When There Are More Hobbies Than Hours In a Day

My friend Stephanie has always called my “office” Dana’s playhouse.  It is a cozy room on the ground floor of our house that most people do not know exists.  It originally was the home office for the first owner of our house who was a retired bank president in the fifties.  It has all the makings of a room a once powerful man could run his empire from with a wall of shelves and cabinets, a corner fireplace and a wet bar.

When Russ and I first moved into this house I was a full time workingwoman and ran my empire from this same room, although I am yet to use the wet bar in twenty years.  After retiring to become a full time Mom I transitioned the “office” into the room that the all crafts and hobbies command center.

The shelves filled up with hundreds of cookbooks, scrap books, decorative papers, trinkets, beads, wire, string, yarn, stickers, glue, tools, embossing machines, rubber stamps, sets of scissors that could cut deckled edges to wavy lines, dozens of cameras and lens and the millions of photos they produced, fabric, canvas and threads, fibers and ribbons.  Eventually the room filled up so much that the adjoining shower was conscripted for hobby storage.  Then like a character in a Shel Silverstein poem my playhouse was too full to be useful and I just moved out and closed the door.

It helped that I had a laptop and some portable needlepoint.  I left my office as a shrine to all my creativity with my old desktop computer holding court on my giant desk/craft table, lonely and neglected.  Now that did not mean that I cut out all my hobbies, but other more meaningful work had a greater share of my time.

Then came the treadmill desk with a reason to makeover my playhouse.  Now I spend more waking hours in the shrine to creativity than I ever did when I was paid full time to work for others.  Being in this room, which is like a time capsule to an old life has rekindled my interest in many old hobbies.  The issue is that newfound fire did not come with any more hours in the day, or the disinterest in the newer things that had filled my days.  The worst part is that now I try and do as many hobbies as possible all while walking on my treadmill desk.

I went to get a massage today and my therapist was quizzing me about how many hours I was working on my computer.  “Not that many,” I told her, “why do you ask?”  She told me that although my leg muscles were tight from so much walking my real problem area were some part of my pectoral muscles.

I thought about the places she was pushing near my shoulders that were hurting from the massage and I told her, “It’s not computer work but my needlepoint.”  I quickly told her I was not giving that up and she showed me several “Needlepoint exercises.”  Now I not only have to find time to fit in all the hobbies, but the exercises that go along with them.

I think that if I live another fifty years and don’t take up one new hobby I will still never learn, create or finish all the ideas that are in my head now.  The only saving grace is that I certainly will forget them before I can feel remorse about not completing them.