I was just curious as to everyones hobbies here on

I enjoy coin collecting.. Specializing in high grade Buffalo nickels and also Bust coinage from the early 1800's

Also I have recently started getting into woodworking.

GOLF... well, when it's not 25 degrees in Dallas!!!
And I'm training for a marathon w/ Team in Training (w/ the Leukemia Foundation), so the little lady and I are runnin' 4-5 nights every week....

I play basketball pretty much all year long.

I also coach CYO basketball and peewee basketball (K thru 3), which takes up a lot of time, especially November thru March.

Golf, golf and golf, aevans176, we need to tee it up some time! I’ve played the one course in Dallas that’s made up of famous holes from other courses, can’t remember the name but it was a nice track. And some other course between Aberdeen and Plano that was pretty nice as well.

When not golfing I like to work in the garden/yard, bike (road only at this point), fish, hike/camp, and play basketball.

My hobby used to be fine woodworking but I started doing work for sale and didn't price the jobs to replace equipment because of Wal Mart competition. With my tools in disrepair I find little pleasure in it any longer.

My most recent interest is in alternative energy. I have tinkered with it since the 70's but in recent months it has filled my free time and ate up all my "play" money. I'm in the middle of building a vertical axis windmill that I dreamed up watching a butterfly pollinating flowers on a breezy day. The thing has eight arms coming out from the center with wings that open up when down wind and close when against the wind. I don't know if it will work or not but it should be finished next month if Christmas allows me the money to add the wings or aluminum deflectors. I want to use the thing to pump water and run a permanent magnet generator to charge a solar battery.

I just like to tinker with inventions and have designed a solar hot water system for my home. I also designed a couple devices for tracking the sun for PV solar panels.

I don't know if this takes away stress or adds stress but I like to program. I work as a developer at a software company and attempt to write programs there but when I come home I go right back to work developing my own program (developing an online triathlon, cycling, running, swimming custom training application with my coach.) If I had it done aevans176 I could've hooked you up with a plan, maybe next year BTW, Team in Training is a great cause. I've helped a lot of people train for their events before and they always say how much fun it is. One of my good friends actually met his now wife when he was coaching TNT.

When I really need to just get away from the world I'll play video games for a few hours. Nothing like blowing shtuff up and fragging 12 year old kiddies online.

Not to sound like a huge nerd I do participate in sports as my name implies. I do triathlons, road racing, mountiain biking, cyclocross. If I have to, I'll run and swim but I wont enjoy it. I'm thinking about becoming a Spinning instructor at our gym too.

Being 6'7" I'm not built for triathlons or cycling but I put the wing span to good use when I play volleyball. Nothing like a hard spike to take away all the woes of the office.

As for the traditional hobbies, I used to collect baseball cards (they were supposed to pay for college...) and comics. However, now I just collect girl's phone numbers ...(*kidding of course, if my g/f is reading )

There are literally probably two dozen nice courses here in DFW... and most of the year is beautiful! (Don't check it out this weekend... it's freezing!)

Ft Worth has some nice ones as well... we have the TPC at Sawgrass, etc... and not to mention because there are so many, it's easy to get great deals online...

Come on down. Golf is great here...

Volly Firefighter. Also Advisor for our Jr. FF program.
In slow time of year now, no one wants to go spray water or cut up cars when it's zero out. Usually winter time means more reading, which also helps me sleep away the winter

I read, watch classic cinema, and sing -- both solo work and in choral groups. I also consider my three cats a hobby, though they would be deeply offended. As far as they're concerned, they are my religion. LOL

I too like to write programs. Working on a database for military equipment right now.

Blacksmithing and shooting black powder cannons in the summer and reading the most of the read,

I'm not a big fan of golf but my father is and I have played some pretty good courses in the Dallas area.

I played a great Ben hogan course in Fort Worth but I forget the name.
Trophy CLub in Southlake and Great Southwest was a very good course that doesn't seem like it would be, Arlington I believe)

I play tennis when I can and have played for, gasp, 25 years fairly avidly.

I also like going to happy hour and playing NTN trivia. But I don;t get to do that much anymore.

AHHHH.... NTN. Good stuff with some cheap cold beer. I haven't done that in a while. My better half is in Shreveport tonight... maybe that's a plan.

Also, I'm not sure which course you're speaking of in Ft Worth, but there is the Colonial in Ft Worth as well as Fossil Creek... both out of my "wife's golf budget" for a regular round, but great places to play. Doral is also in Cowtown... which I've never paid to play, but have played w/ work people.

The only "Hogan" course I've played actually is in Trophy Club, TX and is called (ironically) "The Club at Trophy Club"...

Music is the hobby because there isn't any money in it. Well, a little. Not enough to make a living, that's for sure. I'm adding an all-electric set along with the acoustic stuff, using an amazing preamp that models a bunch of classic electric sounds from Marshall stacks to the fuzz face. Figure on doing jazz standards with added oomph to 'em, blues and rock. So say a gig starts out with mellow acoustic, heads into slide National, and after the dinner hours are over, crank it.

I think this relieves stress. I don't know, it's just interesting to work out a tune, figure out the sounds, try oddball things. Coming back to electric after all these years does seem to be good for the vascular/muscular/yah-yah systems. Could never afford the monster amps along the way, so the el-cheapo preamp is really something.

Think I'll be selling the axe and a box to upgrade the electric, or actually get something lighter on the strap. The Epiphone Sheridan is all maple and gets my shoulder/back sore too quickly. Got my eye on a Schecter C-1 Classic, which is mostly mahogany with maple veneer, neck-thru body for sustain, cool vine inlays all over the fretboard. The Sheridan has sustain out the roof (internal neck block) and I'd miss that with something like a Strat, plus the looks are classier. Price is generally lower too.

Add horse trading guitars in there. I like doing that.

Reading books and other educational media in relation to the natural world, science.

Online gaming, always fun when its not a computer you are going against.

Looking at all the stuff one can buy at wal mart without actually buying anything.

Thanks a million. It's getting us both into tip-top shape, and the granddaughter of our church has Leukemia, so it was a no brainer. We've already met some awesome people, and everyone is utterly wonderful and supportive.

She and I have run 5K's and 10K's... and of course my "service" career has been riddled with running, but never on this level while also raising money for something substantial.

Y'all say a little prayer that we're successful and injury free... we've already made it 7 weeks or so into training and things are just peachy...

I don't feel so bad now. I write software all day and when I want to veg in front of the TV, I'm usually programming something-or-other. Either on my desktop in my home office or on my laptop in the living room.

Most Fridays and a couple Saturdays a month are eaten up gigging in my band. And with my newest purchase of another toy, I won't get anything done for a while. I bought a TC Helicon VoiceLive vocal effects processor this week that lets me play my acoustic and run a mic through it (with headphones) and gives me every harmony arrangement you could think of with excellent vocal effects - all footswitch controlled. A musician's wet dream for sure. I was late for work this morning playing around with that thing.

I run all that crap (I have an 8 channel mixer as well) to my 8 track BOSS digital recorder, make a few recordings, and promptly delete them because they sound horrible to me. But it is fun (somehow).

All my band stuff (Marshall stack, PRS, etc) stays down in the workshop until I load it for a gig. My Trace Elliot SuperTramp combo stays at our rehearsal studio. It's embarrasing to see how much money I have wrapped up in music equipment. All the mics, wireless units, stands, effects pedals....sheesh...for a fricken hobby.

As AuthorMusician says, there's no money in music. If you have a bar tab like mine, you have even less.

Well, apart from the obvious reading books and watching movies n stuff, I like to play small skirmish war games. I'm not a great tactician though so I stay away from the bigger hex games and stick to the 28mm scale small unit games. I don't play Warhammer 40K.

Most of the games I play are set in the 1190's (Robin Hood) or a pseudo 1935's+ pulp universe (Rocketman) but I really don't care which period we do as long as the game is fun. The social aspect is more important than the actual games, though we put some thought into these. Gaming night is every Thursday and we also play role playing games as well.

A part of the wargaming is the collecting and painting of the miniatures and building various models. Luckily for me my GF has no problems with my interests even though they take up so much space every week

me making wargaming models.

Weather permitting, I like to skydive. It the best way I've ever found to release endorphins and purge my mind and body of the accumulated stress from the work week.
Weather not permitting, I do enjoy the occasional PC game. I like the more realistic first person shooters and some of the fantasy games. I am anxiously awaiting the release of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

I like to run and work out, but I am required to do that every morning anyway, so I don't do it much on weekends. But when I do, it's pretty relaxing.
I like to think of myself as the next Bob Villa, but I'm probably closer to Tim 'The Tool Man' Taylor from Home Improvement.......either way, I like to tinker around with the house. Unfortunately, I'm in a rental right now. That kind of puts a damper on projects.

I read.
I gather information--on anything.
I am an information packrat--I have stuff stored--"just in case". I can spend hours going through wikipedia just random clicking on links.

I am hoping to begin trying to create a video game.
It will have many elements and take team play to an unseen level. It will have a bit of everything--shooter, pilot, tactician, logic based spywork. Teams should get fairly large.
Wanna be a general and command fleets--there will be a spot. like shooters--well taking over planets requires ground troops to be successful--so we needf shooters. gotta have space battles so pilots will be needed. Want to build agalatic empire, or develop a criminal underworld or rebel force--we'll have you covered.
We hope to have it finally reach a tournament level for play. The storyline will also be available for people looking for good space battle/empire vs rebels kind of space fiction--ala david drake. As the play progresses the players will be developed into storylines.
I am quite excited about it. Strangely though i do not play video games myself.

Other than that i play with my kids.

This is a very interesting topic indeed! My hobbies are reading articles online, computer programming, and playing video games.

On computer programming, I'm quite different from most of the other programmers. I've been writing small programs with Ada95 because its fun to mess around with the multitasking and generic routines. You can do that stuff in C++ with the pthread library but its quite messy. I don't have the time though to write any serious programs.

On the video games, I'm not into the Quake3 or other 3D shooting games that much. I like playing Choplifter 3 and Sim City on snes9x, a SNES emulator. Choplifter 3 is a helicopter rescue game with excellent graphics. If I wasn't busy learning Korean, I would seriously try making a video game like Choplifter 3.

Wow, seems like we got a lot of computer programmers on here. Who's for dropping the 9-5 and doing our own startup

I play computer games way more than I should...but it is mindless fun and a good stress relief.

I also read (not as much as I used to or as much as I would like, but i'm trying to change that). Working on reading at least 1 hour a day now.

Obviously, surfing the net is something I do....both for informational purposes and just to see whats out there.

Movies...I used to go to alot more. Now I just rent them and watch them on the big screen I bought a couple years back. It has to be a REALLY big event to get me out to watch a movie in the theatre anymore.

Sleep. Its amazing the older I get the less I ever seem to get enough of it. Sigh...I guess some things are just inevitable....but I will say this. I appreciate a good nights sleep and being rested way more than I ever did when I was a young man.

Lastly, I play poker. LOTS of poker. Online, card rooms, home games occassionally. I even watch a fair amount of it on TV. And if I do say so myself, I'm not too bad!

What do I do for a hobbie? Main one now is collect businesses LOL- but of the auto/bike variety- here is a recent post on many of my bike related sites I visit- my LCC (low cost choppers) business has 7 bikes to do before april- no telling if I will make more than three at this time LOL- I have cool customers I guess- they are getting screaming deals on custom bikes!

It is cool to be able to have fun making money! So- here is one of my posts on the bike sites:


Truly a "junk yard/e-bay dog" bike- got the frame off e-bay, well, darn near everything off e-bay- all the motor and stuff from a KZ 1000 (1977) donor bike that was given too me.

Will be called the "retro rocket"

total cost of build will be under 1000 bucks it appears- with the exception of tires- will add about 300 bucks or so to the price.

Okay- we started putting the pieces together to kind of mockup close to what the trail would be etc- what you are looking at is a 75 Z1 900 B frame, ZX6 forks, ZX10 rims front and back, with a 170 tire in the rear. Looks like a 8 inch over on the forks, with the ZX10 hieght tires, around 4-6 inches of trail, we will get it closer as we get it mocked up better.
This is what we call the "staged car craft mag shot"



Okay- it is my buddy Travis in the sell out choppers hat LOL- don't hate him, it is Alaska, gotta keep something on his head to keep warm!



Here is my buddy stacey making sure we had the tire hieght right LOL



Here the fellas are doing some more looking apparently- but it is a good shot of how wide a 170 tire looks like on this thing!



Here it is with the shadow tank on it, the old corbin chopper seat (which looks like garbage- now that the bike is more mocked up- something else will be occupying that area it looks like!



Another fat tire shot- some slight clearance issues with the swing arm, just barely touching up front- and I think the sprockets will line up pretty good.



Last one of the shadow tank and such- the ducktail will stay, and no side covers- the old tank style to hide the electrics. the 5 inch of gooseneck and 36 degrees of rake (about 8* more than stock) - gives the whole front the chopper look- combined with the drag racing cues and wheelbase- the new wheel base will be 71"- almost 10 inches longer than stock.



Edited to add: so you see how chopper guys and gearheads have fun? Little glimpse into our wierd little world where brand loyalty can get you into a fistfight? LOL

My main hobby is amateur theatre.

I act mostly, but I also enjoy directing if I can find a play I'm passionate enough about. I've also done lighting, which was fun, and less of a time commitment. I'm not really interested in stage management or other behind the scenes roles.

My theatre group has a pretty comprehensive website, which is linked on my profile, but this thread gives me a good excuse to put it here! Old Town Theatre Company Website

As I write, we're in the middle of our December production - the last night of Stags & Hens by Willy Russell is tonight. It's gone pretty well (so far!) and has been good fun to do.

Next up, we've got some radio plays to do as part of our preparations for a competitive theatre festival in February next year, then there's The Lion in Winter next March, a yet-to-be-confirmed Shakespeare in June, Art by Yazmin Reza in September, and The Wizard of Oz next Christmas (I fancy the Cowardly Lion myself ).

After that, who knows? I would quite like to direct some Patrick Marber at some point (Dealer's Choice and Closer are both terrific.

Other than that, I like my X-Box (my budget won't stretch to a 360 this year, but if things pan out I might be able to compare the PS3 and Revolution and pick the best one) and the usual socialising (a British euphemism for drinking in public ).

I've been pretty lazy in exercise terms for the past couple of years, and now have the figure to show for it (as the most recent photos on the OTTC website will testify, I'm now the company fat bloke). So aside from securing decent employment, my biggest project next year is to get back into something approaching shape - a shape which hopefully will bear a less striking similarity to a whale.

I've never been especially talented at playing team sports - I love rogby, but was never any good at it. My uncorrected eyesight is too poor to throw or catch anything, the type of contact lenses that would have let me play were non-existent or too expensive when I was growing up, and now I'm a bit old (and unfit) to play for anything except a poor quality veterans* team.

I enjoyed rowing and sculling, though, so I'd like to work towards taking them up again. Even if I don't get any further than buying a rowing machine, I'll be happy.

I also paint and draw from time to time. I enjoy it and I'm told I'm quite good at it, but I find I lack the discipline to practice regularly enough to be improving. It's one of those things I never quite seem to get around to. Maybe I'll add it to next year's to-do list, along with losing 50 pounds, getting fitter, getting a steady job, directing a play, etc.

*Nothing to do with ex-soldiers, this is just the British sporting terminology for team sports players, especially in contact sports like rugby or football, that are older than about 35.

Fossil Creek is the course and I meant to say that it was an Arnold Palmer course.

I would suggest Great Southwest if it is still there. It should be in budget.

Great Topic.

Let's see, I bowl and play co-ed volleyball in leages. Both teams were set up through our church. The whole family bowls, and my daughter and I do the volleyball thing.

I golf, but only out of necessity. I never really got into it, but it's almost a requirement in my line of work, at yearly golf outings and such for vendors and potential customers.

One of the other things I do is sing. Both in the church choir, and just for fun. The fun stuff I do at home, recording on the PC, using karaoke CD's for the background. Mike was kind enough to let me upload a couple of songs on another thread, and I list them here again, for your entertainment (or not).

Just a Little Bit

Sylvia

My passion before I moved away from Florida was beach volleyball. I played on the Pro-am Bud Light volleyball tour for almost 4 years... I had a blast doing it but I had to grow up... too much partying on the weekends lol

Wow, I never knew how many programmers we had here. Unlike a lot of y'all I can't stand playing video games, I just feel useless I guess, staring at the computer or TV pushing buttons. I haven't played a computer game in years and the last time I touched an xbox was at least a year ago.

Mainly I love to play guitar, learn, or be active; though I do sit at the comp. and read a lot (online and books/mags/newspaper/ect). Over the last 4 years I've taught myself guitar and some theory and my plan is to expand to the fiddle (or violin I guess), harmonica, or maybe another instrument. I write songs when the creativity flows and I'd really like to be part of a band (but I don't think I'm technically good enough yet).

I also love any physical activity. At one point or another I've done (or still do): baseball, basketball, football, thai boxing, brazilian jiu jitsu, surfing, mountain biking, skiing (only snow), karate, longboarding, hiking/camping (I'd really like to get back into thai boxing, BJJ, and mountain biking).

And travel, I travel as much as I can. I particularly like backpacking and meeting anyone I can from anywhere. So far I've backpacked: Spain, Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Mexico, and Australia. I've also travelled to: Austria, England, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Canada, 32 States and D.C. (I hope to visit all 50 at some point).

That's about it I guess.