Such that, if even a fellow Doper were to say that he or she did it too, you’d be surprised. We Dopers of course are a sufficiently odd slice of society so that you probably wouldn’t be able to put anything over us, but we shall see…
Anyway, my pastime is taking 30-60 minute drives during the sunsets and drinking in all of the amazing scenery-light and shadow, yellows and golds and deep blues and whites, all while playing my favorite songs at full volume. It’s pretty much where my entertainment dollar goes, anymore.
There’s at least one other curler on the boards, but that’s definitely a fringe hobby. On the other hand, I know a whole club full of people who also play, so I’m hardly alone.
Just finished a woodworking class (and at a damn fine school, too) and built a box. Don’t know if that will become a recurring hobby or not. And I’m building a robotic Etch-A-Sketch; definitely be surprised if someone else here is working on that.
I search for submerged towns, using my boat’s sonar and a remote underwater camera.
Most lakes in Texas are man-made, which often means the dammed waters covered towns. I can usually find the location of the old town via records, and use the GPS to position my boat over it. I drift to and fro until I find unnatural, geometric returns on the sonar, then send down the camera.
What have I found so far? Not much. Only an occasional mud-covered shape like concrete steps (and once, what I thought were tombstones). The most interesting find was while searching for Preston Texas. When I sent the camera down, it was immediately covered by little white crawling things. They jumped on it as soon as the lens got near the lakebed and crawled frantically over it (they were fast!). No matter how fast I retrieved it, they jumped off before I could get the camera back to the surface (about 45 feet deep).
I don’t do it anymore, but as a child, I’d love to create hypothetical cities on paper, drawing highways, streets, parks, subways, etc. I am a terrible artist, with no sense of scale or talent, but I could spend hours doing that. I would sometimes buy oak tag and make a huge city; my largest city had streets up to 101st avenue…
I’m interested in knowing what critics thought about movies and albums back when they were first released, especially if their reviews proved prophetic in some way or were amusingly miles off the mark (did you know that The New Yorker panned The Wizard of Oz as a “stinkeroo”?). I also like looking at the graphic design of old ads. So looking through old magazines satisfies both of those interests.
I “share” some of my findings on critics’ reviews by editing the “Reception” sections of Wikipedia articles on those old movies and albums. Mind you, a lot of the time I’m doing this for movies I’ve never seen and albums I’ve never heard.
Not a completely unknown pastime in the world, but I’m a poetry mentor. I take a couple of fledgling poets under my wing, generally to help them explore working in received forms. It’s fun and keeps me on my toes and it allows me to choose people who might benefit the most from the more intense focus. I used to participate in poetry forums where it was catch as catch can for critique and talent and I burned out on that completely.
I selectively breed sunflowers for enormous height and massive crowns. I’m very likely not the only person who does that, but might be the only one on the Dope.
I used to de-hybridize tomatoes. That is try to discover the original varieties used to make the hybrids and develop a true-breeding line. It was a lot of fun, but growing them out to F7 or F8 or even further and keeping them segregated was eating up too much of my garden space.
I like to collect old meat cleavers; especially those made and signed by various blacksmiths and small 18th and 19th century firms. The perfect rainbow for me is going to some little town like Gna Bone Indiana and finding one made there a hundred years ago in some little antique shop. Best souvenir you can get!
AFAIK, I’m the only person here who runs a Merlin Legend PBX phone system in their home for fun.
On the spectrum of telephone-related hobbies, that’s barely a blip. There are people who run mechanical switching offices (either crossbar or Strowger switches) in their basements and interconnect them with other people’s private exchanges. So far, I haven’t heard of anyone running a 5ESS at home. That would be an illness, not a hobby.
I still have my childhood chemistry set in my basement (you know, the good ones from the old days when they still let kids play with mercury and blow up the basement making rockets). My husband worked in a lab so we always kept it well-stocked for the boys when they were growing up. Now I sort of feel sorry for it, abandoned and alone, so sometimes I head down there and play with stuff. Just doing a little titrating and starting a reaction or two.
I collect car 8-track tape players and accessories. I have 3 under dash (one with FM) models and 3 in-dash models. I have two cassette adapters and one cool hand-operated head cleaner cartridge. They all work. I did not pay over $3 for any one item.
I haven’t added any recently since yard sales are so lousy these days.
Did you know it is possible to play a CD through a cassette adapter inserted into a cassette to 8-track adapter inserted into an 8-track tape deck? It works pretty well!
