Doesn't everybody need playtime? Yes. Not everyone gets it, though. I don't usually get much play time, but when I do, these are the things I like to do.

Bike. I am just starting to rediscover the joys of the bicycle. Ages ago, when I was a kid in small-town Iowa, we used to bike everywhere. Bikes were practically an extension of our bodies. I lost the habit after moving and growing up. Just within the past year I've rediscovered bikes, and now I am an every day bicycle commuter (yes, even in winter). I am inches away from giving up my car. I don't bike any substantial distance (yet) but I am passionate about the cycling opportunities in my community and my life.

Read. I don't read as much as I used to (time limitations), but I read nearly every night in bed, at the very least. My reading interests meander across genres: a heavy emphasis on science fiction / fantasy, science and technology, postapocalyptic stories, alternate history fiction, philosophy and religion, history, comics and graphic novels, and classics. I don't care for westerns, biographies, or romances, but nearly anything else is possible to find its way onto my bookshelves. Some of my favorite authors include Michael Pollan, Neal Stephenson, S. M. Stirling, H. P. Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett and Roger Zelazny. I am most emphatically not a fan of this series, however.

Write. Admittedly, I do this quite a bit less than I read. Shucks, I don't do as much of this any more, but at times the muse will come upon me and I'll happily spend some time pretending to be a wordsmith. Here are links to some of my old writings. More recently, I have started blogging and microblogging.

Computers. Well, duh. Anyone who knows me at all will wonder why this isn't at the top of my list. (It's because the list order is arbitrary.) My life is, to understate the obvious, heavily influenced by computers. If I'm not playing games or just messing around with programs, I might be coding or experimenting with different ways to optimize my system. When I'm not doing that, I'm taking apart or assembling some computer system. I'm comfortable playing with computers on the hardware and software level. It brings me great joy to disassemble and reasamble, whether that's putting a new motherboard into a system or reloading my operating system for the nth time. I am passionate about open source software, including Ubuntu linux, OpenOffice and the Firefox web browser, and highly engaged in green computing, and fascinated by cloud computing and cloud data storage, including end-user offerings from Google. Yeah, I use a lot of Google services.

Roleplaying. It's a rare event for me when I get to roleplay, but it still brings a warmth to my heart to contemplate. Like many gamers, I tend to derive far greater enjoyment from (and invest more time in) creating a character, rather than playing it. Some of my favorite RPG's are Amber, 7th Sea (a new one for me), Chill, Call of Cthulhu, Car Wars (been a long time for that one), and Shadowrun. Ironically, I never much cared for Dungeons and Dragons. One pet peeve I have is that to non-gamers, D&D is synonymous with "role-playing game". Once and for all: They're not the same; one is a subset of the other. D&D is to RPG's like tuna is to fish. Tuna is a fish, but there are many more kinds of fish!

MUSH. This isn't as prevalent in my life as it once was. Nonetheless, I hold onto the hope that one day I'll have more time and inspiration to resume MUSHing. To the uninitiated, MUSH stands for Multi-User Shared Hallucination, is a text-based roleplaying medium, and tends to be halfway between computer game and pencil-and-paper roleplaying game. My MUSH page is here.

Drum. No, I'm not any good at it, I just enjoy pounding away on the drum sometimes.

Organize. Call me strange, but I find that organizing things is relaxing and therapeutic. I love to reduce clutter in my life, and I also greatly appreciate knowing where things are. I also like to keep records of everything I can. I'm an archivist at heart. I archive almost all of my paperwork on my computer as scanned pdf's and long ago have archived all my music CDs as mp3's. I have every intention of scanning all the old family photos, just haven't gotten there yet.