Monday, January 5, 2009

My weird hobbies

I'm one of those people who is car obsessed. Don't try to parse that, you either are or are not. It like something you're born with that stays with you forever. Alot of my free time is spent doing something based around old cars. Either working on them, looking at them or shooting bull on internet forums about them.I'm not real sure how I got this way but some of my earliest memories are of me playing with my matchbox cars so I've had it a long time.

My other much stranger hobby is collecting antique beer cans. These are the kind you'd need an opener to get the beer out. I know exactly where this came from. When I was about 13 my mother used to take me to the Asheville Mall and drop me off (this was back when the word "predator" was used only to talk about large meat eating animals). I'd play Missile Command, Galaga, Defender and Robotron 2084 until I ran out of money. One day went to B. Daltons Booksellers and happened to pick up a book about it. I was hooked. It's a laid back hobby that usually involves drinking beer at some microbrewery, which isn't a bad thing to do.

Metal detecting is another old recently reaquired hobby from my childhood. As a kid I'd read about Mel Fisher trying to find the Atocha and was enthralled with it. I'd dream about finding lost treasure. I was probably 10 years old and mowed lawns for $5 a pop (did you know that kids nowaday get like $50-$75 for doing this?) until I saved up $240 to buy a then state of the art Compass metal detector. A few months ago I bought a new one to look for cans with and found that I really enjoy wandering around aimlessly in the desert looking for stuff other people lost.

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