Why I Like "Fiddly" Hobbies

My last post about canning discussed my desire for hobbies that focus the mind completely. They also produce something I can use or enjoy in some way. One reason you will not find me staring at the smart phone all that much or watching TV comes from my belief that when I'm done, I can, in the words of my late father-in-law, "have something I can put my hands on." A friend called such hobbies "fierce" but I prefer "fiddly" because they involve a lot of geeky knowledge combined with special tools and learned craft.

I suppose writing has all that going for it. For many of us, hobbies enrich our knowledge while keeping at bay what writer Joseph Conrad called "that obscure feeling that life is but a waste of days."  Hobbies can immerse us in social circles online and in person.

There's also something more at work with fiddly hobbies. Consider the urge refinish furniture, make one's own clothing or knitwear, spin wool, restore old cars, fly fish, and renovate historic houses. All these tasks immerse ourselves not only (when needed) in the virtual but in what I call, with a twist on Baudrillard's term, "The Garden of the Real." Gardening, too, can be a fiddly hobby, when practiced a certain way.

Yet fiddly hobbies are different from other pastimes I enjoy, such as travel done well and off the tourist track.  My travels change me and leave me with memories and some mementos. Fiddly hobbies are like a good holiday from the day-to-day that never ends.

Since the 1960s, I've built scale models. In fact, my earliest modeling memory is of spray-painting my eyeball in 1968, during the Richmond riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. As glass broke from looters a block from our house, my mom, without a car, had to phone the hospital to get advice on how to rinse out my eye.  Yet I most recall how good the Jaguar E-Type looked to me in a decidedly non-stock shade of metallic Lilac.

I still build a kit or two every year. My current project honors a deceased friend, Gary Braswell, an avid collector of realistic action figures. He had in his stash a nice American Volunteer Group "Flying Tiger" pilot standing about 12 inches tall as well as, in the same scale, a Zero-Fighter pilot from Pearl Harbor. I decided to pose each pilot with a scale model of his sort of plane.

Getting the kits together involves a lot more detail than my long-lost Jaguar and, for that matter, a lot more safety. Today I use airbrushes, different types of glues, specialized tools, and I take months on a kit. I do a lot of research on aspects of correct paints and the weathering on particular subjects, going so far to mix my own shades of paint for certain projects.

Reloading is my newest fiddly hobby, and I bring to it the same level of research that I employ with models, but even more care. I picture a few reloading tools here, for .38 Special and .45 ACP rounds I shoot for target practice. I have a case trimmer, different measures and a "trickler" for gunpowder, a Swiss-made caliper good to thousandths of an inch. There's a fat Lyman manual with precise information, because a mistake, such as overcharging a bullet with powder, could mean a trip to the hospital or the Great Beyond.

Reloading led me to an epiphany about American gun culture that has almost nothing to do with firearms.

Long ago, most of us could work on our cars, if we wanted. Today, even an oil change is difficult without a lift or special tools. To a large degree, our cars have become a collection of computers on four wheels. Meanwhile, what seemed a safe refuge for tinkerers has vanished. Just a short decade and a half ago, I built both PC and Mac desktops from old parts, and I donated them to needy families and local charities. Now, in the age of SSD drives, flat-screen displays, and wafer-thin laptop cases, there's not a lot inside a CPU that a user can service.

I cannot even imagine working on a smart phone.

Modern gun owners, compared to the old guys who went out to hunt with a bolt-action rifle and kept a simple revolver in the night stand, trick out their firearms with optics, special triggers, new grips, and all sorts of internal and external upgrades. It amazes me how geeky the gun forums become with tales of amateur gun-smithing, barrel swaps, and changes to recoil springs.

Whatever the political and moral questions that swirl around America's fetish for guns, there's this fiddly-hobby, hot-rodder aspect that most critics and enthusiasts of firearms tend to ignore.  Of course, for some of the gun hobbyists I meet, I'd feel safer if they decided to build a few model planes.

Whatever  the hobby, the need to tinker exists on both sides of the Atlantic; in the UK I've been shown many DIY projects and the products of fiddly hobbies. There is something delightful about the hours slipping by, slow enough to savor their passing, as one engages in a fiddly hobby.  I might, if I can find one still on radio, have a baseball game in the background.

You just won't catch me in front of a TV watching hours of baseball or other sports. Now playing baseball, that most fiddly of sports? Perhaps in my next life.

Meanwhile, I have my 2017 fishing license and that involves infinite fiddling with lures, leaders, sinkers, respooling old reels, and stocking the cooler. I'm a fierce fisherman, too. I don't tend to go fishing to drink beer. It's about catching fish, finding the deep spots where they linger, scouting a bank for just the right overhanging tree to cast under (but sometimes into). Soon I'll have a lifetime fishing and hunting license from the State of Virginia, so I can continue my fiddly hobbies until I'm too old to clamber into a boat or get up a tree into a deer stand.

Overwhelmed By Tomatoes? Get Crackin' Now!

Time for my annual exhortation to can your own vegetables.

I'm abnormal when it comes to modern American life; I cannot identify most TV shows or celebrities, but I can tell you more than you'd want to know about what a friend calls "fierce hobbies," such a model making, reloading my own ammunition, or, yep, canning. All of them require a lot of attention to detail and tend to focus the mind and body completely.

Yet of them all, canning is perhaps the most gentle and productive. A few generations back, many folks, urban or rural, did it every summer. And to be honest, the longest part of making good tomato sauce for canning is slow-cooking it. The canning can be done in two hours. So please do not tell me you lack time to can your own sauce. There are few more rewarding things in one's kitchen, in the dead of winter, than opening a jar and evoking summer again.

As to how to do it? I've long favored a U Georgia site for the scientific principles espoused in the recipes.   Now that tomatoes are cheap, why not save some money and put up a few gallons?

Some advice if  you are ready to get cracking with this wonderful way to save the harvest. Modern tomatoes lack the acidity of older varieties, and even when I can heirlooms, I add a teaspoon of lemon juice to every pint jar.  I also tend to pressure-can tomatoes these days; granny never did, but the science of food preservation has come a long way. Cherish her recipes but use modern techniques in the canning kitchen. I employ both my first canner, a Presto, and my heavy duty All American Canner for summer chores. Great advice on canning marinara sauce, as well as a decent recipe, can be found here.

I have little time for folks who tell me "I don't have time to do [insert DIY activity]."  If one were to count the hours and hours wasted on the "smart" phone or watching videos of people injuring themselves, there would be enough time to restore a Model T or build a lake cottage.

Get Cracking. Summer is swiftly passing us by and the boxes of canning tomatoes will soon be gone from the farmer's market.  If  you grow your own, I find that a bushel of tomatoes yields about 3 gallons of finished sauce, depending on the variety of tomato and how much you cook it down.