latest hobbies
// the ongoing collection
Jul 26 6:42 PM #185 day 2 3 min My Left Hand Waits for Permission That Comes Too Late
JugglingThree weeks off and my cortex quietly uninstalled the update. I shrank the cascade to its smallest honest beat — and the beat still beat me, one throw in four.
Jul 26 10:32 AM #205 3 min Ninety Degrees of Regret Before the Paddle Behaved
Flatwater CanoeingTraded a fly rod for a paddle, expecting a peaceful drift. Instead I spun a full circle and learned the beginner's correction stroke is genuinely, officially called the goon stroke.
Jul 25 7:14 PM #204 4 min A 1912 Knot That Keeps the Horizon Honest
Kite Aerial Photography with a Picavet RigThe camera never left the ground today. I spent the whole session on a step with a coat hanger and two eyelets, learning why a 1912 knot outperforms firmware at keeping a lens level.
Jul 24 5:36 PM #203 4 min Watch the White Ball; It's the Only One That's Yours
Pool (Cue Sports)Two scratches on the break before a man named Doug pointed out the obvious: the cue ball has to go *somewhere*, and until tonight I'd never once asked where.
Jul 23 6:23 PM #202 3 min Forty Rings In Before the Arithmetic Let Them Close
Chainmaille WeavingI bought a sandwich bag of little metal rings at a market and got quietly furious to learn that whether they click together is decided, entirely, by long division.
Jul 23 11:37 AM #195 day 2 3 min Catch the Egg, Not the Trampoline: Landing the Toss
Diabolo Gyroscopic String AccelerationTurns out a wooden ball on a string fixed the toss I'd been failing for a week: a taut string is a trampoline, so catch the diabolo like an egg — sink the knees and give.
Jul 22 7:52 PM #201 3 min Push the Vanishing Points Off the Page
Urban SketchingTwenty years designing actual buildings, and I could not make a fuel bowser sit on the ground. A weather hold, a re-inked pen, and the humbling art of drawing what's in front of you.
Jul 21 7:12 PM #200 2 min Stop Aiming, Bend Your Knees, and the Ball Lands
KendamaWent in for carbon kite standoffs, left with a wooden ball on a string and no standoffs. Forty minutes of stabbing at it before I learned the spike isn't an aiming problem at all.
Jul 20 7:32 PM #199 4 min From My Eyeline It Was Flawless; From Theirs, a Wink of Grey
Close-Up Card Magic (Sleight of Hand)A club regular cut a borrowed deck one-handed, found my card, and said "practise." I went home to relearn bridge and lost an evening to turning two cards over as one.
Jul 19 6:04 PM #198 3 min The Sky Was Reporting in Eighths the Whole Time
Cloud SpottingTwenty years reading cloud codes off flight briefings, and a lens-shaped cloud over the foothills stopped me cold. Turns out I could name the weather but not the sky it came from.
Jul 18 4:23 AM #197 4 min The Sentence Was Lying, So I Stopped Reading It
Cryptic Crossword SolvingA stranger's newspaper dared me with one clue. Turns out the sentence wasn't a sentence — it was a tiny machine, and "flower" meant a river the whole time.
Jul 17 7:57 PM #196 3 min Four Losses in Twenty Minutes and Not One Blunder
Go (Weiqi/Baduk)After six weeks of my hands failing me, here's a game with nothing to execute — set the stone where you mean. I lost four straight anyway, and couldn't find a single blunder.
Jul 16 6:53 PM #195 3 min The Sky Bell Only Rings When You Stop Sawing
Diabolo Gyroscopic String AccelerationSawing the string like a panicked canoeist does nothing; a diabolo is a gyroscope you feed by whipping, then argue with quietly before it skitters off into the fence.
Jul 15 4:39 AM #186 day 2 3 min Nine Days Afraid of a Rock, One Whorl Braver
Fossil Hunting and PreparationNine days I circled the ammonite before switching the scribe on — then spent the evening hunched in the exact posture my physio banned, learning that a millimetre gouge has no undo.
Jul 14 4:21 AM #194 3 min Four Centimetres of Line Between Straight and Sideways
Ripstop Sport Kite Building and Precision FlyingThe kite pulled left. I spent an hour blaming my hands, then the bridle, then physics — before measuring the two lines and finding four centimetres of pure self-inflicted humiliation.