This year, I put out a call to bloggers asking them to write about an area of expertise other than writing or blogging. Over two blog posts by 12 bloggers, you’ll discover their hidden talents, receive some crucial advice, and learn how these bloggers spend their time outside of their computer screens. After reading their essays, be sure to check out their blogs (all links will open in a new tab). Then, share your areas of expertise, something you’ve spent 10,000 hours or more mastering, or something you are working on mastering, in the comments below!
Escape Room Level: Expert
By: Renata Leo
Blog: buffalosauceeverywhere.com
I completed my first escape room in November 2018, and I was immediately hooked. Escape rooms were just the perfect activity for someone like me. I loved how immersive the experience was and how much fun it was to solve the clever clues. As an extrovert, I also love an activity that I can do with others!
After that fateful day when I did my first room, I couldn’t get enough. My fiancé and I completed as many rooms as we could in the tri-state area. Any time we went on vacation, we would find a local escape room that we could complete. At this point, we’ve done 25 different ones!
Since I’ve done so many different escape rooms, I not only have tips on successfully completing a room, but I also know what types of things that I do and do not like when completing them. I’ve gone to rooms with all different kinds of themes, game masters, and groups of people.
I’ve written extensively about escape rooms over on my blog, but here are some pointers in case you plan to do an escape room in the near future!
- Make sure to bring people with different skills to the room with you.
- Double check each other’s work when things aren’t going correctly — you might have found the right answer but typed it in incorrectly (I’m guilty of this!).
- Pee before you go into the room! Sure, you can come out in the middle and pee, but that’ll run out your clock, and playing while you have to pee is too distracting.
- Don’t allow your team to lose steam early. If you can’t solve something in the first 20 minutes, get a hint from your game master. Getting a hint early is better than losing morale early!
The Sport of Parenting
By: David Metzger
Blog: www.nursepapathebook.com
If parenting were a sport, it would certainly be classified as full contact. Fully physical. Fully emotional. Fully psychological. Fully frustrating. Fully joyful.
If my family of four humans are a team playing this sport, I wonder what roles we would all embrace. At one smug point in this parenting journey, I was confident that we parents were team owners, and the kids, athlete subordinates. We started this organization. We bank rolled this team with money, sweat, and thousands of compostable diapers. Often though, our kids seem to run the show. We bend to their needs. We answer to their desultory demands.
So, if we aren’t the owners, perhaps we’re coaches. There are many moments when our know-how matches our children’s willingness to take it in. Usually though, our didactic pleas are lost to the ether. There is too much crying, fighting, whining, huffing, and puffing for us to have a meaningful exchange.
These kids don’t want to play the game how we’ve taught them. They storm the field naked, without padding. They run backwards around the bases. It seems that we’re just here to patch up the boo boos and brush off the butts.
If we aren’t owners and nothing in our contracts stipulates our roles as coaches, then I guess we are all players on the same dysfunctional team. We all sit in the dugout calling the plays and yelling at the ref. There is indeed a pecking order, but as soon as one player reaches the top, the order changes. We all have to adjust.
Family prepares kids for the game of life. Where else can they strike out, break a bat on their knee, get ejected, and still be invited back for more fun and fracture? Remember, the game of family is almost always a doubleheader.
Garden of Inspiration
By: M. Louise Pistole
Blog: https://www.louisepistole.com/
Meandering through my gardens and taking in all the sights and sounds of nature fills my mind and heart with inspiration. Digging in the soil, filling the wheelbarrow with wayward sticks, and pruning bushes are therapy for my soul.
Growing up, my mom had beautiful gardens, and I loved helping her tend to them. Later, she managed a florist for many years, and my love and knowledge for flowers deepened.
And finally, I had my own acre of land to dig, plant, pull, prune and enjoy. There’s a continuous learning curve on what to plant, where it needs to be planted, how much water and sun a plant needs, protecting from insects, and much more.
Anyone who has a lawn also knows there is a delicate balance of seed, fertilizer, and weed killer to maintain beautiful green grass throughout the year.
I have been blessed with experts and good friends who know a lot about plants and are willing to share information. I am also doubly blessed that both my son and his wife majored in horticulture. Their wealth of knowledge guides me along my garden paths.
After all my plants, I was ready to add arbors, a picket fence, and a pergola. Then came angel statues, bird baths, a sun dial and wind chimes.
The great outdoors definitely fills me with inspiration and restores my soul. The beauty of the flowers and trees, the scampering of squirrels and watchful eyes of deer along with the music of water and birds makes my heart soar.
After nearly 50 years of reading, studying, asking questions and seeking guidance, my gardens are finally well established. It is time for me to sit on the porch with a tall glass of tea and ponder life.
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Buy a copy of Discover Your Joy by Louise Pistole, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
Public Speaking: Get Up and Start Talking
By: Bill of A Silly Place
Blog: https://billswritingplace.wordpress.com
Bill is the author of “A Silly Place,” a blog that he describes as his “journey through the world, and everyone’s welcome to come along.”
Before I get started, many thanks to Laura for the invitation. And now, without further ado…
I can’t tell you how to have a stadium full of thousands and millions more watching on TV mesmerized by your every word. If you want to know that, ask Barack Obama. And I would bet he doesn’t know how he does it, either, at least not that he could explain. It’s just a thing he can do.
Actually, there aren’t too many recommendations I can make for how to be a good public speaker — although lots of deep breaths and envisioning the audience, not in their underwear, but as an amorphous gathering in front of you can help with nerves — but I can tell you the first thing you need to do to be a public speaker: Get up and start talking.
Whether you’re giving a speech to a class in college, talking on the radio, making a presentation at a conference, explaining a concept at a meeting, speaking to a local community group (all of which I’ve done) or whatever reason everyone’s eyes and ears are on you, the first obstacle to overcome in public speaking is the fear of public speaking.
I get it. I understand it. People are afraid of looking or sounding dumb when other people are watching and listening. After all, there’s a reason I don’t do karaoke.
But if you get up and start talking, and nothing bad happens, then you won’t be so afraid to do it again.
And if something bad does happen? You learn from it and take another shot.
Last Stitch Attempt
By: Sabina
Blog: www.rosegoldreports.com
What can I do? Staring at the ceiling in crippling pain I lay in bed and wondered: what possible hobby can I do? Becoming disabled due to an energy limiting chronic illness rapidly shrunk my world, leaving me bed bound and struggling with washing and feeding myself. There’s no treatment or cure for ME (Myalgic Encephalopathy, a neurological disease) yet my occupational therapist was determined to find an activity I could do which would help me feel that I wasn’t completely useless and stave off the depression many chronically ill people develop.
I enjoy reading, but it tires me out easily, and she wanted me to have a completely new hobby. It had to be small, lightweight, and relatively easy; it also had to be something that could be dropped at any moment. We settled on crafting.
I tried and rejected several things as too difficult or too messy. Eventually I tried needlework. Cross stitch seemed easy enough. Except for someone who sometimes can’t remember what year it is due to brain fog, counting stitches proved impossible. But I liked the coloured threads and the how lightweight it was. What if I just stitched without instructions or counting?
I’m only a fraction of a way into my 10,000 hours. Some months, my hands are too painful to stich at all, other times I might do 20 stitches a day, several days in a week. I did little things, a flower or a leaf using a small hoop. It took me forever to finish, but I had something to show for my years in bed.
Christmas 2019 I decided my next project would be bigger and something Christmassy. I decided loosely on a robin in a wreath. It took me almost all year, but Christmas 2020 saw me proudly watch as my Mum hung the hoop on the wall opposite my bed. Whenever I feel frustrated at my predicament, I look at my robin and think, “I did that.”
My Secret Superpower
By: Cathay Reta
Blog: www.cathayreta.com
What is my superpower? My area of expertise? Well, it’s not easy. Not everyone can do it, or at least not do it well. It’s a talent I’ve crafted and refined over a lifetime . . . and I’ve really honed in on it these past couple of years.
It’s nothing. Not a thing.
This doing “not a thing” gives my mind space to air out. It lets a passing breeze blow out weakened old cobwebs so I can breathe in freshness – fresh scents, fresh feelings, and fresh ideas. It is especially effective when surrounded by nature. The best way to sit and do nothing is to do it in the shade of a tree. Trees – big strong and towering trees with far-reaching limbs are quite the enablers. They multiply this superpower; they increase its effectiveness, joining us together to soak in sun’s vitality and life-giving rays of hope.
Maybe this superpower is really not so secret. People see me do it. It happens in plain sight. Yet it is often misunderstood. Some wonder why I’m wasting so much time just sitting around. Why am I not moving faster? Isn’t there something I should be doing? The untrained eye often mistakes this powerful calm centeredness for laziness. It is quick to label and to discard what it doesn’t know. It doesn’t know that this stillness is the fertile soil in which new ideas germinate, appreciation makes her way to the conscious mind, and tomorrow’s dreams unfold.
It’s nothing. It’s everything. It’s simply being.
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Buy a copy of Keep Walking, Your Heart Will Catch Up by Cathay Reta, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
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Thanks for including me, Laura! This was great ☺️
Such great hobbies! Mine are more athletic. I spent my 20s and 30s as a competitive figure skater, then turned to marathon running in my 40s, having run 3 of the 6 major races. I was trying to do all 6 in 10 years, but the pandemic tuned me upside down, so it will take a little longer. Oh, well. It just means I’ll have a slower qualifying time for Boston.
It is lovely seeing a diverse range of subjects and stories here! Love that they all come from the heart. <3
Very interesting to read everyone’s stories. Mine would have to be singing. I’m not sure I’m at 10,000 hours but I might be getting close! I have been singing in choirs, and in my car, my whole life. A few years ago, I joined School of Rock and, for the first time, took vocal lessons and had the experience of singing with a band. I loved it and miss it a lot in these pandemic times.