Some of us work in offices, some of us work at home; some of us are raising children 24 hours a day, others of us are raising someone else’s children. Even if you’re not getting a paycheck, chances are, most of us are working folks. And when you’re working folk, you don’t always have time to do everything that you want. Which brings me to today’s Lunchtime Poll question…
What hobby do you most enjoy doing when you’ve got a few hours to yourself, away from the responsibilities and demands of your career – whether that career is high-powered executive or constantly patient mother of miniature narcissists who never pick up their damned shoes from the hallways no matter how many times you ask?
For me, it’s cooking. Why, just this weekend, I made a bunch of treats for work on Monday and Tuesday. I’m holding a few long, long training sessions on those days and figured a few sweet treats would improve everyone’s morale. Why, I’ve got chocolate caramels, chocolate custard tarts, peanut butter cups (with dark chocolate peanut butter!), banana bread, and cinnamon-apple cake.
Even though it’s hot and miserable outside right now (90° in Seattle is hot stuff, indeed), I can’t step away from my kitchen when I’ve got some free time to cook.
Well, how about you? Is it mountain climbing? Rowing? Baking? Sewing? Taking hot baths until you’re pruney?
43 replies on “Lunchtime Poll: Not-Work Hobbies”
My current project at home is a papercraft alphabet for my adorable little nephew. He’s only three months old so it’s kind of jumping the gun but damn I love papercrafts. Maybe they can decorate his room with them? Up high where he can’t nom them?
http://howaboutorange.blogspot.com/2012/07/print-and-fold-papertoy-alphabet.html
Other than that I like to cook, do origami, paint/draw/sculpt if I can. Been trying to include more experiences in my life. It was suggested to me that I should do more outside of work to make work smaller in scale to my life as a whole. We’ll see how that goes! I’m hopeful.
Oh wow that is so cute!
I really see the value in making work a smaller part of your life. I really had some luck with that in the past when I felt that work had taken over too much of my thought-life. I couldn’t even make dinner without dwelling on work!
Papercraft alphabet. My mind is creating all sorts of wonderful iterations of this!
Oh, those are amazing!
I run fairly often, and I like to swim laps, and sometimes I take a ballet class. I also really enjoy napping.
That’s a very unusual set of hobbies, but they kind of fit together, don’t they? Swimming is so graceful (unless you’re me), and obviously, ballet is pretty much tops for grace, too.
And napping, well. Who the hell doesn’t want to be a pro napper.
I have turned into a knit freak. I will knit any time I have five minutes to sit quietly.
Shoot, there was a time when I brought all of my knitting to college classes. It’s so soothing, and something about it really centers the mind, don’t you think? It’s like meditation, really.
I enjoy painting, although this also requires quiet time from kids, but usually I like to sit with a cup of coffee and veg out via tv, internet, or a book. Feels like I haven’t’ read a book in a while…
I’ve taken to audiobooks lately, since I feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day right now for me to read.
Wouldn’t mind taking up painting one day, though. Do you use oils, watercolors…?
Truth be told, I’m not much of a ‘relax’ person. Too many things to worry about, but once those things pass, I suppose I’d be most likely to fill my time up with writing (gotta make some progress on my sites at some point…), making videos, learning stuff online, various degrees of success in growing things to eat, figuring out how to cook more stuff without half of what I buy going bad, and makeup/hair masks/face masks/making scented products to bathe in and/or wear. I’d really like to get into doing stuff w/essential oils. Oh, and, uh, exercising, because I’m super-sure I’ll get right on that.
It’s so funny you mention essential oils. I’ve been giving sidelong glances at essential oils for a long time–for bathing, skincare, hair care, aromatherapy. Seems like I can’t get it off my mind, lately.
All of this started when I spent an afternoon perusing PubMed for articles about the benefits of essential oils. Fascinating stuff!
Baking. Â And listening to podcasts. Â Sometimes at the same time.
YES.
My guilty confession? I watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, or another equally campy show, or listen to the BBC while I cook.
The British accents always put me in such a good mood…
If I have time off one of the things I enjoy most is just watching several films or tv episodes on end. That without any pang of guilt you can say ‘Okay, what’s next/Oh, I have to see the next one immediately!’
This is how I feel when I have an unencumbered “weekend.” You know, the sort of weekend when you can stay up as LATE as you damn well please because you don’t have anywhere to be the next day.
Next to napping, this has to be the best feeling as an adult.
No work tomorrow? EFF YEAH.
Is the Internet a hobby? I spend a ton of time surfing.
Other than that, I do knittin’, book-readin’, cookin’ and this week only, buildin’ furniture. From Ikea. So not like, carpentry, though that would be awesome.
An Ikea enthusiast, are we!
Have you seen all of those Ikea hacks? I’m debating doing one I saw recently for a makeup table. That shit was real.
Yes, I love Ikea hacks! I wouldn’t call myself an enthusiast, though, so much as an ‘I just moved into my first apartment and need cheapo furniture’ person. However, today I spent almost the entire day putting together an enormous chest of drawers all by myself and it feels totally badass.
Writing. Yoga. Scuba diving whenever I can afford it (not as often as I’d like). And recently: paddleboarding. Watch out for a We Try It post in the next few weeks…
So, um, there are these paddleboarders who go out on the Puget Sound and Lake Washington–the two major bodies of water around Seattle.
And I cannot even watch them because (1) it looks really hard and (2) I keep thinking they will fall into the gross, gross waters of the Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
So I guess I’m saying, Please only go paddleboarding in cleanish waters. I will worry, otherwise, that kelp and silt will drown you. D:
My first lesson was in Grand Canal Dock in Dublin, so I’m immune to grossness:) Second lesson was in a nature reserve in North Dublin where people were catching crabs to eat, so I’m guessing it was clean enough… third lesson TBC, I’ll let you know:)
Mine are: writing romance, writing poems, making quilts, other sewing/craft projects, studying Spanish, reading, and screwing around online. Trying to cut back on that last one…
SCREWING AROUND ONLINE IS A TOTALLY VALID HOBBY.
Do you find, writing romance as you do, that plotting the story is really necessary? Every time I’ve tried my hand at writing romance, I cannot stick to a plot. It always ends up as something entirely other than what I planned (mostly, everyone ends up dead *sigh*).
I laughed so hard at “everyone ends up dead” !
Personally, I have to plot. I never stick to the plan exactly, but I need to have a basic idea of the storyline. The first book I finished, I didn’t plot ahead, and it was a hot mess (for other reasons too, but still…) No plotting up front can mean tons and tons of rewriting later, or realizing 100 pages in that I don’t really have a story you can sustain.
Sewing for me. Though in my current state of unemployment sewing is the only thing that IS getting me a meagre amount of money. So not sure if that really counts… That said, making myself a sexy silky dress today for a friend’s wedding this coming weekend :D.
I’m trying to learn how to sew dresses! I think this first one will probably just be a wear-around-the-house dress. Maybe the first several will be. :)
I seem to wear a WAY HUGER SIZE in dress sewing patterns. Is this normal?
Yes, this is very normal. For example I’m usually 8-10 normal closes and 12-14 dress pattern size. I’ve heard the explanation that it is due to the fact that fashion has undergone some serious vanity sizing whereas the pattern world has not. I’d highly recommend doing a skirt before  a dress if you’re new to the sewing thing, shoulders are a tricky thing sometimes. Yay for starting to sew!
Yeah, I started with a dress, and near the shoulders you have to like, scrunch up one of the pieces and cut a bunch of little slits and curve it to make it match up with the other one? (Do you know what I mean?) And it’s kind of hard! I’m going to try to finish it, and then try a skirt next. :)
easing can be a tricky thing, I’d recommend stay stitching along the seam line before you do any cutting. Also, most fabrics squish a little better than they stretch (unless you’re lucky enough to have a stretch fabric in which case all of above is easier)
Photography. Specifically analog photography and alternate processes. As soon as I have a weekend with enough free time I am cleaning out my basement bathroom and turning it into a dark room. (No one wants to pee there anyway because it’s so dark and gloomy.) I don’t have an enlarger yet, but I have all the chemicals I need for dry tintypes and I have a large format camera I inherited from my granddad to take them in. I also shoot a lot of 120 and 35mm, and I have a real fondness for plastic and vintage cameras. Also on my to do list is to assemble a plastic twin lens reflex camera from a kit I got in the mail about a week ago.
Cool. Can you achieve effects in analog that you can’t in digital? I don’t know anything about it!
I like the way old-fashioned darkrooms smell, though…the chemicals.
Er, yes and no. You can mimic the in camera effects with digital pretty well (think Instagram), but you don’t get analog’s weird unpredictability. I have some cameras that basically have minds of their own. They leak light, they don’t always focus where you think they should, they vignette. I once shot a whole roll only to realize when I got it processed that it had already been exposed once and that I had just made everything on it a double exposure. I also had some fun times with finding some old Polaroid 600 film in my mother’s closet and shooting it long after it had expired. Everything came out weird orange and demented looking. It forces me to quit being a control freak, which I am about most of my other forms of art. For me, it’s more about the experience of taking pictures than the end result necessarily.
You can see the mad experiments here:Â http://www.lomography.com/homes/opifex
Oh, I love looking at your pictures!
And that’s really interesting. It’s probably not an exact correlation, but I sometimes write poetry in traditional form  for the same reason–it forces a little bit of randomness and unpredictability, instead of me controlling everything.
Aww, thanks. And I’m a pretty tactile person in general, so I like physical media.
At the moment I swing between digital art and teaching myself the basics of interior design via Sims 3. Once I get a dedicated craft room, it will be sewing, cross stitch and altered art – all the things I can’t do from the computer.
Can you design houses, gardens and interiors in Sims?
Maybe I shouldn’t know the answer to this. :D
You can. And with the amount/variety of custom content available you can design almost anything you want. It’s really cool, and with a good graphics setup the detail is incredible.
Cool.
I’ll see you all next year sometime.
Welcome to the plumbob side!!
:-D
I am all about the reading a good book with a nice glass of wine with some awesome music playing when I have free time. Of course with the amount of free time I have this week, I’ll have to be very careful my love of wine doesn’t crossover in to the alcoholic danger zone.
I totally now have that Top Gun ‘danger zone’ song stuck in my head. And damn but a glass of wine and a good book sounds fabulous! I’ve only got a week or two more on my current meds and then I can drink again! I AM SO EXCITED. (In a not-an-alcoholic way)
Yes! My evil plan worked! And getting off med so you can drink again is awesome (in a not-an-alcoholic way(!