Play

I love my work, and do my best to balance work and life, and the bit that's left is filled, to overflowing and then some, with hobbies.

• Cooking.  I love to cook.  I mostly cook Indonesian, Dutch, German, French, Chinese, and eclectic mixes of these.  I currently am enjoying a few new toys, courtesy of wedding presents: a 14-cup professional Cuisinart food processor, several really nice All-Clad Stainless Steel pans, and a food dehydrator.  It lets me indulge in exploring several new ranges of cooking.  My wife Irene and I cook love to cook together, and love to cook with and for friends.  We host large food and gaming gatherings each long holiday weekend and host a large brunch once a month or so.
• Working out.  Irene and I work out.  We do stretches and martial arts forms each day when we get up, walk, hike, and do a nightly cyclical workout program every night.
• Martial Arts.  Irene and I study silat, an Indonesian fighting system.  We have class once a week, get our forms in every morning, and try and do something together several times a week.
• Reading.  I started collecting books when I was nine, mostly hard science fiction.  By age ten I had an agreement with the nearest bookstore to let me sift through their new books before they went on the shelf.  At one European SF convention a friend and I at the opening of the dealer's room bought a dealer of English books' entire supply.  With an approach like that it's not that strange that my collection currently runs a tad over 9,000 books.
• Hiking.  We love to hike.  So far we've hiked Forest Park, Butte Park, along the coast, and a bit along the waterfalls in the Columbia Gorge.  We walk a lot in the neighborhood, to get groceries, to the St. John's Pub, and so on.  We'll get there.
• Gaming.  My family played games of all kinds: board games and card games.  With my uncle I played chess, taking it up to club play and speed chess tournaments for money every weekend, and war games.  These days we have once every few months a board games extravaganza and we play card games.  I also play role playing games.  Well, I mostly run them.  And that hobby got a bit out of hand, to the point where I line produced and co-wrote one pen-and-paper role playing game that was published: Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne.  I own the license to Amber Diceless Role Playing and, time permitting, one of these days, I will publish a second version of it.

• Organ playing.  I play the organ.  I had ten years of lessons and played until I was in my early twenties.  I bought an awesome Yamaha Electone organ a few years back and am practicing again.  I have no musical talent whatsoever, and only play by dint of practice, practice, practice.  It's still mediocre at best, but I enjoy it.  Playing the organ relaxes me.
• Skiing.  I love to ski, from age ten to twenty-five I would go on two two-week ski trips a year.  Sadly, despite living this close to Mt. Hood, I haven't skied since moving here.  But his next winter ... 
• Whipcracking.  I learned to crack a whip from a professional whip cracking artist and teacher.  It's a lot of fun, but it takes a lot of space (with my height and built, using an 8' bull whip takes about 27' x 27') and the ground needs to be dry and not abrasive.  In Portland, that's a bit trickier.
• Paintball.  I played paintball a fair bit when Living in Chicago, and one week a year in the mountains of West Virginia, where a friend of mine ran a paintball field and owned undeveloped mountain property.   I'd like to get back into that.
• Miniatures Painting and wargaming.  I played Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K, Battlefleet Gothic, and Epic 40K.