Hobbies

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.

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.

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....

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....

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....