{"id":814,"date":"2007-02-18T23:38:17","date_gmt":"2007-02-19T03:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/18\/evening-hobbies\/"},"modified":"2007-02-18T23:43:32","modified_gmt":"2007-02-19T03:43:32","slug":"evening-hobbies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/18\/evening-hobbies\/","title":{"rendered":"Evening hobbies"},"content":{"rendered":"

On evenings when we have no social plan, after my daughter goes to sleep, my wife and I usually spend a few hours in the rec room, with the television, or a movie, on. Some things we actually watch intently, although very few of themI think we’re down to one show that require complete attention now, and the occasional outstanding film.<\/footnote>, but mostly it’s background. I usually am working on a laptop, either reading<\/a> my thousands of RSS feeds<\/a>, or writing on this blog, or actually doing work. I have a powerful facility for continuous partial attention<\/a> (developed thanks to the plodding pace of our educational system, I think.) A few months ago my wife expressed the wish that she could have something equivalent to do, but something less geeky than messing about with a computer.<\/p>\n

For her, an activity like that has to be less mental than reading, or working with a computer. Frankly, I think she should be a knitter, because that’s pretty much the ideal for her–keep her hands busy with something that requires a very small amount of attention, and frees her to pay whatever amount of attention to the “entertainment” that it deserves. That may still be in the future, who knows?<\/p>\n

She also has mentioned to me at several points in the past that she really enjoyed velvet doodles when she was a kid–this apparently in no small part because the velvet aspect makes it easy to stay inside the lines.<\/p>\n

So, when I was shopping at the art supply store<\/a> for some things to do with Sarah, I saw an insanely complex celtic knot velvet doodle in a large size (16″ x 20″) I picked it up for her. And since we all know that the markers that come with velvet doodles are crappy and don’t last until the end anyway, I solicited her opinion on colours and then made another trip to the Serious Art Store<\/a> and bought some professional art markers for her.<\/p>\n

Several weeks later–remember this was something she only worked on when we had crappy TV, or a non-compelling movie, on–she finished the process of colouring it in. I thought it would be fun to treat it like a serious work of art, so I stopped off and picked up a frame for it, and it’s currently on display on an easel in the rec room. It looks like this:<\/p>\n

\"Trish's<\/a><\/p>\n

It’ll stay there until either Trish moves it, or it stops amusing me.<\/p>\n

As I said, I usually spend me continuous partial attention time with a laptop (I’m doing it right now!), but that doesn’t mean I can’t spend some time on things with more concrete results.<\/p>\n

For instance, I spent a couple of hours, over a couple of nightsIt probably could have been two hours on one night, except I had my two-year old “helping” me–and her assistance while adding fun, certainly also adds time.<\/footnote> last week making this:<\/p>\n

\"Marble<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Marble<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, a cable-stayed<\/a> marble track, with a motorized, gear-driven elevator to automatically keep the marbles cycling. It took a couple of hours to get it all built, and another couple of sessions adjusting the various suspension cable lengths to get a track that both steel and glass marbles would stay on all the way around.<\/p>\n

I did try to shoot a little video with my camera, but the video quality it uses was not adequate to make the operation usefully visible.<\/p>\n

This project was a gift from my wife, by the way. This probably explains why I have been able to get away with commandeering the formal dining room for a week… but soon I’ll have to come up with some other plan for what to do with this thing. (I’m tempted to put a little end table near an electrical socket and just leave it going as kinetic art, but I’m not sure how that would go over.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On evenings when we have no social plan, after my daughter goes to sleep, my wife and I usually spend a few hours in the rec room, with the television, or a movie, on. Some things we actually watch intently, although very few of themI think we’re down to one show that require complete attention now, and the occasional outstanding… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytime","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-d8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}