle to me and I would actually enjoy tearing it apart, figuring out how it was supposed to work and then why it didn't and fix it. I also have always liked wood working and have on several occasions turned that into a money making enterprise.

My wife loves to paint. For years she and I combined our hobbies and I cut out and made things that she painted and we sold them on the side of the road for our Christmas money. My daughter got involved and we never had any after Christmas debts. She learned a lot about where money comes from and never had this misconception that so many kids have that money just sort of magically grows in their parents wallet or purse. We usually made between one and teo thousand dollars every year with this little home business...and had a lot of fun working together.

If I had any single bit of advice for anyone, but especially young people, it would be to start your own small business and turn your pleasures into something that others will pay you to do. In America the tax advantages are MASSIVE. LOL, I live in a world where there is a year around nearly 50% off sale on any of the tools and such that I use in my various hobbies!! The things that earlier had been an expense suddenly LEGALLY became tax deductions. My daughter was paid for helping and THAT was a tax deduction. Eventually she got to the point where she bought her own clothes and such as child with her own money that she actually earned working for the family businesses.

You have to work and if you turn your pleasures into what you do life is a lot more fun. I've done this over and over. I like guns...I got a federal firearms license and sold and repaired them. I LOVE gun shows and people actually PAID me to go to them!! Did I get rich? No but I have had more fun that most rich people have and have more toys than is reasonable to help me enjoy my pleasures.

 

Wish I had the resources to have a coin collection.

My surviving kids and wife have had, or currently have, life-threatening health conditions which eat all of my income.

 

Coins are COOL. I collect Type Sets. That means that I avoid the expensive coins and am just looking for examples of the different styles and types. There is a lot of history in our coins. I love the stories that go with many of them. Very few people have even heard of a lot of the coins of our ancestors back when say a penny was worth enough that they had to make half pennies to make change. Personally I think the older coins were a lot prettier than the new stuff. The Walking Liberty series is one of my favorites.

 

My hobbies are also kind of my interim profession. Ive always been pretty artistic. Ive enjoyed painting, photography and singing since I was little. Now I do some modeling, am trying to break out as a singer, and do some small commissions painting, sculpting, wood burning and drawing.

 

It can be whatever they want man. What it is for you it's not for someone else. What most people call survival, I call camping. Doesn't give me the right to judge them. It's not a lifestyle. Don't let it take over your life, what's the point in surviving? Living. Right.

 

I dont know what makes you a "spokesperson" for the very loose prepper community really, you might be psychic or something, I don't know. But to the vast majority of people it is common that we don't know anything about the future, or about people we don't know for that matter, and if we don't know anything about the future, there is no bombproof way of securing it. So, there can be no experts.
The entire prepper label is used by elitist preppers the same way for example "Heavy metal" was a thing once. You are no real metalhead because you listen to Queen, or whatever. There is no "real" or "unreal"(?) preppers. You think you are a prepper, then you are. I don't know what you are preparing for, but if you say so.
I don't get the least bit offended if I'm not seen as a "real prepper". Geez. I have bills and stuff.

 

I'm not a history nut, however it seems I end up reading a lot of history. When holding an old coin, I think about the people who used the coin back when -- maybe they've been gone a hundred years. I wonder what their days were like and with what conditions they had to live.

I have a Scottish tuppence from the 1600s. One can still see the thistle.

 

Hobbies can have survival value. I like historic rifles from WWI and WWII. If you get out to the rifle range, you'll have put back surplus ammo to do this sort of blasting away. I grow a garden. Canning some food today. Silver coins can be in one's coin collection and if you are rich, you may have gold coins. If you like to work on machines or like carpentry, you'll have the tools for such. All of what I just mentioned will have survival value for the SHTF "festivities".

People who have put back nothing and people without skills are going to be either dead or a real danger when hard times roll in. Maybe we SHOULD prep for a zombie apocalypse!

If they're not preparing, I'll not be sharing.

 

Some interesting hobbies on here.
Mine include:
Collecting British & Canadian Army WW1 medals as well as British Fire Service helmets & cap badges (1940-1974). I also dabble in photography, nothing special just snapping at things that catch my eye.

 

To a certain extent prepping is a hobby for me. My lifestyle has been forced on me for most of my life by the necessities of making a living and supporting my family. When I could I made decisions that I hoped would improve our chances of surviving any sort of collapse but even in that there had to be economic considerations. Unfortunately the sort of places that would be the safest places to be are also mostly not someplace that you can make much of a living. I understand how a lot of people feel trapped in the big cities. They are economic giants where money is easy to come by.

I've personally never seem myself as a prepper. Prepping too often seems to be about piling up huge masses of things that you will then sit on top of and try to protect. The version that I have tried to live has been a part of my entire life repeated over and over.

My Dad was raised in a farming family. It was his first love but after coming home from WW2 farming was just not a possibility. Farming in America at levels smaller than almost industrial is just not economily possible. About all you will have is plenty to eat until the bills become overwhelming and you lose the farm. SO, we lived in a large city but returned to help and work on the family farm when we could. The big thing to my Dad was that I learn how to produce and store my own food if I ever needed to. We did a lot of things in old ways that avoided dependence on a lot of technology.

Then came the Boy Scouts with their motto of always being prepared. I took that totally to heart. I have always been somewhat of a worrier and being prepared ahead of time is comforting to me. My boy scout stuff later melded into militia connections in the 70s when I honestly expected the US to have another civil war possibly racially pushed.

I think that where I differ from the prepper norm is that I have worked hard for nearly my entire life to learn how to survive, maybe even thrive, under almost any conditions. I didn't need to have a lot of food piled up because I KNOW from experience that I can find plenty to eat in the environment that I live in. I also have explored the ability of the human body to adapt and know for a FACT that it doesn't take over 2000 calories every day for a person to survive and be healthy. You can easily live for MONTHS on end on as little as 400 calories a day. You then can play catch up when food becomes easily found. This is actually what humans were evolved for.

As I got older and had more money and time prepping became a hobby. I have collected survival things far beyond any sane need. I like guns and knives and nearly any sort of weapons. I have a fascination with fire and making fires and have a huge collection of fire making things. I like to put together kits of different sizes and have actually got one that has everything that I would need that is not much bigger than a wallet. It covers all of the short term must haves for survival in most any reasonable environment.

I collect how to books like the foxfire series and just about every sort of old skill books that I can find. In the end basically I could set up 25 people with everything that they might need. I look at this sort of collected stuff and probably the best trade goods that I could have. What will a 5 gallon bucket full of 22 lr rounds be worth? How much is a knife going to be worth? It's my best hobby and greatest pleasure.

I decided a long time ago that if the world as we know it goes to crap I'm not just going to survive. I'm going to LIVE and THRIVE. I have always surrounded myself with people that I could use to make a world worth living in and enjoying.

I'm old now, I'm not going to survive. I hate to break this to everyone but none of us are going to get out of this life alive. I still have the same pleasure in my hobby that I always have had and still like to try out every new thing that come out and try to own one of every knife made. If prepping were my lifestyle I'm afraid that at this point I would be getting sort of despondent. No matter how hard I try, I'm not going to survive and my friend and adversary death will in the end catch me as he does all. A lifestyle is too goal oriented and based on win or lose live or die. A hobby is just done for pleasure. I have far exceeded my NEEDS and still am looking forward to another new knife, gun, stove, skill to learn. LIFE is a hobby! You do it as long as it is fun and then move on to something else when it gets boring.

 

I recently got into building & flying RC multi-rotor aircraft. I have a strong electronics back ground & love to assemble, fabricated, create & troubleshoot problems. This plays into my prepping. Practicing these skills that can be applied to nearly any area is fun when you see where a little know how & creativity can take you.
I'm also using this hobby to strengthen ties with my kids, teaching them the same skills & pride .

 

Hey Neiltarquin,

Don't sell yourself short here. Gardening feeds both the body and the soul.
In an older more refined era...this could be classified/known as "Husbandry."

The management and handling of crops as well as livestock.
And people take great pride in this knowledge. Nothing wrong with this ...most certainly!!

It is very satisfying when the crop comes in and one thinks of way to improve what one does to get a better crop next year and be more efficient at it.


My gas tiller broke down when I let someone else borrow it. I need to get another and stop loaning it out. People need to buy their own or rent one.

I won't be doing that again...loaning out my tiller. It was a nice one ...a troy built.

Lessons learned.

I liked feeding the birds around here years go. I quickly found I was feeding not only the birds but the squirrels as well as they verily liked the sunflower seeds.
Soon enough I found that I was not only feeding the squirrels and birds but was attracting the neighborhood cats as well.
I had to taper it off.

Of special interest I verily loved watching Hummingbirds come to the feeders. They are fascinating to watch them hover and feed.


I like to shoot and also to reload my own ammunition . Oddly enough I find myself enjoying my time at the reloading bench as much and sometimes more than shooting. A good sandwich, music, and a drink and I am good for hours.

I have taught myself to form brass cases from one caliber to another for certain applications/firearms

I even have one firearm for which factory ammunition is no longer manufactured. I make my own cases from one caliber, convert or resize it to another caliber, and reload it for this firearm and then shoot it. It is satisfying to know I am not dependent on a retail store, as are many, to get ammunition for this tool.

I have an olde Japanese WW2 rifle in 7.7 MM Japanese Arisaka caliber. Again Ammunition is not easy to find and it is expensive. I taught myself to reform brass cases for this tool as well and reload it to get around the more expensive ammo made by Norma and sold only in a handful of specialty stores around here.

This is a type of problem solving and for which I find interesting.



Also I like listening to and talking with my friend on my ham radio. I have built my own long wire antenna system and hoisted it up into a tree using a fishing pole. It is a roll of 12 gauge wire from Lowes...about 500 feet long.

The olde timers, from whom I learned, taught me to build certain antennas inexpensively and with commonly available materials from the hardware stores. I am ever grateful to these olde timers for teaching and not giving up on me.

I speak on the weekends with my friend out in Tennessee...about 400 miles away.
This works out well in saving phone charges.

I also listen to foreign broadcast stations on my ham radio as it picks these up as well. It even picks up the regular AM/FM bands.

I keep two portable shortwave receiver sets around here which pick up short wave, the ham bands, as well as single sideband traffic.

One of the rooms in my home is converted to my radio room.

This room is "Holy Ground Highlander!!" Just like my garage.

Man stuff happens here!!


Certain kinds of problem solving interest me ...provided time constraints work with me...
Knowing one can solve the problem ...is a good skill to have ..not just a hobby ...but it can be more enjoyable as a hobby.

I like to ride my Honda Ruckus scooter about town weather allowing. Even take it to the store for supplies as I have a double wide milk crate mounted on the back of it.
Also take it to and fro work. It has saved me many times when my car or truck was broken down..as far as missing work. I live about 8 miles from work. I am approaching 18,000 miles on my Honda Ruckus scooter...and am managing to keep it going.

On occasion I like to watch U tube videos on how to solve various problems and or learn new techniques for solving olde problems. These videos can be very helpful.



I do not consider drinking to be a hobby or a worthwhile pastime. I have strict rules about drink.

I do not drink alcohol and operate machinery. I do not drink and reload ammunition....especially this.

I do not drink alcohol and operate my ham radio equipment. There is an amplifier in my radio room...which will kill you with the high voltage if you get on the wrong side of it...and is clearly so labeled.

I am not against alcohol or drinking per se...I am against what I consider stupid.
I have plenty of alcohol around here...the hard stuff. I just seldom drink it unless I am feeling bad...then have a couple of stiff shots and go to bed.

I can do plenty of stupid things stone cold sober. I don't need to be helping it along by a career or hobby in drinking. I've known too many career drinkers in my life..male and female both.
Not for me thanks.


Thanks,
Watcherechris.

Not an Ishmaelite.

 

Good for you GS Auto Tech....


Excellent Philosophy and well said...well said!!

Keep them in the X ring!!

Watcherchris

 

Good for you Tom. Question here......Does running alcohol require extensive modification or adjustment of your equipment/trucks ???

Can you go into any details on this or is it a trade secret??

Watcherchris.

 

Sighted-in that shotgun. Man, is that puppy accurate, even w/iron sights! Remington 870 slug barrel, 20ga., rifled, using Hornady SST saboted 250 gr. slugs. When shooting from bench, that puppy kicks like a mule. Supposed to have 1200 ft.lb. energy at 100 yards. Got the 2" group @ 100 yrds Hornady sez they'll do.

Hobbies? I get home and quite frankly don't have the time for a Zen sh##. Check the news & correspondence. Tonight, I had to repair a punctured tire. Shot'a rum. Shot'a tequila. Gonna shower'n go to bed. Get up and do it again, amen.



Sometimes here at the end, it is two eternities. And sometimes here at the end, it is the wink of an eye.