Pandemic Hobbies

Those of us non-essentials who are home for the foreseeable future have found lots of ways to pass the time.

Some are exercising, some are reading, cooking, sewing, learning to speak Dutch.

I am passing my time trying to figure out what everyone else is up to!

So here is the Nerdbear.com list of the 15 most popular hobbies that other people are taking up during the pandemic, if you're looking for one.

(I had a friend who took up the saxophone. He took it up when the guy in the music store wasn't looking.)

That was from hobby #16 - learning to do standup comedy by standing around your living room alone.

The others...

1. Watching TV shows and movies The thing to do is to find some sci-fi or rom-com or chuckle-fest and watch all 18 seasons in your pajamas.  How those seasons got in your pajamas is up to you to explain.

2. Reading  "There is no frigate like a book to take us worlds away," said Emily Dickinson. So, try a new book, or just say frigate.

3. Working out I'm afraid that for many of us, Planet Fitness is going to be Planet Fatness, the time we get back there. But a good home workout can be had by picking up the entire contents of a bag of Fritos from the floor.

4. Arts and crafts And you think it's a coincidence that all the AC Moore stores closed just weeks before everything else did, huh?

5. Board games Sorry! I haven't a Clue as to why board games get so Parcheesi.

6. DIY projects Now's the time to build that home cyclotron you've always wanted, or to stain the living room floor. I've started by staining two t-shirts and a pair of pants.

7. Yoga I couldn't stop laughing long enough to do the Downcast Dog.

8. Baking So far, I've done oatmeal muffins and sweet potato muffins! Next up, I'm pushing the envelope with oatmeal-sweet potato muffins.

9. Gardening The Lazy 'C' Ranch sits on the site of a former gravel pit. The only thing that comes out of the ground around here are old ginger ale bottles, spare tires, and (no kidding) an entire Frigidaire.

10. Video games I quit after Pong, but I understand there have been a lot of advancements in this field.  And you don't even need a quarter to play, no sir. Hundreds of dollars, yes, but no quarters.

11. Meditation They ("they") say the point to meditation is to achieve mindfulness. Too bad for me; it's already full of minutiae such as the weight of a gallon of water (8.5 lbs), the idea of painting lines down the middle of roads came to a man in 1911 when he saw milk dripping from a milk wagon leaving a mark on the street, and the most widely printed book in the world is the IKEA catalog, so my mind is full of something, all right.

12. Audiobooks and podcasts I like listening to podcasts such as Mo Rocca's "Mobituaries," but I've never been able to get into audiobooks. I think they remind me of when an elementary school teacher would read us some childish book after lunch to give the sedatives time to kick in (hers, not ours).

13. Writing Any fool can write. I prove it every day!

14. Learning a language A great thing about having friends all over the globe is the chance to learn words and expressions in other languages. You never know when they might come in handy, n'est-ce pas?

15. Learning an instrument See #16, above.


There's no telling when the pandemic will abate, and things will return to normal, but we're all doing the best we can!