Okay I've done crafts of all sorts over the years, woodworking to needlepoint, painting, and sewing, used to make all my own clothes from my own patterns even that I sketched out. But my left and dominant hand is quickly giving up the ghost on functioning. The little needles for hand stitching are quite literally slipping through my finger tips. My three year old granddaughter could color better within the lines than me by now and probably work a crochet hook better too. Naturally I am staying far away from our lathe lest I become an episode on some ER show for having a chisel lodged in my skull. And my right hand has spent 37 years as just an accessory to make me look even, like most righties are with their left hands. I can no longer pick at the strings of a guitar, maneuver my violin bow, or depress the keys on my clarinet, or piano.

So I am now growing ever more desperate for a hobby. The work arounds I've been using to try to keep my hobbies have all but failed, 3 fingers are completely numb, the pinky to the middle and the other two only have partial feeling. My poor brain is going crazy from lack of use and I can feel myself growing depressed and frustrated with myself. But the only hobbies I can think of aside from reading excessively as I already do, require the coordinated use of at least one hand.

I can still operate my sewing machine, but require someone else to make all the cuts . I lost sports in my early twenties, lost my education in my early thirties, and now here I am just a few years later and it's taken away my music and my arts. And about 6 months out of the year for my gardening as well... mostly because it's just tooo hot to tend to the garden all the very loooooong summer we have in GA. Even my bread making days are over, and any fancy baking, I can still manage a few chocolate chip cookies on a good day, but forget about shortbreads or windowpanes, or any kind of decoration on cakes and such.

I'm just getting fat dumb and lazy it seems. I mean if you're in the mood for cake and you make cute dainty little confections that look almost too good to eat you've one spent a lot of calories making them, but also you slowly savor one of the poor little things and leave the rest alone for the day or fob them off on friends and family where your little baby can be consumed without your knowledge. Versus making a batch of chocolate chip cookies with a stand mixer, you spent next to nothing in calories to make it, and half your cookies are gone before they even touch the cooling rack. And geez I have never in my life eaten as much fast and convenience food as I have this past year... I think you could total all years before and still come up with less than this past year combined.

I need something to do, something more stimulating than playing on the iPad or reading through encyclopedias and really any books, papers or whatnot I can get my hands on. But also something I can do that won't suffer a clear failure, or worse result in personal injury or accidental death. Even writing which I used to love to do, is fading quickly as my dyslexia and memory issues become more pronounced (thank god for spell check). I'm feelings very much like the antagonist from the Conquer Worm or maybe just wishing I were.

I sure wish I could give you some suggestions but I don't have a creative bone in my body. My daughter does but I have no idea where she got that from...lol

I always enjoy reading your posts. They always make me 'think' a little deeper than I normally would. I myself am just a silly 55 year old woman but what you are going through is not being lazy my friend.

You have done so much in your life. The list is amazing to me.

Hopefully someone will come along with some really good suggestions for you.

And you are sooooo right about these Georgia summers. They are LONG and HOT. My favorite time is when I can open the whole house up and have a light breeze come through. Those days are so few here

Take care

Debi in Georgia

My mom has vision loss, she had to give up her sewing, gardening for the most part, still can cook & bake w/ special magnifier for recipes..
We are trying to think of activities she can do at home too, it is hard to come up with ideas..

Hmmmm.... such a tricky thing, when it comes to vision loss... it's harder to aquire new skills when you can't see well enough to read the directions and when working with something unfamiliar. If it was the eyes going on me rather than the hands, I could still play my instruments, or knit and crochet and some hand embroidery, like sashiko that's done in repetition more on feel than staring it down, but only because of how long I've been doing it. I couldn't imagine trying to learn a new craft without being able to see what I'm doing. Not that one couldn't learn, there's plenty of blind people out there who can sew, knit and crochet, even paint but it's been my experience that the ones who have an easier time of it were either born blind or lost their vision very early in life, once we gain that dependency on sight it becomes our all.

I suppose I should be glad it's the hands and not the eyes all the same... I can still read as much as I like to at least keep my brain from going completely idle, and I'm sure with that reading I'll eventually come across some sort of solution to my current predicament.... speaking of which I wonder how deft your hands must be to do bobbin lace? I've never tried it before, but I can tie my shoes with my right hand only because of the number of times I've injured the left and a general despising of slip on or velcroed shoes, just need to be able to get the pins into the pillow or board, and print out my patterns rather than drawing them... I don't really care for lace on the whole, but I do have a GD who would probably be able to put it to good use. Now is it worth the $40 for bobbins to find out?

Ahhh... better still, before spending the money I could probably fashion a close enough proximity to a bobbin from some old pencils and rubber bands. Yiiippppeeee a project!!!

Have you tried paracord braiding?

I know you're having problems with your hands, but so was I when I started trying out paracord braiding. I was basically using it as a physical therapy.

It's kind of like macrame...actually, it is macrame, just on a smaller scale. You can use just about any thickness of cord you want. The thicker cords might be easier for numb fingers to maneuver.

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Wow that really takes me back to the totally 80's friendship bracelets Gosh I must have made thousands out of embroidery thread back when I was a kid. And the 90's hemp bracelets and necklaces... but I never thought of doing it out of paracording before.... what do you do with them when you're done though? Untie and try another knotting? Make a rug? Dog collars? I can't picture tying paracord around my wrist or neck, though I believe I have some left over from my camping days to play with.

I'll have to hunt it up tomorrow afternoon, sort of fighting with the DH tonight so I'm naturally suffering the effects of insomnia while he's blissfully asleep. Hot day, had to go food shopping and my wheelchair had a flat tire, I didn't want to use the store chair, silly of me I know but I despise the motorized carts especially when I have tunnel vision and poor coordination now, and he had a bad day because his work kept bothering him even though he was off and we both just basically got snippy with each other. Which even carried over when we got back home and he criticized my attempts at putting groceries away which was really just succeeding in throwing half of them on the floor because left hand kept reaching to grab stuff though it can't hold anything. And he thought I was throwing them on purpose thinking I was still mad at him... honestly I was ready to bean him by the end of it.

Hot, tired, sore and my left hand refused to listen to me and stop picking things up, while my right hand just sat idly by, not even trying to help. But then to I was rushing to get things put up because I was hot, tired and hurting and wanting nothing more than to hop in a nice cold shower and lay down, so I wasn't focusing enough on which hand was doing the work till the bread when skittering across the floor, followed by the DH's soda, the cats food, the DH's chips and when I reached for the meats he stopped me and kicked me out of the kitchen. And from there we've been in the silently seething at each other point of our argument and to which tomorrow afternoon he'll call me to apologize while he's at work and I'll feel guilty for having never once in 17 years of marriage being the first one to apologize and after dinner tomorrow we'll be cuddled up on the couch together like the whole day never happened, and once more I won't have learned my lesson to simply say I'm sorry first so I can get a good nights rest, because he always lets me win any argument... sooooo infuriating.

This is why I need hobbies!!! I need challenges and conflicts... better they occur by paint brush or thread than my poor DH, who agrees that a bored me is a very very stubborn and ever so much a *^%#~ me.

I made a few bracelets, a heck of a lot of keychains, and I was going to start trying actual macrame with actual macrame cord when exboyfriend dumped me and I basically ran out of steam on all my hobbies for a long time. (he dumped me in 2014, it's taken me a bit to start back up with any enthusiasm. MS has also kind of sucked the crafting enthusiasm out of me for a bit too)

I'd really like to get back to playing with paracord and trying out some macrame cord but since my dad died in April I just haven't had time, or money to do much with the hobbies. I'm trying to work on a scrap afghan right now, but haven't really gotten all that far. Been mostly trying to help my mom who's been super depressed about my dad. Usually I'll sit down to start crocheting, and I think that's when my mom takes her cue to start picking on me because she's sad and bored.

I found several packages of keyrings the other day in my desk. I keep hoping I'll find a magic stash of paracord, so far nothing. I did play around with some crochet thread (not really thread, it's cotton yarn that's a step down from worsted weight) and the knots that the paracord braiding uses. At least the cotton yarn was easier on the fingers than the paracord is.

Well couldn't find any paracord laying around the house, but I have combined the "lace bobbin" technique with some old embroidery thread and am finding that I can make little friendship bracelets with it. Just used pencils and elastics to hold the skinny threads that I otherwise would have a problem in manipulating and I can "weave" away.

So the next thing I guess is convincing the DH or my mom to make me some bobbins out of our scrap wood. Saving myself a pretty penny on buying them and also hopefully making them so they can clip into my sewing machine's bobbin winder so I can wind them easily.

You never sound like a "directions" person. You sound smart, go on your own paths. I have no hobbies, use Trivia (you are on list - PM me (I'm administrator) if you want to, yet have a problem getting on. - there's one of things/tasks I set for myself) of things I don't know to investigate that area more. On computer you can make print bigger when that's an issue. I have no set hobbies, tend to meander in all different directions as they arise. What interests me today, may not tomorrow.

-you can go places like museums, etc. on computer
- take courses.

Play to find stuff you like.

I read quotes once in awhile, TS Eliot, etc. No two days alike.

Yeah, not real big on "following directions" in most cases To me they're more guidelines when I'm given directions. I used to play a lot of trivia games, but they do tend to get boring after awhile... even though I'm losing it some I do still have a pretty decent memory for weird trivia, so all my trivial pursuit type games are now out the window, Q and As are all memorized enough to not make them a challenge and I run into the same thing with apps, run through the question database once and thats kind of it.

I do love foreign languages though so I've returned to learning Japanese, already have gone pretty much as far as I can with French and German short of moving to one country or another or at least finding a good friend from one. And I'm thinking of trying Portuguese next, we'll see if I'm able to gain a reading profiency with Japanese first, right now I know it better by ear than character, though I can sound out and somewhat translate if it's in hiragana, and I know about half the katakana characters which are primarily used for spelling foreign words, but once you move into kanji I'm lost aside from 人 person and the numbers up to ten. But oddly enough I find it helps my dyslexia some learning Japanese, from learning it I'm able sound English words out a little bit, something I was never able to do before. Mines kind of weird because I could read long before being taught to "read" I just could never read aloud, my brain kind of made its own sounds for the words but was able to maintain the meaning.

So at four years old I could see the word feline and understand it meant cat, but couldn't sound out the word not even the starting sound, could write it down but couldn't even speak the letters in order to spell it aloud with it in front of me, my brain just kind of made its own sound for it. But I could define it, and learned how to say it by someone else reading it to me, then it would go "click" okay, so that's the word sound that matches this 'picture'. That's been the norm for me all along until learning Japanese, something about their different characters just seems to make sense in my brain at least with the phonetic writing (hiragana and katakana), probably because they don't change sounds "せ" is "se" no matter where in the word and no matter the letters that surround it. And I couldn't even tell you if the e is short or long vowel sound other than to say that it sounds like you're saying "s-eh".

Either way it's fun... but kind of hard to dedicate enough time to learning it to stave off boredom. At most I can dedicate maybe 2-3 hours broken up throughout the day to it, but trying for anymore than that and the brain gets fried, jumbled up, confused and spits it all out. So I try to keep it to no more than an hour or so a day, aside from listening to it... I can watch anime and jdramas (sooo cheesy, like really b-list 80's but funny) all day long. Okay "watching" may be a strong word, but I can have it as background noise all day long and glance at on occasion, I just don't like watching tv that much, two shows, NCIS and Big Bang Theory and more the latter, I'm fine with missing a few episodes of NCIS, but I love BBT (Sheldon's my hero!!!)