Have you used this time to do or learn something new?

The Quarantine Zone
1

What new activities, hobbies, knowledge, etc. have you gained while staying home due to Covid-19?

I have 3 things that I can’t say I would have taken up without this enforced time at home:

  1. I can now solve 5 kinds of Rubik’s cubes (I learned 3x3, 2x2, Skewb, and Megaminx – I could already solve the Pyraminx). I now like to just tinker with one while I’m sitting around.

  2. I took up recurve archery. I ordered a couple of bows, and my kid sometimes joins me. I can hit near the center of a pretty close target reliably. I did this a lot in the first few months, but I’ve not been doing it as much lately. I want to progress to a more distant target, but need to be able to go to a range for that.

  3. Related to 2, I’ve been cresting and fletching my own arrows. (Painting pretty lines on them, and putting feathers on them, basically). Enjoyable, but I only bought so many arrows, so pretty self-limiting.

We’ve also done several home improvement projects, but we would have gotten to them eventually regardless of Covid-19.

2

Nothing radically new, but I’ve been experimenting with food production.

Can you grow potatoes in small pots (5-7 liters)? Ans: yes you can - I did it with home made compost and got a best case yield of just under a kilo per pot (!). Ordinarily you wouldn’t attempt this because you’d vacation at some point and the plants would die from lack of water.

After I took the potatoes up I reused the pots and compost for lettuce - works perfectly well.

The main crop of potatoes was more conventionally grown, in the ground, on an allotment (community garden in the US, I believe). So: after I dig them up, can I re-use the plots for a second crop (peas and fava beans)? Ordinarily we would have our main vacation in September and so possibly miss the crops. Experiment still in progress, but it’s looking good.

j

3

Yes, I went from dabbling with card magic (a couple self-working tricks) to full blown advanced techniques. Memorized stacks, advanced slights and flourishes, etc. And I have no intention on making a dime from it though.

4

Very cool, both of you. We wanted to do some planting in pots and in the yard. We have a couple of small tomato plants in small pots, which would be doing better if we put them in bigger pots and focused more care on them, but it hasn’t happened.

For the card magic, it sounds like it might be similar to my Rubik’s cube endeavor. I’d never tried because I knew it involved memorizing several algorithms, and it felt like too big of an undertaking – I wouldn’t have the focused time to consistently work on learning it. Now, that has been possible, and necessary even for sanity purposes.

5

My wife has really gotten into gardening, she felt like it was necessity since there might be food shortages. I doubt there will be a magic shortage, but there might be!