“HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.”

– Hogfather, By Terry Pratchett

Time runs ever slower in the dog days of quarantine, boarded up in our apartments and houses while the things we found enjoyment in are starting to lessen their gleam bit by bit. That is why I knew I had to come up with something to do during my quarantine to help pass the time, and I decided to join the bandwagon and try out a couple new hobbies.

Quarantine hobby #1

Cooking was the most obvious. From helping my mom, I learned how underdeveloped my skills were and decided it was time to learn how to sustain myself and get some new ideas for when school starts back in the fall. With this new challenge in mind, I scoured the internet for tasty recipes that involved pastas and baking. The first recipe I tackled was cilantro lime shrimp stuffed in romaine lettuce wraps and topped with avocado slices and a homemade chipotle ranch dressing.

The subsequent dishes began to spiral into random inhibitions on what I needed the most. I ended up making a blueberry lemon cake, a spinach and artichoke macaroni and cheese dish and various other pastas. You can do so much with pasta. And that’s the fun thing about cooking: it’s all about experimentation!

And when you cook, you also have the wonderful resulting hobby of cleaning up after yourself! That can easily fill your day for six hours; think of all that time well spent!

Quarantine hobby #2

Another hobby I found myself diving into was gardening, after my little pomegranate tree decided to flip over and subsequently die via a seatbelt accident. This hobby also sprung up because all summer long I’d been helping my parents move into their new house, and I was given the task of uprooting the plants in our old garden to our new garden. So far we have successfully repotted mint, a crepe myrtle, and I am now growing some lemon trees. You’ve all heard the saying: “When life gives you lemons…”  Well I decided to take it a step further and just make more.

Quarantine hobby #3

If these hobbies still don’t pique your interest, then I have something for the extroverts. Back in May, after finals, the Ocean Engineering  Mentorship Program hosted a Zoom meeting for all the ocean engineering majors and staff where we had our very own Olympics. It wasn’t a physical challenge but more of an engineering one that involved building the tallest structure with objects smaller than 12 inches, and finding an object in our room that related to our major. Various activities like that made the session fly by, but it certainly showed us how creative one can get to find new innovative ways to hang out with friends.

And now I leave it to you, dear reader, to figure out whether or not these are to your liking. Trust your imagination and keep trying new things even if you fail the first 21 times.