Hobbies for Ostomates: What Keeps You Busy?

Hi Gang,

So I just scored a major win on eBay on an antique telephone, and it got me thinking about what my fellow ostomates do in their spare time. As many have kicked their activity level down a notch with their new front butt, I'm curious about what you enjoy doing. For me, I've been collecting many things since long before my second ass came along, so not much has changed. I'm concentrating on the top 3 right now, but here's a list of things I enjoy. Let me know what gets your motor revving.

Vintage Erector Sets

Antique Telephones (1890's to 1930's)

Restoring post-WW2 US Military vehicles (Dodge M37's and Willys M38A1's)

60-70's toys (from my childhood)

Antique tube radios and horn speakers

Farmall tractors (Cubs and 140's)

Muscle cars (Oldsmobile W-machines)

Restoring a Bombardier tracked snow machine

80's vintage dirt bikes

Animals, animals, animals

Regards,

Bob

Hi Bob.  Thanks for reminding me of some stuff from the past.  My second Erector Set had an electric motor included.  I was about 10 at the time.  I actually was able to build a few things with my grandson using that same set.  

In my early teens model WWII fighter planes hung from my bedroom ceiling.  Not the plastic ones; balsa wood, paper and dope for paint.  Panthers, mustangs.  Even built a Messerschmitt trying to figure how our planes could shoot it down.  Built a couple crystal sets and recently found a 5U4 tube from the early 50s.  I rebuilt the Bendix brake system on my $11.00 used Schwinn about a dozen times until I finally got it right.  Times have really changed.

Thanks,

Mike 

I have stopped collecting. I find that I have a lot of stuff that my kids will not want. I still do Lego though.

Hey Bob,

For me, I like fishing, muzzleloaders; I have a 50 cal. percussion rifle and a cap n ball dragoon revolver. (and a Winchester 30.30 used to hunt)

I like history, the war between the states, and the fur trade era.

Hot rods, old trucks, the occasional NASCAR race on television, or drag racing.

I used to like camping, exploring in the woods, sometimes finding old homesteads, or old logged areas with springboard cuts in an old stump. Finding old cars and tractors, machinery, etc.

Even the Antique Road Show, trying to guess how much they're worth.

But as you said, some things I'd like to do, I can't anymore. Thanks, Bob. Oh, and cutting wood too!

Hi Bob, I like square dancing and keep up with it at least three times a week.

I have stopped collecting and have been trying to eliminate the items that no longer make me smile and passing them on to my kids and grandkids.

miss-t

Stories of Living Life to the Fullest from Ostomy Advocates I Hollister

My wife and I fossil hunt. We have been all over the Northeast bag and all, climbing all over road cuts and cliff faces. I also enjoy photography. When we went on our honeymoon out West 5 years ago I shot thousands of images in the Badlands, Devil's Tower, Yellowstone, Moab, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, and Meteor Crater, AZ.

You do M38A1's, eh? Cool. I have a 69 CJ5, so pre-AMC, in bad need of a restoration.

Here it was in better times:

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I really like the Kaiser era v6. The odd-fire Buick derived 225 was a hell of an engine.

1. Astronomy. I've seen one total solar eclipse from Salem, OR. I have been twice to Chile and once to Australia. I will most likely have to sell off most of the equipment, since I can't lift more than ten pounds.

2. Leather work. That is one of my o
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stomy kits.

3. Watercolors.

4. I had to give up camping.

5. I am reading all those books I've been wanting to read since high school.

Have you ever looked at the Meade ETX-80? It's a great lightweight scope that all packs into a backpack. It's the other hobby I forgot to mention.

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Wow.....some astronomy guys! I didn't list that because although it was a passion in my youth, I sold my Meade LX200 a few years back (but kept my Criterion RV-6). Now I'm on the hunt for an old school orange Celestion C8 and a Criterion Dynamax 8. I've got a line on a nice C8 but I have to drive up to Lancaster Pa to get it. Also just found an old 8" Criterion F8 reflector dinosaur in upstate NY that's calling to me to restore it. So I might be road tripping sometime soon.  Now that I don't sleep anymore I can enjoy the early morning nighttime sky. Have you guys seen the new large aperature Dobsonian scopes they now make?  Up to 20" primary mirrors!! I'll put the link below;

https://www.skywatcherusa.com/collections/stargate-dobsonians

Regards,

Bob

I don't have as much spare time now as I'm my mom's carer. I like painting yard art pictures, mostly Christmas ones. I'm a Christmas-o-holic, lol. I used to work with cars, and they were my hobby, well, more 'My Life.' I always had a few at home repairing or restoring. I had to stop working with cars due to health problems, nothing to do with having an ostomy.

Hello Bob. Thanks for this interesting and thought provoking question which I had to think carefully about before trying to answer.

Firstly, over the years I have taken pride in trying to do almost everyhthng there is to do in terms of hobbies and passtimes so the list would be very long indeed. However, as I've got much older, many of the more physical activities have had to be shelved in favour of sedantary ones. Of course  I write, which takes upm a considerable amont of time; I do a lot of experimenting and DIY, which fills in some gaps; However, my main 'hobby/ activity/ interest' is practically and emotionally 'caring' for and about people. Mostly, these are people who are not cared for or about by other people, so they seem to have a 'need' which I can fulfil. Needless to say, I do this, not from any form of altruism, but because I receive far more than I give whilst helping and enabling others to experience friendship/ companionship and socialising, which they might not otherwise come across in their often lonesome lives. 

Last year I managed to finish writing my memoirs, which I entitled 'Memoirs of a 'Bettermaker'', which I thought summed it up fairly concisely. 

Best wishes

Bill  

Hi Bill. I will read your "Memoirs". In the meantime, thank you for being the special person you are.

Sincerely,

Mike

Bill, you are a gem. Your hobby of caring for and about other people suits you to a T and you are good at it! Your caring comes through loud and clear on this site, and I hope you have felt  the joy of helping so many people who have read, and benefited from what you have posted. You are a true gentleman, and we are lucky to have you.

As for me, my passion is art - in paint medium, or often, textiles, as in weaving and felting. I have done some silversmithing and wood carving in the past as well. When the weather is nice, I am obsessed with my gardens - it's like painting with plants. I love to plant tropicals in the backyard and pretend I live in the Caribbean (OK, so Lake Huron is a slightly different shade of blue). I feel pretty chuffed when I bring Spanish moss back from South Carolina and it survives the Ontario winter (in the garage, but I still get bragging rights). If I didn't have a creative outlet, I think I would shrivel up and die.

That's great! My wife paints. We have a lot of her art hanging around the house. Recently, after 12 years together, and 51 in total for me, she managed to convince me to try my hand. I will never claim to be an artist, but I have to admit I find it relaxes me. It's fun. Every now and then we set up our easels together, put on some jazz or classical, mix a cocktail, and paint together. Sometimes, if one cocktail turned into 3 or 4, she'd paint a goofy face on my bag. It really helped to make me feel less like a monster.

We're beginning our grass elimination and replacement with garden program this spring. We're going to put in multiple containers for both vegetables and flowers. We're also going to allow a large portion of the yard to go to wildflower meadow. As it is, we own a little more than an acre, and it has 27 mature oaks, so we are really shaded. Because of that, we are more moss than grass as it is.

My rider died two years ago and the mower I wanted is just out of reach right now, so I ended up hiring a guy. Financially, for what he charges, it makes sense. It would take years for me to pass the break-even point. That being said, I really enjoyed the Zen of riding the yard. I'm hoping gardening will get some of that back.

Hello Mike.

Thank you for your kind comments. I am not sure how you would get hold of a copy of my book, and (being A4 hardback) they tend to be expensive as far as modern books go. However, if you message me with your email address, I could send you a copy free of charge. I never feel it's quite the same reading from a computer screen, but it does seem to be a growing trend and my daughter seems to enjoy reading them in this way. 

Best wishes

Bill

I collect marine items, bob, ships compasses, clocks, barometers and anything else worth collecting. Gadiani Beach near here was the world's largest shipbreaking yard and is still quite big, so a lot of items are available most of the time. Amazing how some of these giants are beached for scrapping. Somewhat sad to see something that once roamed the seven seas end her life that way.

I've seen these at various star parties. They provide very sharp images and find the stars for you. I currently own various scopes from 70mm to 150mm. I also own an iOptron MiniTower which can carry two telescopes and also find the stars.

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You mean this...? 20-inch Obsession at the yearly OzSky Star Safari, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. April, 2019. I post my worldwide astro adventures on Cloudy Nights. My pen
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name is golfertex.
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How does one track objects with a light bucket that large? Does it have a motor, or is it just hand aimed?

Some scopes do have motorized tracking, but these are a bit expensive & cumbersome. Most observers use a "push-to" computer such as Argo-Navis, in conjunction with a Telrad finder. I know the southern sky well, so I just consulted a sky atlas, like Sky Safari, and aimed the scope with the Telrad.

Don't you have a problem with objects drifting out of the field of view very quickly?

Sure, things do drift out of the field of view, but it's not instantaneously......so you slowly move the scope to keep the object centered.  The higher the magnification the quicker it moves out of view, but you get used to it. What really drives you nuts is not having a firm vibration free mount.  Then every time you touch the scope the image goes bouncing all around.  First lesson learned in astronomy is you can never have a mount that's too stout. Well, maybe that was the second lesson....the first was not to buy a cheap Jason or Tasco 60mm refractor.  Save your paper route money and get a real reflector.

Just about every commercially made scope now-a-days has the option of "go to"......or computerized motor controls.  I think it takes much of the fun out of astronomy, but today's "want it now and don't want to work hard to get it" youngsters demand such things.  Spending hours freezing your butt off during the wee hours of the morning and not finding what you planned to find makes you work even harder the next night.  And the joy of actually finding it, although it's much dimmer than expected, made for some long lasting memories.  If you use a computer to find objects for you then stay in your warm house and just look up pics of what you want to see on the internet.  Aw.....now I'm getting all frumpy and grumpy in my old age............time to go!  

later,

bob

I don't use the Goto function all that much. I will say, though a digital readout of RA and Dec is really nice on my crappy old eyes.

Nice post, it's interesting to see everyone's different hobbies. I'm curious to know the power on your large scope? I know nothing of such things, but I'm very familiar with a rifle scope. In that world, a 40 or 50 mm objective and 18-24 power is considered quite large. Regards, mmsh

Generally speaking, and I'm oversimplifying here, astronomy scopes don't talk much about "power". For the most part, you are looking at extremely faint objects, unless you are looking at something like the moon, so the real objective is light-gathering ability. Again, I'm oversimplifying, but at least in reflector type scopes, it's all about the size of the primary mirror. The larger the mirror, the more light, and therefore the fainter objects you can resolve. An 8-inch mirror is better than a 6, and a 10 is better yet, and so on and so forth. You have to remember looking through that eyepiece looks nothing like the amazing photos Hubble, for example, delivers. Those kinds of photos only come from very long time exposure photos. In the days of film, the scope had to be very carefully guided, usually with a motor, to follow whatever you were photographing, as it moved across the night sky. In today's digital world, this is instead usually done by taking multiple snapshots, sometimes hundreds, and cumulatively combining them on a computer.

Now you can and must use various eyepieces called "objectives" to achieve magnification when looking through the scope, bearing in mind, the more magnification, the dimmer the overall view is.

When using a digital CCD, this is less of an issue. What becomes important then is the resolution of the CCD. Just like HDTV has better resolution than Standard, and 4K is better than HD, and 8K is clearer than 4K, the same goes for telescopic CCD imagers. What that means is the higher the resolution, the tighter you can crop and blow up the image, which is effectively the same as having a zoom lens in a camera or rifle scope.

The thing about all this is, though, is that glass, good quality glass, is expensive. You can easily spend thousands of dollars on a good 8 or 10-inch Cassegrain style scope. The other thing to keep in mind is aside from the size issue is that glass is very heavy. This really limits the portability of a really good "light bucket". If you live in an area with a lot of light pollution, there's only so much you can really see no matter how good your scope is.

Magnification with the 20-inch Obsession can range from 50x to 300x. The calculation is: focal length of the telescope divided by the focal length of the eyepiece. The photo shows the Obsession scope equipped with a 32mm TeleVue Panoptic eyepiece. So, the magnification is 78x. New, this scope costs about $9K, and the eyepiece is about $700.

Hmm... I can think of a lot worse ways to blow ten grand! It is a pretty exciting time for amateur astronomers. Scopes have come a long way since I was a kid.

Regards,

bob

They sure have. When I was in high school back in the Dark Ages of the mid 80's I had a friend who had a Celestron C8. The damn thing ran off of a car battery! I still can't believe we used to haul that thing out into the woods when we went camping.

I operate my iOptron MiniTower (a telescope automatic tracking mount) with a lithium battery pack the size of a paperback book.

Hi all, when I was younger, I was into all the Apollo moon stuff and had a small telescope. My current hobbies are trail riding in my SxS and guns, everything from BB guns to muzzle loaders. My most valued is a double-barrel 12 gauge Ithaca from the early 1900s.