Do I Really Need More Hobbies!!!!

 

This year has been tough on an old man. I am having a hard time getting stuff done on the homestead that needs to be done. One of my problems is my desire to do more stuff that is not homestead related. When it is hot outside I have more time to watch youtube videos and get ideas for stuff that just seems fun and cool to me. Do you ever do that? I have projects looming like building a greenhouse, tractor shed, and goat barn. But the heat has me indoors watching too many videos about cool stuff that seems like it would be fun.

I have been watching Paul over at The Scrap and Pallet Man Channel and thinking – wow I could do some of that and stack copper and aluminum for smelting. Then I watch Bigstackd and the Okie Scrapper and think yeah I could be stacking copper and aluminum for making ingots for my retirement/burial fund. Needless to say, I am already retired except for this homesteading gig.  Then tonight I was watching Andy Wards Ancient Pottery and it looks like something that would be fun to do. He collects his own clay and sand and makes earthenware pots. Looks like all you would have to invest is time, mainly because I have all the tools I would need. Let’s see, how many hours are in a day….hmmm…..

I don’t know if I have attention deficit disorder, or if I just am having a hard time focusing in my old age. Last night I got out of my car and left it running all night and my son found it still running this morning, it is starting to make me wonder.

As a young man I spent a lot of time doing things I found interesting. Hobbies of my youth had to be things I could come up with on a shoestring and didn’t take a lot of storage space. My bedroom was the extent of the storage I had available. As a young boy playing was my hobby, football, basketball, playing in the river, and running around with friends. In my teens I still liked those things but was more interested in expanding my knowledge.

So during this time I started money making hobbies like trapping, and wild herb gathering. I trapped alone and with other young men with the same ambition. We trapped fox, muskrat, mink, weasel, and the occasional bobcat and opossum. I gathered roots like Solomon seal, Indian turnip, bloodroot, yarrow root, yellow root, black cohosh, may apple, sassafras, Mullen, and ginseng.  These endeavors paid off at different times of year and were excellent sources of income for an industrious young man. The trapping paid off at the end of winter and the herb collection at the end of summer. Perfect little side hustles for a teenager. 

Now when I was in my sophomore year of high school my football coach – who was also my 9^th grade science teacher – got me into a summer program with the National Science Foundation at Morehead State University here in Kentucky. For an entire summer I was on campus – couldn’t afford to drive back and forth so stayed a full 2 months. I was the youngest person ever admitted. I was totally consumed with Botany, Limnology and Entomology. So I came back home with an entire new set of hobbies. At one point I had one of the largest insect collections in Kentucky. I had cataloged over 2000 moths and I don’t know how many beetles, wasps, and other insects. Into the woods I would trek every Saturday night during the summer with a Coleman lantern and an old white bed sheet and gather moths. I think I found a couple of new species but there was no one I could share the finds with so I just cataloged them and kept going.

I added so many new herbs to my list of gathers. The Coburn Fur and Herb Company no longer exists but I supplied them with many exotic herbs for a while, including such herbs as foxglove, Saint Johns wart, witch hazel, bee balm, peppermint, rattlesnake weed and others I just can’t remember at the moment. These were the things I learned to identify in the botany class. I learned so much about how to identify the insects in the river and how to test for the cleanness of water by the insects that live there. These skilled hobbies carried me right to college and taught me that Biology was cool but the spelling was not for me. All the memorizations of kingdoms, phylum, class, family, and species required all the memorization and the spelling and some of those spellings just made no sense to me. Thus I became a Physical Science Major working in Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics, lots of logic and little spelling!!! “Man’s got to know his limitations!”

I still continue some of the hobbies of my youth. They have come in handy with my homesteading skills. Woodworking, welding, metal working, botany, entomology have all been beneficial over the years to gardening and just plain living. Physics and math have been great additions to the homestead and allow me to devise and build and modify things as I get older and more infirmed.

Take the time to learn new stuff. While teaching I utilized the local libraries and checked out all kinds of books on a myriad of subjects. Every homesteader should have a library card. It opens a world of possibilities. One of my librarian friends commented one day that I had the most eclectic list of books checked out of the library she had ever seen. I she said I had checked out books on everything from Modern String Theory, to Mother Earth News Handbook of Homemade Power, to Ancient Hopi Pottery, to Egyptian copper tools. One of the greatest books I ever got was a little book I found at a used book seller called Larry’s Rock and Read. You could trade your books and Classic Rock Albums for other books. It was an eclectics’ dream bookstore except for that trading in part. I never wanted to get rid of a book. Larry is dead now but his little part of heaven lives on in my memory.

Today youtube has over taken my book bug. Crystal still wants books you can hold in your hand but youtube is creeping incessantly into her blood too. I am a nerd but Crystal is a book nerd. Her love and hording of books would be monumental if she weren’t so thrifty. So feed that need for knowledge. You never know what will come in handy on a homestead. I have used skills that you can only attain by doing. I have also used skills that I have only read about in books. I have also used skills for which I am completely inept and completely professional. If it is doable it is written down somewhere or is on youtube. They have all served me well. Learn all you can every day. The more you really learn and practice the freer you become from the “have to” world. But never let it out of your mind that Life, as well as Homesteading, is a Marathon Not a Sprint – Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride!!!