Category: hobby

  • moon man

    Buzz Aldrin, who hoofed his way along the surface of the moon forty years ago, is trying out his moves on Dancing With The Stars. I thought I might have heard about this the other day on the radio but figured it was just my tin ear picking up a name that sounded like “Buzz… Read.

  • cha-cha

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    We’re still doing the cha-cha in the group class we go to on Tuesdays, but at our private lesson afterwards the instructor had us doing the rumba and waltz. I’m pretty sure anybody who can count to three can waltz, and the rumba isn’t much more difficult, although you need a sense of rhythm to… Read.

  • in the garden

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    With a warm spring sun still dazzling the skies over her shoulder, My Darling B turns over a forkfull of garden soil and crumbles it in her hand to see if it’s ready for planting. It looks promising. This photo was taken in the middle of last year’s potato patch. The garlic has sprouted! And… Read.

  • Michael Collins

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    Michael Collins is the astronaut who drove the bullet-shaped command and service module in circles around the moon while Aldrin and Armstrong took the lander down. The photo above is from the 2008 documentary In The Shadow Of The Moon. I couldn’t resist using it here, instead of the usual Nasa portrait because, to my… Read.

  • geekiness pays off

    “Got time for a question that doesn’t have anything to do with anything?” Tim asked me the other day. I just love questions that don’t have anything to do with anything, so I said, “Shoot!” “If you want to increase the amount of heat in a circuit, do you increase the voltage or the current.”… Read.

  • apollo model

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    My basement workshop filled with the reek of burning plastic as I cut the hatch out of my scale model Apollo command module this afternoon. I want to display it with the hatch open and the model doesn’t come with a removable hatch, dammit. What would be so hard about that? It’s probably better that… Read.

  • promenade

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    When we push all the furniture in the living room to one side, it turns out we have almost enough room to practice our dance steps. Almost, but not quite. It would probably be enough room if we had a little more floor time under our belts, so we knew how to fit the dance… Read.

  • Mad City Model Rail Road Show

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    I spent most of the morning and a big part of the afternoon at the Mad City Model Rail Road Show today because I’m a train nerd and therefor I must. Therefore. Whatever. Train shows are really as geeky as I get. I don’t go to Star Trek conventions. Okay, I did, once, back in… Read.

  • second dance lesson

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    Wow, dancing’s hard. Our instructor keeps impressing on us how easy it is, and I guess I have to agree with him. A Foxtrot two steps forward, on step to the side, bring your feet together, and keep repeating that for as long as the music continues. Really, you’d think anybody should be able to… Read.

  • first dancing lesson

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    Guess what we did last night? We went dancing! We’ve been saying for years that we wanted to take dancing lessons and last week B made a command decision and signed us up for an introductory lesson. We plunked down twenty-five bucks at a studio just north of here for forty-five minutes of private instruction… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend