Hobbies

In January 2019, I went to Norway for an internship and wanted to buy a chunky wool sweater while there because it seemed like the right sort of thing to bring back. I purchased an on-sale past season color Dale of Norway sweater in the Arctic city of Tromsø, and thus began my love affair with wool sweaters.

In March 2020, I came home to Minnesota at the start of Covid lockdowns. In early April, we had a typical large MN snowfall, and for the first time, I found myself with both the free time of youth as well as the engineering knowledge I had gained. It was time to make things out of snow. I only had the one big batch of snow to work with that winter, but I resumed my work the following year. ...

I ran my first race late in my senior year as a way to try something different with my sudden influx of free time. It was a half marathon, I did not train adequately, and it did not go well, but I still finished. It took a few years for me to do another, but that one went better, and I was a bit more encouraged to keep going.

Painting is something I’ve enjoyed here and there for quite a while. My first fond memory of doing so was in 8th grade art class when our assignment was to paint a sports scene for a sport we played in a pop art style. Taking pride in my lack of athleticism, I chose a picture of a guy getting hit in the face with a baseball. To my surprise, my art teacher actually liked my painting and selected it to put on the wall near the student lockers. To my greater surprise, it remained there years later when I visited again during high school. To my even greater surprise, it’s still available on the school’s art portfolio website! ...

What I was a child (and now), I loved to talk and tell stories. As a way to redirect my energy, my parents and teachers encouraged me to write these stories down. When I was in kindergarten, I wrote my first stories, some of which I’ve found more recently, and they were indecipherable. One, however, was my magnum opus: The Caterpillar, the full text (and pictures) of which are preserved in a post below. ...

This is a hobby I’ve been intereted in over two separate phases. I was first interested in early high school, during which I made a variety of simple models from Youtube videos, and more interestingly, experimented with folding a tiny crane using toothpicks instead of my fingers. I revisited this hobby during the covid lockdown, and ended up being sucked into it from around January 2021 to February 2022. During this time, I made an instagram account to document my folds. This was a great way to engage more with other folders and keep track of everything I’d made! ...