I have this vague feeling that I'd like to learn how to fish again. I haven't done so since houseboating with my parents as an early teenager. But when I poke around on the internet, I find the official government sites--you need this license, and that license, and oh this one too for $ALotOfMoney--and varying sites about fishing locations which rhapsodize about what the government stocks when and where and you have to use this specific type of bait that I've never heard of, etc, but not really anything directed toward the beginner.

Stuff like: I know I need a pole with a line, and some type of hooky thing on the end. Is there a general ratio of length of pole to length of me, and is just pulling the older rods down out of my parents' rafters okay? What do these different weights and such mean? Bait is something to put on the hooky bit; do I really need something more than worms? For that matter, how do I tie the hook on? What is a bobber, and how do I fasten it on? Which licenses do I really need, and I know there must be limits on how many of what type people can catch in a day, so what are they? For that matter, what kind of fish am I allowed to catch versus having to toss back, how big do they have to be, in what months, and is there a basic visual guide to what they look like? Could I fish in random streams or only lakes? (The ocean is, for the moment, beyond the scope I'd want to explore.) I assume I'd need a cooler and ice to put the caught fish in; should I gut them as soon as I catch them, or wait until I get them home? And is there a fast, humane way of killing them once caught, or...?

Minecraft makes it all look so easy. RL less so.

As pretty much anyone who reads this journal has figured out by now, I sew. It is one of my main hobbies (the others being embroidery, cooking, gardening on occasion, reading, writing, and watching anime and these days Japanese live action shows; neither my husband nor my cat count as hobbies).

One of the sub-hobbies under "sewing" is quilting. Unfortunately, I'm rather better at the "assembling quilt top" portion of it than at the "quilting said quilt top" portion. I've done it, both on machine and by hand, but it's something that I currently lack enough time and patience to devote myself wholly to. Thus, while I have a stack of quilt tops to be quilted, I realistically know that I'm not going to get to them anytime soon. Flipping through this month's Quilters Newsletter Magazine, I hit on the ads section in the back and realized for the first time that there are ads for people who will quilt these tops for me if I give them money! (I'm a bit slow; please excuse me.) Most of them are for machine quilting, but there are a few ads for quilting by hand as well. My personal preference is for hand quilting--but then my personal preference would be to quilt them myself, too.

So I end up eyeing the box of quilt tops tucked neatly away in the closet and wondering if paying someone else to quilt them for me counts as "cheating." Does a gift mean as much if I only do part of it myself? Part of me says no, but part of me says yes, especially in light of the fact that it may well never get finished otherwise. Anyone have any thoughts about it?

(For reference--I don't think anyone who reads this quilts, but I could be wrong; one never knows everything about one's friends--the two sites I'm looking at thus far are here for machine quilting, and here for hand quilting.)