Dem
47
GOP
53
Here is the question we put before readers 2 weeks ago:
J.H. in Portland, OR, asks: We've seen how many of the Electoral-Vote.com faithful are connected to the computer sciences and now I'm wondering how many are involved with ham radio. I ask this because I wonder if there is a correlation between technical curiosity and experimentation, and the awareness and interest in political events. Or between other areas of interest and interest in political events.
So, I would like to know: What are Electoral-Vote.com readers' hobbies?
We've gotten a LOT of responses. And we've gotten many responses from readers who say they are particularly enjoying this question and the answers. So, it's going to continue for a couple more weeks after this. Today, it's responses from readers whose hobbies are artsy and/or craftsy.
K.F. in Framingham, MA: My main hobby is the theater. I have been involved in the theater on and off since I was 12. We're talking junior high, high school, college, and then community theater. I have been in over 35 plays including many musicals and I've directed, produced, worked backstage, and written for several others.
Incidentally, I ran for local office once. I enjoyed running because it felt a bit like theater to me, especially when I participated in the debates. I didn't win that race, but in many ways I'm glad I didn't. While running for office was fun, I realized that I didn't really want the job. That job was meant for boring, serious people who like sitting for hours in meetings poring over data and budgets. Campaigning was fun, but governing is hard and boring. I remember joking with my opponent (who won), "I'm the real winner because now you actually have to go do that job." He quit politics after just 6 years.
So today I tell people that I have no interest in being a politician on the public stage. I would much prefer to be on the theatrical stage, playing a politician.
A.N. in Berkeley, CA: I am a theatrical designer with projects that take me around the U.S. and the world. Work consumes virtually all of my time so I would say that my hobby is the performing arts which, these days, is fully entangled in politics. AND I'm a daily reader of your site.
T.B. in Santa Clara, CA: What a great way to learn more about the readership!
I have a B.S. in computer science, but I attended art school my freshman year to study scientific illustration before missing math and science enough to change.
Neither of those is my passion, though. I live for music! I sang in choir in junior high and high school, then took college off and have sung in various work or community-based choirs since 2000.
Having gotten my first computer in 1991, in the dial-up BBS era I found the demo/music scene. That pushed me to write my own music (on ScreamTracker, for anyone else who knows it). A few years ago, I uploaded them to YouTube.
I only took half a year of piano lessons in second grade, so I play piano by ear. Choir has made me a better sight reader, but I'm still not great. I had a plan to do a bunch of piano/vocal covers, but to date, I've only finished one: Green Day's "Good Riddance."
Four months before my 50th birthday, after neglecting live music for years, I set a goal to attend 50 shows where music was a focal point. I made it to 51 and created a photo/video montage to celebrate.
Finally, in 2008, I realized I wake up "hearing" songs in my head almost every night/day (sometimes multiple times), and I've kept a daily journal of every song. Seventeen years and counting!
R.B. in Seattle, WA: Playing guitar. I'm retired now, but was working as a software engineer when I started playing. It's a great hobby for so many reasons: you get a way to express yourself, you can do it with other people, which is unbelievably fun, etc. But specifically as a hobby for a software developer or, probably, most other professions: It forces you to be 100% in this moment as it comes. No going back to correct something you misplayed, as the next note is already here. This will make a real difference in how you look at being alive.
M.S. in Cupertino, CA: Listening to classical music has always been part of my life. For the first decade after finishing graduate school and starting a lifetime career in computer systems research, I built and flew radio-controlled model airplanes, including some of the first with electric motors. Then I got interested in historical landscape painting and have spent the last 35 years of my spare time researching a 19th century American artist. This resulted in my building and still updating one of the first catalog raisonnes of a painter on the Internet; see here. I also have done a fair amount of birding.
D.B. in Keedysville, MD: Music! Still trying to get better on (wild and crazy) electric and acoustic guitar, bass, keyboards, woodwinds, cello and hand drums, still want to increase my compositional output, and still want to make more strides into designing and building musical electronic devices. I play only improvisational music (no songs allowed). Music is so beautiful, it becomes truth!
B.B. in Toronto, ON, Canada: I retired from my life's vocation as a teacher and practitioner of family medicine 3½ years ago at 75. At the age of 16, I had to make the binary choice to either join an orchestra playing French Horn, or go to university. Clearly I chose the latter—loved my career and have no regrets.
I was sitting and talking with my wife just before retiring wondering about who I would be without a stethoscope or students, and thinking wistfully about having donated my horn to my kids' local middle school, and she said "Why don't you rent one?"
So I did; found to my surprise that I could still make a noise from it, joined a group called "New Horizons"—whose stated purpose is to bring music to seniors—and played in a concert band for a year. I thought it wouldn't take long to get back to where I was almost 60 years ago, but in reality I pretty much started from scratch, and had to work as hard at this as at anything else in my life just to become mediocre at it. But I bought a good secondhand horn and now play in two community orchestras, a swing band, and compose for orchestra. Though I have yet to have any live premieres I do get people listening on my YouTube channel!
This is my "road not taken," and I feel so privileged to have had the chance to live my other self. There is nothing like studying scores, hard practice and playing live music with others to keep the mind active and feed the soul, to say nothing of maintaining my lungs' vital capacity!
I suppose this isn't leisure anymore, even though it feels like it, but another vocation. So now my leisure time is taken with photography, grandchildren, and folk music song circles with my wife and friends.
T.B. in Leon County, FL: My list:
- Sacred Harp (4-part a capella hymn singing): I was introduced to this activity before I first met my wife and was a little intrigued; then I met her (via an unrelated church board), and as she was big-time into Sacred Harp, I figured I'd either have to fully engage or lose her. She died recently, and I'm still singing (although we took 3 years off for COVID).
- Woodworking: Friends have a very good workshop, including a CNC machine and a portable mill. I help them mill lumber and do grunt work; they help me design/build tables, cutting boards with inlaid design, specialty trim, etc.
- Reading real paper books, currently Patrick Taylor: I read hours per day to my wife after cataract surgery made reading challenging for her; she liked cozy mysteries by women about women, so that's most of what I've read these past 5 years. I just finished a car trip and "read" Moby Dick and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I read the odd "history of science" book now and then, too.
- The cat on my lap purrs me to add "cat care": Our... well, my two cats are easy. Our previous cat lived to 22 and needed special care his last 5 years. I went from "I hate cats"—my wife and kids took "complete" responsibility the first 8 years—to, well, I don't even think it anymore.
- Contra Dancing: COVID put an abrupt end to my dancing, and my wife's poor health kept me home. But squares in junior high and high school, international folk in college and contras since 1990... I should go back!
W.W. in Washington County, OR: I'm passionate about dancing, after starting in the 1980s. I go out dancing every week and often travel to dance events. I've danced in over 20 states, Canada, England, France, Ireland and Costa Rica. I most often go contra dancing, and have led contra dances since 1992. There's a caller (like square dancing), so you don't have to know how to lead or to follow. Contra dancing is viewed by some as a "Gateway dance"—it can lead to other dancing. "Oh, there are a couple of waltzes each evening, I should try that." "Some of us are going blues dancing, wanna come?" Find a local dance with www.trycontra.com.
While I dance contras more often than anything else, I know it doesn't work for everyone. Some folks get dizzy, and others find the social aspects too intense. There's a wide world of dancing, from Argentine Tango to Blues to Cajun to Zydeco. Find the music you can't sit still to, see if you can find a dance community, and give it a shot. If the first community doesn't work for you, try something else.
I also spend a lot of time with genealogy. It's like solving a mystery and working a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces that represent people and records. I'm also involved with DNA genealogy, as a volunteer admin of several surname DNA projects, and have "solved" a few adoption cases, finding unknown parents for adoptees. DNA genealogy is a new field, with direct-to-consumer tests being available only since 2001.
Otherwise, I enjoy bicycling, hiking, and skiing, both cross-country and downhill.
J.K. in Portland, OR: I will respond to my fellow Portlander by opining that the average Electoral-Vote.com reader is somewhat polymathic. Which translates into a belief that we do not restrict our interests (or our expertise) to STEM, much less technological stuff. In my case, as a career policy scientist committed to logic and evidence, my main non-professional activity has been international folkdancing, where I have been a dancer, dance teacher, performer, choreographer, master teacher (teaching teachers) and initiator of new recreational dance groups. I also am a (much less expert) singer, principally in Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass (SATB) choruses (having over my lifetime sung in a performance each part except alto). So in my own life, it's been STEAM and because I do it all with other people, TEAMS.
C.B. in Hamden, CT: Choral singing. Gospel/spirituals, Italian madrigals, show tunes, religious services, barbershop quartets, Baroque oratorios, jazz a capella, Beethoven's 9th—any music, any time, anywhere. There is no situation that isn't improved by singing with other people.
S.S. in Toronto, ON, Canada: I'll just say that until I discovered Electoral-Vote.com about ten years ago, I had absolutely no interest in politics. When Donald Trump came on the scene that changed entirely and I have been glued to the political news in the States ever since (an American by birth, I have been a Canadian citizen since about 1975, but have almost no interest in Canadian politics). No interest in computer science, either, or any other technology. At 82 years old, I sing with a group of shape note singers in Toronto, I also do folk dancing with a group, and I work part time online proofreading and copy editing English translations from other languages. Generally, my interests are in the English language, music, philosophy and religion.
E.B. in Freeport, MT: I am a retired regulatory attorney (public utilities). My leisure activities include reading anything and everything about World War II, The Beatles, the Boston Red Sox, human evolution (my major back in college), and, to a lesser extent, the Sixties.
I am a half-decent amateur musician and enjoy writing songs and tunes, and I practice daily to gain competence as an instrumentalist (mandolin). I plan to begin recording my songs; I have the equipment, but so far it just sits there.
I also enjoy woodworking, and am currently building a workbench for my daughter and her family.
G.T. in Cincinnati, OH: A retired professor, my major hobbies are bicycling and woodworking. I was once a racer, but now I cycle mostly for health and for "improvement." I can't seem to shake my racing habits and like to challenge myself with intervals and hill climbs and sprints. I usually ride alone although I still love fartlek group rides.
I make furniture for family and friends including beds, dressers, tables and benches:
I've been lucky enough to accumulate a fairly large cache of domestic hardwoods (approx. 5,000 BF) that I'm hoping I will turn into furniture before I turn into compost.
I also spend 2 months each summer and fall volunteering as a host at a state forest campground in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Hiking, fishing, cycling and kicking back.
G.S.C. in South Pasadena, CA: For over 40 years, I was a scientific glassblower. I made the kinds of things you see in science fiction movies or TV, where a lab is filled with coiled tubes and containers boiling away with colored liquids. However, I made things like that for actual scientific laboratories, not TV or movies. (The point: Just about all of these things are handmade.) For 32 years, I worked at a university. A professor or student would come to me and ask me to make something. We'd talk about it, how they expected to use it. They would explain the science, and I would explain the glass. For me, the fun was figuring out HOW to make it.
My hobbies are (mostly) woodworking (I make Arts & Crafts furniture that I mostly design myself) and photography, with enhancements done in Photoshop and/or Lightroom. These activities, like my job, are fun because of the fun of figuring out how to make or do something. It's those times when you wake up at 5:00 a.m., realizing "THAT is how I'm going to make it/do it." Both of these overlapped my profession by many years, so there was no transition to them; I just moved them in to fill the time I was working. Both my old job and my old hobbies are passions. I've never been bored, and I've never been busier than I am now.
A.C. in Kingston, MA: Probably my biggest one is knitting/fiber arts. I manage 1-2 big projects (blanket, sweater) a year, and loads of little ones (hats, scarves, socks, Christmas ornaments, dice bags, seasonal decor).
Knitting ticks a lot of boxes for me. The physical repetition is relaxing and helps me manage my ADHD. I like that I can "be productive" while watching TV with my family or hanging out in a group. I like being able to give friends and family handmade gifts. I get to support small local yarn stores and local sheep and alpaca farms when I buy supplies. And I get to repurpose and upcycle; for example, I knitted a bath mat by ripping old frayed towels into long spiral strips that I used for "yarn." I get to engage in low-stakes analytical thinking—yarn selection involves considering fiber, weight, color, and source, while project selection involves considering supplies on hand, what the recipient would like, and how much time I have to get it done.
I develop a lot of my own patterns based on pop culture, history and mathematics. I use a similar approach in most of my hobbies (the other big ones are cooking, cross stitch, and playing folk and classical music) where I may start with someone else's template (recipe, pattern, composition) but then adjust it to make it my own.
M.A.H. in Warren, MI : My hobby is crochet.
A.S. in Renton, WA: After work, I relax by improving my landscaping while listening to sci-fi audio books.
D.E. in Lancaster, PA: There is an old album by the Doobie Brothers called What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits. I would amend that slightly and say, "What were once vices are now hobbies." And my vices are legion!
My go-to leisure activities will always be reading and watching critically acclaimed films and TV shows. Although in the last couple of years, I have definitely acquired a new vice that became a hobby, and that is building LEGO kits. It started off when a friend gave me a small kit of Captain America for Christmas. I built it on Christmas Day and it reminded me how my mom and I would have to assemble at least one gift unwrapped that morning. Building that LEGO kit made me feel her presence and that was a great comfort for me. The next year, I bought my own kit for Christmas, this time a little more complicated in the build, and still it made me feel like I had been visited by the Ghost of Christmases Past. While searching for which kit to buy, I discovered there is a huge array of sets from "definitely for a child" to serious adult subjects and complexities covering a wide range of topics.
There was one set in particular that caught my eye, as I have always wanted a sizable model of the SS Titanic. I saved up my money for a couple of months and splurged. This model is huge, four feet in length. It is capable of being broken into three pieces, and the cross sections of the ship are extremely accurate and detailed, showing the ship's pool, staterooms, dining rooms and Grand Staircase. From that moment on, I was addicted.
There are many themes to chose from but the ones I follow are Icons, Art, Botanicals, Marvel and Lord of the Rings. Other themes include Star Wars, Harry Potter, Cars, Architecture, and starting this coming Black Friday, Star Trek (I just heard my disposable income fly away at warp speeds).
Speaking of cost, I won't lie, it is an incredibly expensive hobby; but I have a way of looking at the cost that makes it more bearable. Unlike most people who try to build a set in one day, sometimes rushing through the build in 10-12 hours, I slow it down so as to appreciate the experience more. For example, the Titanic set cost me over $600 but LEGO divides the 9,090 pieces into 46 bags. Instead of rushing through the build, I spaced it out by just building two bags a week, on my days off. When you divide the costs by the number of days I was physically building the set that came out to about $26 a week. If I had indulged in another hobby, I would have definitely spent that at least—shoot, when I was going out to clubs in my youth, I would spend many times that each weekend, and building LEGO doesn't give me a killer hangover either. Drawing the build out this way made my experience with the Titanic last almost half a year.
Which is a nice segue as to why I find building LEGO sets so enthralling. There is a mindfulness to the build. My hands are physically active as well as my mind. When I'm building, my thoughts are directed to the model, so much so that they crowd out all thoughts of the daily moral outrages of Donald Trump and his cast of villains. The process of building gives me peace. For me there is an active mental participation in the art of the build. Not only are you following the instructions carefully (believe me, being wrong by one stud always has disastrous effects) but I feel my mind is engaged with the designers. Building LEGO sets is like being an Impressionist painter but with plastic bricks instead of paint dabs. It's more the effect on the eye than being photorealistic. There are about 4,000 unique pieces and 200 different colors for the bricks, studs and plates, so that means the same pieces that went into building the Titanic also go into building Rivendell, a Bird of Paradise plant, the Milano and Van Gogh's "Starry Night." There's a wonderful joy in discovering that a car wheel becomes the basis of a delicate flower.
Then there is the journey of the build. Of course, I know what the finished model will look like, but when I start off, I find myself puzzled as to what in the hell I'm building. I question why that particular piece or why is that stud where it is and then many bags down the road I discover why with a click. When building the bow of the Titanic, there was a deep square shaft near the bow, way more forward than the ship's forward mast. I puzzled and puzzled why that shaft was there until one day I built a complicated piece that looked more like a skyscraper but with two anchors (made from the hot dog piece) on chains dangling from the top. I turned the page in the instruction book to discover that piece slid down into the shaft, clicking easily into place. At first I wondered why it made sense to go to all that trouble, but then it occurred to me, that attaching the anchors to the side of the ship gives them an artificiality. By building that piece as they did, the designer made it so that the anchors and chains look like they had massive weight to them. A small effect, and one most wouldn't even notice, but taken as a whole, it gives the model a sense of realism, stripping the illusion of plastic shaped hot dogs in favor of massive iron weights.
Then there is the story of each model, and I think this is what really sets LEGO apart from other building sets. Sometimes the model tells a story, and sometimes the original design engages me in a conversation. When building a Christmas Village set called the Alpine Lodge, I became fascinated with each piece that represented snow. To me the snow pieces told a story about what kind of snow it was, how long ago it snowed, and the consequences of what the weak winter sun and gravity were having on the snow. The more I thought on the nature of the snow the more I was convinced that the designers of the set were very aware of these details, and I have to admire that kind of awareness and artist's eye.
Each morning when I wake, one of the first things I see is my Rivendell set, based off of the designs from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. I am endlessly fascinated by it and am reminded that all great architecture relies on illusion and tricks—our eyes are constantly being confounded by shapes and colors. The buildings of Rivendell seem to rise out of the rocks and streams. The building looks so light and airy, like a thing from another world, with the building's physical supports hidden cleverly from view. It speaks of a life of contemplation and reflection. I can hear in my mind's ears the rustle of the leaves and the crisp bubbling of the stream as it passes over the rocks. The trees are beginning to change color, reminding myself that the time of the elves is quickly coming to an end. The whole set speaks of transience. I also know that completely hidden from view underneath the plinth holding the Ring is a representation of the Eye of Sauron, forever fixated on the prize and always there, waiting patiently. Given the state of the world, we all need a Rivendell to escape to if even only for a few hours of peace, knowing that Sauron—er, I mean Trump—will be waiting for when we're not.
And that's why I love building LEGOs!
M.M.M. in Oakland, CA : I love seeing all the common and the disparate interests of our reader community. I share many of these too: voracious pop culture consumption, music, gardening, running, video games, comic books. I saw no one mention another hobby I have recently engaged with: carpentry and woodworking.
Ultimately, through my hobbies I have realized the theme for me is creation. Producing something rather than just consuming it.
Thanks for sharing everyone!
Next week will include outdoor activities, sports, and collecting.