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You are here: Home / Archives for Recreation / Hobbies

Find Yourself a Hobby and Enjoy Its Amazing Benefits

October 11, 2012 by Trish

Hobbies are considered by many as the activities that only those with laid-back and quiet lives can afford to have. The truth, however, is that the people who live busy and stressful lives are the ones who need hobbies or past time activities. The reason for this is that hobbies can bring huge positive changes to a person’s life. Here are some great things you can get from having a hobby.

You get to enjoy your free time.

Having a hobby gives you a chance to free yourself from all the pressures and stress of everyday work and hectic schedule. If you feel overwhelmed by all the responsibilities you have, you must be finding it hard to find the time or even allow yourself to take a break from all your tasks to simply sit and relax. But once you find a hobby to enjoy, it will be much easier for you to have a purposeful break. This way, you won’t feel as if you were just sitting around and wasting your time.

You can experience some positive stress.

If you are someone who isn’t overly stressed and you feel that you are actually under-stimulated, you will find that hobbies are actually a good source of stress. This is referred to as the healthy and positive kind of stress that can make us feel more excited about our lives. For instance, you feel that staying home the entire day is uninspiring and dull, you can attend cooking classes to give you a sense of self-worth and enjoyment. You will do this without any pressure, so you get to be productive without having too much to stress about.

You get the chance to meet people.

Many hobbies are in the form of group activities, which can help you become more sociable. Out of your hobbies, you can join knitting circles, golf enthusiasts and even fiction writing group. Such types of hobbies that let you have connections with other people can definitely boost your social life and can bring fun to your daily life as well.

Hobbies are a form of gratification.

According to psychologists, gratifications are meaningful activities that can bring fun and meaning to a person’s life. These activities come with some kind of challenge that will let you put to use all your great personal skills. Through your hobbies, you will have a sense of flow where you can lose track of time and escape the stressors of everything around you. As a result, you will give yourself a huge favor and eventually enjoy a more positive and healthy lifestyle and well being.

Hobbies protect you against burnout.

Especially for hardworking people, being stressed and pressured are inevitable. This is why these types of people are the ones who really need to form hobbies more. By engaging in some interesting and worthwhile pastimes, they will have something to look forward to and something that will free them from all the worries at work. According to some research, those people with high-demand jobs are vulnerable to burnouts. As a result, they tend to feel that sleep is the only way to rest and be free from any worries. However, still as indicated by the research, these people do not really have proper rest even as they sleep. But by doing an activity that is not at all related to their work, they turn out to be less fatigued and can benefit from good quality sleep. Through this also, they feel more enthusiastic about their work and positive about their lives in general.

Hobbies are beneficial to your health and well-being.

There was a study conducted about the relationship between health and hobbies. According to this study, those people who take the time to engage in any physical or leisure activity even for just 20 minutes in a day tend to be less likely to suffer from too much fatigue. In addition, participating in such leisure and fun activities help lower blood pressure, reduce weight, and increase physical function. These activities also were associated with very high levels of positive mindset and considerably lower levels of pessimism and depression.

You can build better relationships with your loved ones.

So much has been said about the psychological and health benefits of having a hobby. If you come to think of it, all these can lead to one great thing – better relationship with people. You can just imagine when you reach the point when you feel so good about your body and your life as a whole, you can definitely spread this feeling to your loved ones. You will surely find more reasons to spend quality time with them, and every minute you spend will be filled with love and happiness. At the end of the day, you will realize that what it simply takes to have a fuller and happier life is to address your own need of having time to enjoy and live life to the fullest.

Cedric Loiselle enjoys writing about a myriad of topics such as business and finance, health, as well as home improvement and lifestyle. He can even give sound advice as to choosing the best cooking classes New Orleans has for you and your loved ones.





Filed Under: Health Fitness and Beauty, Hobbies, Home and Lifestyle, Recreation Tagged With: activities, benefits, cooking classes, enjoy, fiction writing, free time, Health Fitness and Beauty, Hobbies, hobby, knitting, meet people, relax, social life

I take too many photos

July 11, 2008 by Tricia

I have a problem. I’m a photoholic. Well … when I have a camera in my hand and great subjects to take photos of I am.

I don’t really like taking pictures of people. Perhaps those of you who frequent my blogs have noticed that there aren’t very many people photos in my posts. However, there are lots of photos of gardens, flowers, plants, nature/ landscape, and city scenes. Oh and I guess photos of my puppy are starting to build up as well.

Whenever I’m out with my camera at a photo worthy event -say Woofstock in early June, or our walking tour and hike at The Brickworks last Saturday or perhaps even our trip to Cherry Beach last Sunday with our dog (who swam for the first time ever!) I just start clicking away and the next thing I know I’ve got two or three hundred photos stored on my cameras memory card!

The amount of pictures I take isn’t a problem as far as my camera’s memory card capacity, it’s dealing with those photos once I’ve taken them that’s the problem.

Storage of the photos is becoming a problem. My laptop was slowing down quite a bit a month ago and I realized that for the last year I’d uploaded almost all of my photos (3 to 5 mb each = 30 to 40 gig of photos!) to the laptop and that the hard drive was quickly filling up. I literally spent a few days transferring the photos to my desktop computer and deleting them from the laptop and that seemed to have helped my laptop performance somewhat. However I think I’m going to have to find a better storage solution.

If you take a lot of photos I’d love to hear what you do for storage. If you use an online storage system or a portable drive or if you transfer the photos to CD’s or if you have some other solution.

My other problem is lack of time. I have several blogs and I also have health issues so I work on my blogs when I’m feeling well enough to write. Working on the blogs takes a lot of my time. Barely leaves me enough time to network with other bloggers let alone transfer photos from the camera to the computer, edit them and perhaps upload them to Flickr. Going over 200 photos takes about two hours or more as I crop them, adjust their size and occasionally adjust the color balance or other levels.

Now if I only took a few photos at a time this wouldn’t be a problem, but since I take like 200 at a time I feel compelled to deal with each and every new photo that I’ve taken before I upload the good ones to Flickr (my main online storage system at this time).

This means that sometimes my photos are a week or more old before they make it into one of my posts.

So are you a Photoholic too? How do you deal with it?

Filed Under: Art, Blogging, Computers, Hobbies, Home and Lifestyle, Photography, Recreation Tagged With: Blogging, Brickworks, camera, capacity, Cherry beach, color, computer, crop, crop photos, desktop, dog, drive, event, Flickr, Health Fitness and Beauty, hike, landscape, laptop, Memory, memory card, nature, online, performance, photo, photo storage, photoholic, photos, problem, puppy, solution, storage, swam, too many pictures, transfer photos, trip, upload, upload photos, Woofstock

Exchange recipes and talk with food lovers at Food Connect

April 20, 2008 by Tricia

I’ve always enjoyed cooking, although I don’t take the time to make home cooked meals as often as I probably should these days. Sometimes it’s far to easy to take a pre-cooked meal out of the freezer and heat it up isn’t it?

It’s silly when it really doesn’t take much more time to cook a decent meal. Not to mention that a home cooked meal often tastes a whole lot better than convenience food.

The only thing that I really don’t like about cooking is cleaning up afterwords. Am I right? Is that one of your least favorite tasks as well?

If you enjoy cooking or perhaps sharing some of your delicious recipes with others you might want to take a moment to visit Food Connect. It’s basically a social site for food enthusiasts.

I came across the site a few days ago, and after spending some time perusing the recipes that members of Food Connect had been posting I decide to create my own free profile.

Even as a child I used to love spending time with my mother in the kitchen, helping her bake breads, desserts and learning how to put together a quick dinner. When I moved from my family home I made sure that I’d written down several of my mothers recipes as I wanted to attempt to cook some of those delicious meals on my own.

So believe me when I say I’ve got plenty of recipes that I can share with others on Food Connect!

Speaking of recipes, I think I found a great one for tomorrow nights dinner. As I said in my last post we were hoping to grill chicken breasts on the barbecue this evening, but I put it off until tomorrow. Perhaps that’s a good thing as I found a tasty sounding recipe for Spicy Barbecue Chicken that I’d like to try. The recipe seems easy and it will only take a short time to prepare. Yummy. I haven’t had true barbecued chicken for ages.

Now I haven’t submitted any recipes yet, but as I was looking through the many recipes posted on the site I noticed that to the right of each recipe there is a box that lists nutritional facts about the meal. You can easily find out how many calories or how much fat, sodium, cholesterol or carbohydrates are in a serving. The Food Connect site does an automatic nutritional analysis of all recipes that are submitted. Bonus! I really appreciate that.

The more I look through the site the more it reminds me of many of the social sites I’ve joined as a blogger.

You can of course post recipes, but that’s not all, you can also add a drink recipe, review a wine, add and review a restaurant, invite friends, rate and review recipes, plan a menu using the sites recipes, join discussion groups or recipe networks, post photos of your recipes, contact a recipes poster or any other member of the site, list an event or use the event calendar to create your own schedule and I’m sure there are many other things that members can do that I haven’t discovered yet.

As I delve deeper into the site I just keep discovering more and more things that one can do at Food Connect. It truly is a social site for foodies.

Even if you don’t enjoy cooking as much as I do I’m sure you’ll find some recipes that you and your family would enjoy, or perhaps a local restaurant that you haven’t dined in yet.

If you visit Food Connect my member name is simply Tricia. You can check out the recipes that I hope to add shortly.

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Entertainment, Health Fitness and Beauty, Hobbies, Home and Lifestyle, Nutrition, Recipes, Recreation Tagged With: barbecue, blog, calories, carbs, chicken, cook, cooking, dinner, discussion, discussion groups, drink recipes, drinks, eat, events, Family, fat, Food, Food Connect, food enthusiasts, food lovers, foodies, free, friend, friends, grilled chicken, home, Join, kitchen, member, members, membership, menues, mother, network, nutritional analysis, photos, post, post recipe, posting, rate, recipe network, Recipes, restaurant, restaurants, share, social site, sodium, tasty meals, visit, wine

I love Dogs and I’ve found a great site for dog lovers

March 1, 2008 by Tricia

I adore my puppy. She’s become my new muse. I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the last three month researching everything dog.

Whenever I become interested in something I tend to do a lot of research on the subject. I go to the library and borrow books, I search the internet for more information on the topic and I also tend to talk to others that are also interested in the same topic. Often I read so much that I end up creating a website to not only discuss my latest intense interest, but also to create a place for others so that they can quickly learn all the things that I’ve learned on one site. I certainly did this when I became interested in reptiles! I’ve got two huge reptile related websites as some of you probably already know.

I haven’t gotten to the “make a website” stage yet and I may not this time round, but you never know. What I have been doing is visiting a number of dog and Labrador Retriever related websites, joining dog forums and reading up on dogs in general.

You might remember that my puppy was quite sick when we got her. I had to learn as much as I could in order to try to make her better. She’s doing a lot better these days. She’s still got some problems, but over all she’s doing quite well. I thank the many great sites that I discovered for helping me help her recover from her many ailments.

One of the sites that I came across along the way is the I-Love-Dogs.com website. If you’re thinking of getting your first dog or getting another doggy companion you can spend some time on the site reading the pros and cons of various dog breeds and of course looking at the many dog pictures that proud owners are more than happy to post.

I-Love-Dogs.com is a major dog portal where you can talk to other dog owners, discuss dogs in general on the forums, talk about your dogs health or behavioral problems or share some tips that have worked for you and your dog companion.

Along with the extensive dog forums you’ll find sections with dog games, lists of great dog names, free stuff for your dog, recipes for home made dog food, articles about dogs and dog training and many other great dog related categories. Heck you can even shop for supplies for your dog too.

If you are a dog owner you should take a moment to visit the I-Love-Dogs.com website. I’m sure you’ll find something there of interest and you’ll probably learn something new too.

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Health Fitness and Beauty, Hobbies, Home and Lifestyle, Internet, Our Puppy, Recreation, Services, Web and Technology Tagged With: article, articles, books, buy a dog, categories, cons, discuss, dog, dog articles, dog behaviour, dog breeds, dog companion, dog food, dog food recipes, dog forums, dog games, dog health, dog information, dog names, dog owner, dog owners, dog pictures, dog research, dog supplies, dog training, eating, Food, forum, free, free stuff, happy, Health Fitness and Beauty, help, home, information, interest, interesting, Internet, Join, lab puppy, labrador retriever, Love, Midnight, picture, pictures, problems, pros, puppy, read, reading, reptile, research, searching, shop, sick, sick puppy, talk with dog owners, tips, training, visiting, website, websites

In the Spring I plan on riding my bike more often

February 22, 2008 by Tricia

Spring will be here soon and if you’re like me, suffering through a very cold winter with lots of snow, you’re probably yearning for the nice weather to arrive. Usually by this time of year I’ve got cabin fever. It’s not quite as bad this year because we’ve got the puppy and whether I like it or not I’ve been getting outside every single day. No matter how cold it’s been. Brrrr

As I said when we got our puppy one of the reasons we got her was so that I could get more active. That new resolve had led to a lot more walking. I think I probably walk at least three to five extra miles each day now.

When the weather gets better, in about a month, I’ll get my bike out and hopefully start to go for rides a few times a week if not every day. If I don’t ride too fast our puppy can trot along beside me for while I go for a short ride.

We do need to get another bike though. My husband Chris has two bikes but neither of them are in good shape. One is a ten speed that only has one speed now! The other is also a 10 speed but it’s totally dismantled.

So I think one of the things we’ll purchase in the next month or so is a new bike for Chris. We have great bike trails near us here in almost downtown Toronto and then there’s always the boardwalk area at the beach too. They’re great areas for both walks, runs and bike rides.

I took a look at the Beach Cruiser website and I really like one or two of the cruiser bike styles. I think Chris will like them too.

I really like the yellow one that I included an image of at the top of this post! It’s so bright you couldn’t miss it and I like the style too. It’s a womens model and the price is quite reasonable too! Who knows, maybe I’ll even get myself a new bike too! They accept credit card and Paypal as forms of payment. Perhaps I could get the two of us new bikes using the earnings in my Paypal account. Now that would be nice!

They have cruisers for men, women and children as well as low rider and chopper style models too. Take a look at the site if you’ve been thinking of getting a new bike or if you have plans to become more active this Spring.

I’m certain that any of the cruiser models would make a fantastic gift for someone special in your life too.

Filed Under: Gifts, Health Fitness and Beauty, Hobbies, Home and Garden, Home and Lifestyle, Life with Chris, Recreation, Shopping, Sports, Toronto Tagged With: active, activity, beach, beach cruiser, bike, bike models, biking, boardwalk, cabin fever, children, chopper bike, Chris, cold, cruiser bike, cruiser models, Downtown, excercise, gift, Gift Idea, husband, life, long winter, low rider, mens cruiser, models, new, price, puppy, purchase, reasonable price, spring, styles, Toronto, trails, walk, Walking, weather, winter, women, womens cruiser

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