Returning to Report

Hello friends! I wanted to report how my first three hobbies of the year went! As you may remember, they were:

-Create a YouTube channel
-Board games
-Embrace my inner nerd

The YouTube channel idea died fairly quickly, as I looked into copyright law. Covers aren't legal to put on YouTube unless you pay the fees. And that just kind of took the fun out of it! My only options are songs I wrote myself, or songs in the public domain. I don't feel up to songwriting just yet. I may come back to this at some point later though. Maybe I can convince people to perform music with me that we record, but don't upload. Who knows. I do know I would love to perform with people. I definitely miss having music performance in my life, and I would like to be able to do all kinds of cool songs, arrangements, and covers, not just classical choir music. Again, I'll need to come back to this.

Board games went really well! I got advice from Facebook friends about what games they love, and ended up mostly with card games. The games I ended up with were:

-Tokaido
-Coup
-Punderdome
-The Game of Things
-Fluxx
-The Oregon Trail
-Splendor
-Dominion
-Harry Potter - The Battle of Hogwarts

The only ones I haven't actually played yet are Punderdome and Harry Potter. The others I've played, and all are pretty good! I now have some good memories, playing these with friends. One of my favorites was the game of The Oregon Trail that the Porters and I played in Wisconsin. There's nothing like a nearly unbeatable game full of dysentery and death!

The third hobby was embracing my inner nerd. Success. I re-read Harry Potter, plus read the Cursed Child for the first time. I've been listening to a Harry Potter podcast that I enjoy as well ("Harry Potter and the Sacred Text"), and got myself a ring with the words "Expecto Patronum" inscribed. I also got on Pottermore and was sorted into Hufflepuff house. In addition, I continued to play Pokemon Go without shame, made some progress on "William Shakespeare's Star Wars", and other similar activities.

Probably the nerdiest thing of all is that I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Our group consists of my roommates, our dear friends the Earl's, and our DM named Sam. My character is a half-elf cleric with the personality of Rapunzel / Buddy the Elf. My charisma is maxed out. I am still getting used to playing, being spontaneous, and having fun. It's a little scary to "play pretend" as an adult. But, sometimes it goes SO RIGHT (or so wrong!), and we laugh harder than I have in months or years. We continue to meet every few weeks, and I have no intention of stopping!

So now you know! These are the hobbies I've been working on, January through March, with some continuing on, which is after all, the ultimate goal: finding the ones that stick.