5 minute read
Short days, long winter
With the winter setting in and the new year just around the corner, it seems like a great time to indulge in some sort of pastime. It just so happens that farmers and ranchers sometimes forgo hobbies for, you guessed it, more work.
That was always the case for Paul Zimny of Cyrus – unless you call a winter career a hobby, that is. It was such a pleasure visiting with Paul and Carol about their lives together, and honestly, there was so much to the story that had to be left out due to lack of space.
The Zimnys farmed during the summers in North Dakota, and in winter, Paul was a full-time aviation mechanic for many years. After they moved to their current farm in Minnesota, they continued to farm in the summer, and Paul built airplanes in his spare time as a hobby. Mind you, he is 95 years old and just sold his last plane a couple months ago. He bought it at age 92 and restored it before marketing it to a young man from Colorado.
It wasn’t that Paul didn’t have time for other hobbies, like painting (he did a portrait of his father) and building model airplanes. Together, he and Carol shared wonderful adventures, like fl ying together in an ultralight plane he built or spending time with family and their many friends, both here and in Arizona.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I meet someone like this, it tends to make me wonder what I do with all my time. But, it also gives me great hope; at age 61, if I were to have the longevity of Paul (Carol is much younger at age 82), I would have at least another three and a half decades to get things done. Imagine that.
We are not all made the same way and we’re not all going to be doing those things in our mid-90s; it’s just not very realistic. God willing, though, we can all enjoy today.
I did a little research into some hobbies that could keep us busy during the long cold winter evenings. The search garnered some fairly interesting results. These suggestions are quite varied and include some personal experiences; they might appeal to people of
all ages, and both men and women. Hey, just trying to help out! Learn a new game and, if you are alone, fi nd someone to play it with. For example, I’m not sure how I reached my current age without knowing how to play the board game Sequence, but my husband, Don, and I played this last week while visiting family. It’s like tic-tac-toe on steroids, with Random Refl ections by Diane Leukam cards and longer sequences. We didn’t win every game but, with a little aggressive determination, we took the match against our much-younger foes. Not that age really has anything to do with it, but still, it was fun beating them. Speaking of aggression, have you ever tried Carbles, Rummikub or Catan? There are limitless numbers of board and card games out there. Speaking of speaking, how about learning a new language? Try Duolingo, an app where you can spend as little as fi ve minutes a day – or however long you wish – learning almost any language you wish. In our area, some of the more popular ones to try might be Spanish (27 million learners on the app currently), German (9 million) and Norwegian (1 million), but you could step out of the box and go for Russian, Yiddish, Navajo or even Klingon. I signed up for the Spanish not too long ago. It is helping me brush up on the classes I had in high school; dusting off might be a better description. I have no idea how long I will keep it up, but it’s kind of fun. Other hobby options might be taking an online class, baking bread, cooking, woodworking, bowling, listening to old vinyl records or feeding the birds. Another one I personally enjoy is taking one room each winter and giving it a facelift. The sky is the limit, and each of us could fi nd something interesting to get us through the short days and long winter evenings. If you have any hobbies you would like to share with our readers, just send them my way at diane@saukherald.com. We’ll see you in a month, when we will welcome new readers in three more counties to the west. Merry Christmas!
Comedy in the country
*Reprinted with permission from “The Farmer’s Bathroom Book,” by Marvin Jensen.
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