Follow-Up about Rob Dial's Podcast on Hobbies

The other day I wrote about podcaster Rob Dial's tips about hobbies.  He suggested that we each have different types of them, one hobby that brings in money, one that enhances physical fitness, one that provides a creative outlet, one that improves memory and intelligence...and one that challenges the mindset.  The only of these that I had an issue with was the first one...and apparently, I'm not the only one.  Yet if I go to an art exhibit or craft show in town, inevitably I will see price tags next to the items on display.  Do I begrudge the creators of these objects their putting a price on their artistic expression, which by and large the greater part of them do as a hobby, a labor of love so to speak?   No, actually I think more of it as an expression of confidence and a statement of quality about their work.  I absolutely recognize the excellence of my favorite athletes, musicians and actors...yet I doubt that their acceptance of millions of dollars for their achievements has tainted their chosen field for them: they still love what they do.  But if I do charge money for some hobby I already love doing, doesn't that also imply that I am committed to the benefited party that my product meets a higher standard than if I were just dithering around?  It's this imposition on my sense of freedom as well as a possible sense of insecurity that I am not up to the task or am undeserving of what I might charge that, at least to me, presents the main challenges I have to this notion of Dial's.  Now one objection I heard about it was that if you're retired you don't feel the need to try to make more money...enough is enough: I totally get that viewpoint and think maybe charity or philanthropy might be viable alternatives.  But Dial, who is 35 with a work history in sales, wasn't just speaking to retirees.  Nor was he suggesting that people's lives are so pathetic that they need to wheedle others out of their cash in a petty manner.  As I said before, the emphasis is on quality and confidence, and receiving a little dough in some area...just one, not everything...can enhance life.  Plus, it's not a bad thing to feel a little challenged and confronted about something like this: it makes me work to examine my own life and that is a good thing...

Podcaster Suggests Five Kinds of Hobbies

When I saw the title of a recent podcast of Rob Dial for his Mindset Mentor program, I was under the impression that he was going to reveal five different specific hobbies I should consider pursuing to enhance my personal development.  If he had really done that, I probably would be writing this article laying out my objections to this hobby or that.  Instead, he described five different kinds of hobbies: oh, yeah, I can dig that.  Here are his suggested hobby categories:

1--Hobbies that provide an income.

2--Hobbies that enhance physical fitness.

3--Hobbies that provide a creative outlet.

4--Hobbies that increase knowledge and intelligence.

5--Hobbies that improve one's mindset.

I believe that I am already engaged in hobbies that fulfill to varying degrees #2 through #5, but I'm wondering whether I can (or want to) tweak a couple of them to meet #1 as well.  Of course, since I'm approaching retirement, the free time on the other side of that transformation should open up opportunities for all five areas.  Also, there is some overlap between them.  But for an old geezer like I'm becoming, examining hobbies like this sounds like a pretty spiffy idea.  What are your hobbies, and do they fit in the above divisions that Dial delineated?  I know there are some that don't for me, such as watching TV and listening to good music, although there could be an argument made that if done thoughtfully, they could contribute to numbers 4 and 5. And of course they provide a good amount of material for my writing, a creative outlet (see yesterday's article)...

Tackling Still More Jigsaw Puzzles at Home

 

During my recent recovery at home I've gone through a slew of jigsaw puzzles...the nearby Walmart has an excellent selection.  I just open the box, spread the pieces out on the dining room table, and walk up to the puzzle at various random moments during the day.  I'm about to begin a new one...if you have a free surface to work on, why not try this fun activity yourself?  Besides simply being fun, it also helps the mind stay sharp, I imagine more than popping some over-the-counter pill.  Each puzzle presents its own challenges, and I enjoy tackling them while inviting anyone around to share in their construction. I've completed quite a few...the above three represent my three favorites of late.  By the way, I was surprised by a recent contestant on the game show Wheel of Fortune who said that she engaged in jigsaw puzzle competitions and that there was actually a world championship in it. If that's your schtick then go for it....for me, I like doing them for their own sake... 

Jigsaw Puzzles: a Pleasant Diversion

For yesterday's "Quote of the Week" article I had originally picked one by Isaac Asimov that resonated with me...no wonder, since I had discussed the exact same quote a few months ago! So instead, before I finally settled on a music-themed quote, I explored what different people had to say about jigsaw puzzles, something I've enjoyed doing throughout my life.  I was "puzzled" by the quotes I could come up with: every single one of them used jigsaw puzzles in an allegorical sense, comparing them to some aspect of their lives and experiences...in no quote did anyone actually get down to describing their feelings about doing jigsaw puzzles per se.  So I'm here to fill that void...maybe only "unfamous" people such as myself can talk about liking them...

Jigsaw puzzles...at least the standard ones in which interlocking small cardboard pieces fit together to form a larger picture...are an inexpensive way to divert oneself.  You can pick out, from the wide selection of puzzles on the market, the picture you want to put together: beautiful scenes, animals, still life, themes like clocks, trading cards, signs, cartoons...anything worth looking at is worth being on a jigsaw puzzle.  You can also choose how large the puzzle is, not only with its dimensions but also how many pieces are involved.  If you have a reasonably large surface on which to spread out the puzzle without it getting disturbed, you can work on it at your leisure without any time constraints.  I like the exercise it gives my sense of perception and discrimination of shapes and shades of color as I group together pieces that are more likely to go together.  There are two ways to do these puzzles: either by referring to the picture on the box or putting it together "blind" with only a general notion of what it will look like in the end...I'm more likely to do the latter with 300-500 piece puzzles while I use the picture in those with more pieces...

One of my favorite old comedy films was from Laurel and Hardy as all sorts of hilarious things were going on throughout it...and there was a table containing a jigsaw puzzle in the background.  No matter what was going on in the story, whenever anyone happened to pass by the table they would have to stop what they were doing and work on the puzzle. Some people, when they're finished working a puzzle, glue it onto a surface and make a decoration from it.  I like to simply crumble it back up and stick it back in the box...sometimes I like to do them again at a later time.  I got a few this past Christmas...just finished a 1000-piece puzzle with clocks...that's it, finished, in the above picture.  I guess I must really like jigsaw puzzles since I wrote similar articles about them back in 2008 and 2017...

Tuesday's List: South Florida Radio & TV Stations, 1968-73

This is one of my quirkier, more personal lists.  I grew up in Hollywood, which lies right in the middle of the heavily populated three southeastern counties of Florida: Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade.  I also had, from 1968 to 1973 when I was going to Nova High School (corresponding to my 7th-11th grade years there) a hobby of listening to radio to pick up distant stations, called "DXing" and now obviously obsolete with the advent of the internet and easy-to-download apps that can pick up just about any station anywhere.  Well, during that time I compiled a listening log as well as lists of the local FM and TV stations.  I'm sure that the TV and radio station lineup looks quite different now than from back then, so I though it might be a sort of contribution of mine to the storehouse of knowledge accruing on the internet to put out a list of these old stations from my old home area.  They are all from either Palm Beach, Broward, or Dade county...my favorite radio stations were WQAM, WFUN, WSRF  (all three with rock n' roll formats), WSHE-FM (album rock), and WKAT (talk radio).  Sometimes WFTL would broadcast local high school football games live and faithfully gave us all the scores late on game night.  In early 1971, WMYQ on 96.3 made the big breakthrough in south Florida with a strong popular music format for the first time on the FM band...others would soon follow in a torrent, quickly converting that once-neglected band into the one most people listen to today...later that decade, as the disco era ensued, the station on 100.7 would reign supreme, while the one on 94.9 renamed itself "Zeta Four" and commanded my listening loyalty with some really good album rock.  Here's the list, with the TV section listing the channels and the AM/FM sections listing the frequencies...

SOUTH FLORIDA TV STATIONS (1968-73)
2 WTHS         Miami  (Educational/Public)
4 WTVJ          Miami  (CBS)
5 WPTV         Palm Beach (NBC)
6 WCIX          Miami  (Independent)
7 WCKT         Miami  (NBC)
10 WLBW/WPLG    Miami   (ABC)
12 WEAT       West Palm Beach (ABC)
17 WSEC        Miami  (Educational)
23 WLTV       Miami  (Spanish)
51 WKID        Fort Lauderdale  (Independent)
61 W61AA      Fort Lauderdale  (Independent)

SOUTH FLORIDA AM RADIO STATIONS (1968-73)
540 WQAM    Miami
610 WIOD      Miami
710 WGBS     Miami
740 WSBR      Boca Raton
790 WFUN     South Miami
850 WEAT      West Palm Beach
900 WSWN     Belle Glade
940 WINZ       Miami
980 WLOD      Pompano Beach
990 WFAB      Miami
1000 WJTS/WRYZ      Jupiter
1080 WVCG    Coral Gables
1140 WMIE/WQBA   Miami
1190 WAVS     Fort Lauderdale
1220 WOAH/WLTO/WCMQ    Miami
1230 WJNP      West Palm Beach
1260 WAME/WWOK    Miami
1290 WIRK      West Palm Beach
1320 WGMA    Hollywood
1340 WQXT     Palm Beach
1360 WKAT     Miami Beach
1400 WFTL      Fort Lauderdale
1420 WDBF     Delray Beach
1430 WIII/WRSD    Homestead
1450 WOCN     Miami
1470 WRBD     Pompano Beach
1490 WMBM    Miami Beach
1520 WIXX/WEXY    Oakland Park
1550 WRIZ       Coral Gables
1580 WSRF      Fort Lauderdale

SOUTH FLORIDA FM RADIO STATIONS (1968-73)
89.7 WMCU      Miami
91.3 WTHS        Miami
92.1 WHMS       Hialeah
93.1 WKAT/WTMI     Miami
93.9 WGOS/WBUS    Miami Beach
94.9 WAEZ/WOCN    Miami Beach
96.3 WGBS/WJHR/WMYQ      Miami
97.3 WIOD/WAIA       Miami
97.9 WWOS       Palm Beach
99.1 WEDR        Miami
99.9 WWOG       Boca Raton
100.7 WMJR       Fort Lauderdale
101.5 WWPB/WLYF   Miami
102.7 WCKO      Pompano Beach
103.5 WSRF/WSHE     Fort Lauderdale
104.5 WEAT       West Palm Beach
105.1 WYOR       Coral Gables
105.9 WFLM/WIXX/WAXY    Fort Lauderdale
106.7 WFTL        Fort Lauderdale
107.9 WIRK/WPBF      West Palm Beach

Looking Back on 1968

After working a little more than my full shift at my workplace, I came home and naturally sat down to relax and watch one of my favorite TV channels: C-Span.  It was showing a recap of the tumultuous year of 1968 when assassinations, war, the election, and all the protests were going on.  I was there in the middle of it all...no, I wasn't in any of the news stories, I was just an eleven year old kid, going on twelve, and trying to get through my relatively insignificant little life...

The first half of 1968 had me in the sixth grade, a "senior" at my Nova Elementary School in Davie.  The second half I was a lowly seventh grader across the field at Nova High.  Now here's the kicker: when we were supposedly younger and less mature, we didn't lord our seniority over the lower grades...but in Nova High, the upperclassman were extremely hierarchical about their position and imagined superiority.  Doubtless this "reverse-maturity" had a great deal to do with adolescence and the need in some primitive, mammalian-brain-dominated classmates to establish some kind of pecking order.  Nevertheless, it was disconcerting for me in August of that year to meet up with kids just a class ahead of me whom I knew back in Nova Elementary and who suddenly didn't recognize me...or pretended not do...

If there was one theme that dominated my life back in 1968 and gave the year a personal stamp, it was my peculiar hobby of AM radio DX-ng, that is, listening to distant stations on the radio.  This would occur during the nighttime when picking up stations hundreds and even thousands of miles away was possible...I would regularly listen from my south Floridian home in Hollywood to stations like WBT/Charlotte, NC, WABC/New York, WBZ/Boston, WSM/Nashville, TN, and TransWorld Radio from Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles.  I would tune in on frequencies that were essentially a jumbled mess of sounds and strain my ears to pick out anything coherent among the noise...it was definitely a training period for me in both learning to listen and cultivating patience. During the second half of 1968 I discovered that the second-year American Basketball Association had a franchise in Miami called the Floridians...I closely followed their games on Miami's low power AM station WOCN/1450...that was perhaps my most memorable sports season, especially when you couple it with the Miami Dolphin's 1968 season under coach George Wilson: they went 5-8-1 that year but had most of the players they would be using to later go to three Super Bowls, win two, and go undefeated in 1972...

1968 was the year of the long song, which AM radio had previously steadfastly avoided.  Hey Jude, MacArthur Park, Time Will Come Today, Those Were the Days, and Sky Pilot, to name some of the more prominent, got a lot of airtime...I know, because I'd be trying to get a station's ID and had to wait until the damned song was finally over!  It was also the year that The Prisoner, one of my all-time favorite television series, began its 17-episode run on CBS.  So no, I wasn't at all caught up with the turmoil and war and politics the way it is being presented on retrospective documentaries...no, I was caught up with my own life...

Decided to Stay an Extra Day at Daytona Beach

Well, Melissa and I were enjoying the beach and hotel so much here at Daytona Beach that we decided to extend the stay to a second night...we'll definitely be heading back to Gainesville tomorrow.  I enjoyed the pool and swam some laps...maybe it's time to resume that form of exercise regularly at my gym, which features a great indoor pool.  I also ran 4.5 miles on the beach, this time using a free GPS mileage-tracking android app I just installed last night.  This should make it a lot easier to be creative about my future running, walking, and biking...no need anymore to map out a course in advance and measure its length...

It's a good thing to have at least one full day to enjoy at the beach...checking in one afternoon and leaving the next morning seems a bit incomplete.  We spent a great deal of time outdoors, and it was refreshing and invigorating for both Melissa and me.  The two of us enjoyed a twilight/early evening walk down the beach after flying a little kite that she had recently purchased (that's what I'm doing in the above photo).  And tomorrow morning we'll still be here, although the emphasis will be more strongly task-oriented as we pack up to go back home.  Yes, we need to get away like this more often...

Flag Planters and Travel Addicts

I have never knowingly met John, a marathon runner whose commitment to the sport has placed him squarely in the "fanatic" category.  He is currently in his early seventies and claims to have successfully entered and finished marathons in more countries of the world than any other runner...not to mention all fifty states of the USA.  Now, though, his mounting health problems have forced him to give up this undertaking.  I'm sad about that, because over the past few years I had become fond of reading about his adventures on his blog.  I may have even inadvertently "run" into him without knowing it, since we were entered in the same races twice, in Gainesville and Ocala...well, actually, he was running the marathon in them and I was doing the half-marathon...

John is an example of someone whom I term a "flag planter"...as well as a "travel addict". Flag planting involves accumulating states and countries that one has visited and/or involved in their designated activities.  Travel addiction, not necessarily attributable to people who like to go on occasional vacations or special trips, refers to those who seem incapable of staying put in any one locale for very long. The two designations can coincide, as in John's case, but they can also be disjoint.  For example, people can be engaged in hobbies that don't necessarily involve travel but still involve counting how many countries (or states) they are covering with it.  As a kid, I used to have a hobby in which I would listen to my own cheap little AM radio (back in the 1960s) and try to pick up long-distance stations.  From southern Florida, I managed to get stations from 31 different states (and I remember them to this day).  Nowadays, though, with the Internet available, this doesn't seem like such an accomplishment.  And a few years ago, quarters were issued for each state as well, with many coin collectors trying to "fill the map" with that numismatic endeavor...

Travel addicts rarely openly admit to their affliction.  Instead, they usually have come up with some grand cause to justify their unceasing travels, be it through employment, education, religion, maintaining family contacts, or other rationales.  John is a case in point, with his goal of planting his flag across the country and world through his marathons.  But you can't do what he did over the years without getting off on travel.  Of course, travel costs money and some people need to have someone else foot the bill for their movements hither and yon.  Social media tends to affirm these habitually restless people as they document, photograph, and publish their various forays with almost assured multiple "likes"...

I am neither a travel addict nor someone who still feels the need to "plant my flag" in different places with my exploits.  That clearly distinguishes me from John, but there is one thing in common between us: we like to run and we are both getting older and more prone to medical/health issues that can limit that running.  John, who is about 14 years older than me, just happens to be a little ahead of me in that regard...

Quarter Infomercial Follow-Up

As a follow-up to my "Commercial Dream Seepage" article a few days ago, I happened to tune in to that same infomercial, in which an obnoxious man was hawking a couple of albums full of American commemorative quarters. In my original article, I dreamed (yes, dreamed) that the asking price was $99: in full consciousness, I observed that the price was TWO payments of $99. However, there were a lot of quarters in this TV offer, and according to the annoying gentleman, they constituted a complete set of all the variants produced not only in the "American States" series, but also the "America the Beautiful" series in the second album. So it finally made sense boasting that the image of Smokey Bear would be on the album cover: it was for that latter album featuring beautiful American scenic places engraved on the quarters.

Watching this, although convincing me that it wasn't really a monumental rip-off after all, gave me pause for reflection. This offer was ostensibly targeted for coin collecting enthusiasts, but was it really so in the final analysis? After all, the fun in any collecting hobby is in the gradual amassing of the "stuff" that the hobby constitutes. That includes starting small, noting the items that are wanted, and investigating various ways to add them to the collection. And a great part of the enjoyment in going over one's collection is recalling how the various items were acquired. This goes for collecting cards, stamps, coins, or anything else. I was an avid card collector as a kid. I envied others who had a larger collection than me and wanted to build up my collection to their level. But if someone just handed me a series' complete collection, then I would get no real satisfaction from possessing it. So that leads me to the probable "real" target of this infomercial.

Investment, pure and simple. People are looking for ways to invest their money into hard, tangible commodities that will appreciate in value over the years. It matters not whether the buyer of these quarter sets is a numismatic enthusiast: collecting coins is (very) secondary to the goal of investment for future financial gain, at least the way I see it...