I thought about putting this in the Fun and Jokes thread, 'cause it is about fun things, but it doesn't have the joking content the threads in there have, so I put it here. No doubt the cosmic Cosmo or the mighty Haggis McBossMod will move it if they think it should be somewhere else.
I took early retirement in April of 2005, and decided to take a year off before starting anything else. I had a long list of books I wanted to read and think about, which I've made a good start on. I taught myself to play guitar from books and tapes a hundred years ago, or so it seems now, and I've been working on improving my skills. I've been an amateur photographer for 40 years and acquired the magnificent Nikon D70s digital camera and have been exploring its features. And of course this place is an endless source of stimulation and I think counts as a hobby too.
None of that surprised me, I'd planned on them, but one thing did. I have long had a fascination with large naval vessels, for reasons I couldn't begin to explain, and in my youth built dozens of models of them. In retirement I find that long dormant interest has revived. I bought a couple of cheap 1:350 scale Lindbergh kits of HMS Hood and DKM Bismarck, and painstakingly painted and assembled them as they appeared in their final sorties in May of 1941. I discovered that one of the reasons they're cheap is because they're not accurate. But I had such fun with them I spent $100 on a beautifully detailed Tamiya model at 1:350 scale of USS Missouri, and ordered another, of HMS King George V, then I bought an airbrush, and an air compressor, and multiple little hobby tools... I'm hooked again, but this time with the level of income that lets me do them up right.
So, what hobbies do you have, or want to have? If time and money were freely available for whatever hobbies interest you, what would you do?
And just to maybe help motivate this a bit, here's a picture of Bismarck and Hood as I built them, taken with my wonderful Nikon D70s: :
I took early retirement in April of 2005, and decided to take a year off before starting anything else. I had a long list of books I wanted to read and think about, which I've made a good start on. I taught myself to play guitar from books and tapes a hundred years ago, or so it seems now, and I've been working on improving my skills. I've been an amateur photographer for 40 years and acquired the magnificent Nikon D70s digital camera and have been exploring its features. And of course this place is an endless source of stimulation and I think counts as a hobby too.
None of that surprised me, I'd planned on them, but one thing did. I have long had a fascination with large naval vessels, for reasons I couldn't begin to explain, and in my youth built dozens of models of them. In retirement I find that long dormant interest has revived. I bought a couple of cheap 1:350 scale Lindbergh kits of HMS Hood and DKM Bismarck, and painstakingly painted and assembled them as they appeared in their final sorties in May of 1941. I discovered that one of the reasons they're cheap is because they're not accurate. But I had such fun with them I spent $100 on a beautifully detailed Tamiya model at 1:350 scale of USS Missouri, and ordered another, of HMS King George V, then I bought an airbrush, and an air compressor, and multiple little hobby tools... I'm hooked again, but this time with the level of income that lets me do them up right.
So, what hobbies do you have, or want to have? If time and money were freely available for whatever hobbies interest you, what would you do?
And just to maybe help motivate this a bit, here's a picture of Bismarck and Hood as I built them, taken with my wonderful Nikon D70s: :