[NFB-Seniors] {Spam?} Re: {Spam?} RE: {Spam?} RE: {Spam?} Greeting Fellow Seniors - All about Hobbies

[Diane]

Do y’all know about the NFB Krafter’s Division? We do a lot of different crafts/hobbies!
Diane

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 24, 2020, at 8:56 PM, Judy Jones via NFB-Seniors <nfb-seniors at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> I love that!
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NFB-Seniors <nfb-seniors-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Veronica
> Smith via NFB-Seniors
> Sent: Monday, August 24, 2020 7:49 PM
> To: 'NFB Senior Division list' <nfb-seniors at nfbnet.org>
> Cc: Veronica Smith <mad.tewe at gmail.com>
> Subject: [NFB-Seniors] {Spam?} RE: {Spam?} Greeting Fellow Seniors - All
> about Hobbies
> 
> Hobbies? I used to collect postcards. They didn't have to be sent to me in
> the mail but they did have to be a postcard purchased and given to me with
> love. I especially loved receiving the ones that are different and textured.
> The best one I ever received  was made out of copper and felt like a bird
> flying. You could feel it's beak out front and the wings were wide open, in
> flight. I gave my collection to my nephew when he got married. More than
> three hundred postcards. I guess they were pretty cool because the first
> thing he did with them was sell them in an auction. He got more than a
> thousand dollars for them. If I knew he was going to sell them, I would have
> kept them.
> Since then my daughter and I have started collecting again. This time I will
> never give them away. The coolest one we have now is made out of wood. 
> 
> Veronica
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NFB-Seniors [mailto:nfb-seniors-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of
> Robert Leslie Newman via NFB-Seniors
> Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2020 2:36 PM
> To: NFB Senior Division list
> Cc: Robert Leslie Newman
> Subject: [NFB-Seniors] {Spam?} Greeting Fellow Seniors - All about Hobbies
> 
> Hi You All
> 
> RE: Do you have a hobby and want to tell us about it? Or, you gave a hobby
> up and wonder if anyone else has figured out how to do it? 
> 
> (My 3rd go at this, eliminating the SPAM label!)
> 
> 
> 
> Here is one of the best uses of this listserv! 
> 
> We have 305 email addresses/people on this list. Sure, not all of the
> seniors that are presently members of the NFB are with us on this list, but
> for sure, it is people that are looking to communicate with other seniors. I
> think we all are eager for information, and are also willing to give it; to
> support each other. 
> 
> 
> 
> Note: The NFB Seniors Division's 2020 Virtual Senior Retreat is coming up
> October 18th-24th. I will lead the discussion class, entitled Exploring
> Hobbies. We want to offer meaningful and exciting information by means of:
> Speakers who are great examples; Written information about resources; Links
> to audio and/or video presentations. 
> 
> 
> 
> Consider the following:
> 
> 
> 
> #1 Are you willing to share with us about your hobbies, and how you handle
> them? The information we gather will be used in our Retreat, be placed on
> our NFB Seniors Division's website, and in one way or another, with all of
> us on this list. 
> 
> 
> 
> #2 Here are examples of what we mean as a hobby: Collecting things;
> gardening; Crafts; Woodworking; fishing; Cooking/baking; Sowing, knitting,
> etc.; Reading/writing; Exercising; Birding; Restoring old cars. You tell us!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> #3 Here is what we need to have said, described: Title of the hobby; Your
> name; Contact information: Extent of your blindness; what alternative
> methods and special equipment do you use; did you do this before you lost
> vision, or is this a new hobby. 
> 
> 
> 
> Remember, we are trying to help one another, we blind seniors, but also to
> enlighten family, blindness services professionals, and the general public.
> So Keep yourself focused on making your description, shortish, easy to
> follow, and to the point. I can and will help with needed editing;
> straightening out with is written, or editing an audio file.
> 
> 
> 
> #4 Here are methods on how you can share, tell us:
> 
> 
> 
> #5 You Make a recording and get it to me. Or, we together get on the phone
> and I record your description. We'd have to make an appointment, to make
> sure we hook up at a mutually agreed upon convenient time. 402-660-1743
> 
> 
> 
> *2. Write an email or document with a description and send it to me at-
> robertleslienewman at gmail.com <mailto:robertleslienewman at gmail.com>  
> 
> 
> 
> **One of my hobbies is exercise, swimming in the summer in our back yard
> pool makes that easy; when the temp is right. Below is an article that
> appear  several years back in the Braille Monitor; I'm still doing this same
> daily routine.
> 
> 
> 
> Braille Monitor                                                    June 2008
> 
> 
> Swimming in the Zone
> A Mile in My Backyard
> 
> by Robert Leslie Newman
> 
> From the Editor: Summer is here, and many blind people would be interested
> in getting exercise in the pool if they had access and know-how. Two
> articles in this issue should offer encouragement to those who love the
> water. The first is by Robert Leslie Newman, who is one of our most
> dedicated advocates for exercise. This is what he says:
> 
> Swimming has always been one of my favorite physical activities. As a kid I
> saw it as fun and physically refreshing on a hot day and a time to be with
> my friends. Now that I am older, less than a year away from completing my
> sixth decade, though I still love swimming for those early reasons, I
> realize that swimming fulfills an additional set of personal needs. In this
> article I intend to explore how a blind person swims independently and how
> this exercise benefits me physically and mentally and boosts my
> self-confidence. Finally, I will describe how this exercise can get you into
> the zone.
> 
> I am lucky to be at a stage of life and career in which my wife and I have
> been able to make one of our dreams come true: to have our own backyard
> swimming pool. It is an aboveground oval pool measuring twelve feet by
> twenty-four feet and is four feet deep. Its sides are steel, its thick
> plastic liner is aqua blue, and it has an electric pump and filtering
> system. We had a deck built that wraps around both ends and one long side
> and joins an existing deck--house to pool without getting your feet dirty.
> 
> Swimming as a totally blind person demands the same basic travel skills as
> traveling on dry land: a combination of hearing, touch, and common sense. As
> I describe my personal technique, note that, just as not all blind travelers
> use basic travel skills in the same way, each blind swimmer finds his or her
> own style of making it work. When swimming on the surface, my preference is
> always to have my ears out of the water so I can use my hearing to keep
> oriented; this would also help to avoid collisions with other swimmers. In
> this ears-up style I am able, not only to keep track of where I am relative
> to the length and width of the pool, but more important, to detect where the
> side walls are, helping me avoid running into them and, when swimming laps,
> to know precisely where they are in order to stay within touching distance
> of them.
> 
> This hearing the walls, detecting where they are, is more than just
> listening for the sound of splashing water as it encounters the pool's sides
> and hearing background sounds coming over the top of the wall. This ability
> is more a result of the very real phenomenon that many blind people speak of
> as "blind sonar" or echolocation (before it was better understood, it was
> called "facial vision"). When I am asked to explain this "detecting the
> walls," I usually explain that objects make their presence known both by the
> quality of their echo feedback, which can be either highly reflective or
> sound absorbing, and also by the pressure that their mass projects, which we
> usually feel on the face. Once you detect it, you can use the amount of
> pressure to judge your distance and angle from the object--in this case the
> pool wall. (Sailors speak of sailing on a moonless and starless night and
> feeling the loom of a nearby towering rock or an on-coming island.) 
> 
> Swimming as exercise is one of my new enthusiasms. I love physical exercise.
> At every stage of my life I have found time for it. I presently do some sort
> of exercise six days a week: lifting weights, running, and muscle crunches.
> Now I mix in swimming during the warm months. Not only does swimming tax
> your respiratory and circulatory systems, it also involves all your muscles
> and is a low-impact activity. I love the feeling I have after a good workout
> in the water, overall fatigue yet a sense of accomplishment for having given
> my body a good workout. Knowing I am better inside and out gives me a glow
> of virtue. Like most people I pride myself on knowing that I am taking good
> care of my body, my health, and my general appearance.
> 
> If I don't watch it, I can get bored when I swim. So, as part of pool
> maintenance, I make a game of finding leaves and other debris that have
> fallen in the water. This is not just walking around feeling for stuff with
> my toes, I'm on a hunt. I make it a test of how quickly I can get to the
> bottom and conduct a search over a reasonably large area. I really get to
> work on my ability to hold a breath. 
> 
> I have also made up several great underwater games. I drop and lie prone on
> the floor of the pool. As I sink, I expel all the air in my lungs,
> eliminating buoyancy. The object is to sink and not have to fight to stay on
> the bottom. With some of my body touching the spongy plastic flooring and
> stretched out with arms extended, I propel myself by finger and toe
> movements only. The object is to see how far and fast I can go. 
> 
> Another favorite underwater game is to visualize myself as a bird in flight;
> the medium in which I am propelling myself, a body of water, is not very
> different from a bird flying through the air. The real thrill that comes
> with this second exercise is planning and executing course changes,
> sometimes radical ones; this is as close to soaring as we humans can get. If
> I am swimming in a straight line, I perform a tilting sharp right or left
> turn or do a figure eight. The resulting position of my body is much like a
> bird's motion during a banking turn. You can really surprise yourself by
> coming up from the bottom on a steep angle as fast as you can and pop out of
> the water. This is called broaching when a whale does it. 
> 
> My favorite swimming exercise is distance swimming, and I love to watch
> people's reaction when I say, "I swam a mile in my backyard." This is of
> course an aerobic activity intended to work on the respiratory, circulatory,
> and musculature systems. The equation calculating a mile of swimming goes
> like this--a mile, 5,280 feet, divided by the perimeter of my pool, 56.5
> feet, equals about ninety-three laps. Because I am swimming just inside the
> pool's wall, using good old blind sonar to keep within touching distance of
> the side at all times, I add five laps to bring the distance traveled of
> about fifty-four feet a lap up to 5,292 feet. On average I make one circuit
> every thirty-five seconds, so one mile takes about fifty-seven minutes to
> complete.
> 
> I have been asked how I track when I have completed a full circuit of the
> pool. I first thought that I would just keep track of the two turns and the
> two straight-a ways and raise my count that way. But, when you get into
> long-distance swimming and hit the zone that I will speak of in the next
> paragraphs, your mind begins floating free. You focus on thoughts that do
> not lend themselves to counting turns and straight-a ways or the shifting of
> the sun or the sound of the neighbor's lawnmower. So I increase my lap count
> by one each time I come abreast of the sound of the skimmer box, a cut-out
> hole in the pool's wall at the waterline that serves as an overflow port and
> allows floating debris to be skimmed off the surface.
> 
> Swimming a mile is not something I do every day; I don't always have the
> time to devote to it. Yet on average in the summer I do it two to three
> times a week. I am going to describe swimming a mile because of what
> happens, not only the physical glow and healthy fatigue, but, even more
> intriguing, achieving the zone, the mental state that comes as my body
> adjusts to the strong and continuous physical strain.
> 
> Starting a long swim, I am excited to begin but nervous that I may not make
> it. I plunge in, either pushing off the ladder or diving off the deck, not
> touching bottom then or when I finish. Until I hoist myself out again onto
> the hard, dry planks of the deck, water will be my only medium. My swims
> have pretty much developed a pattern of both physical and mental stages: the
> warm-up, the struggle, the second wind and the zone, then the hard work, and
> the final push to the finish. 
> 
> I warm up during the first ten or so laps, stretching muscles and joints,
> working the breathing, finding the right stroke, slowly building up speed. A
> modified breast stroke works best for me. Visualize my head up, ears and
> nose out of the water, my back and shoulders rhythmically bobbing above and
> below the surface of the water, my body rocking as I first stretch out, legs
> kicking back while simultaneously my arms reach ahead. Then my body
> contracts as my arms stroke back and my legs come forward. This quick
> one-two action is repeated again and again. I call this swimming style my
> sea gallop.
> 
> I first feel fatigue somewhere in the twenties. I just push through this
> feeling and refuse to give in. Sometimes, to boost my willpower, I give
> myself a fantasy goal, visualizing that I am swimming away from the mainland
> toward an island a mile offshore. 
> 
> Somewhere in the thirties I reach and pass through a physical barrier and
> settle into my most economical stroke. I have my second wind and find that
> pushing my speed up to about two-thirds of my best is a pace that I can hold
> for the next twenty to thirty laps. It is here that I am no longer giving
> full attention to what my body is doing. I experience a separation of
> physical and mental awareness. I have reached the zone. My body is working
> on something like autopilot, where I am fully aware of all that it is doing
> and I am in full control, but I suddenly find my thoughts expanding,
> sometimes cascading. When I focus on one thought, the images come fast and
> full, and I find that I can take them places that I ordinarily would not be
> capable of--working out problems in relationships, building story-lines for
> articles such as this one, examining the secrets of life, and more. During
> this period I have the hardest time keeping track of laps. When in doubt of
> the count, I always repeat the lap. 
> 
> The later fifties and early sixties can be a time to slow down and shift the
> strain from one set of muscles to another, giving parts of my body a rest.
> Then in the later sixties and lower seventies I can again push on strong, up
> to about two-thirds power, and I'm again in the zone. By the later
> mid-eighties and nineties I am again swimming at about one-third speed,
> working at it to stay steady and concentrating on having a good finish.
> 
> At this writing my longest distance has been two miles. My goal for this
> summer is five miles. I have run five miles many times in the past, and
> swimming them will indeed be a challenge. (The zone in running is called
> "runner's high.") But challenge in life is what we all need, and as blind
> people in this day and age, when others often doubt our abilities, we need
> to be ready to tackle any and all challenges that come our way. Success with
> a physical challenge can be one way of building belief and confidence in
> ourselves and can help us to meet and overcome life's challenges.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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