Khayyam wrote:It really sucks that now you feel like you can't listen during your hikes. That'd kill me.
I'm extremely stubborn about my right to hike while listening with noise-cancelling headphones. Mountain bikers are pests and hikers should not be required to accommodate them in any way--that's my position on the matter. If I ever just suddenly stop posting here, it'll likely be because I got creamed by a mountain biker. (Or possibly a mountain lion, but the biker is the safer bet.)
I was in San Francisco over the weekend visiting some friends, and one morning when they were busy with a family engagement, I decided to walk over the Golden Gate bridge and back. Only one walkway was open, so it was shared by cyclists and pedestrians. A speed limit was clearly marked for cyclists, but a lot of spandex-clad road bikers whipped along at twice that at least. I saw one biker cross onto the pedestrian half of the pathway to overtake a slower cyclist, almost hit a small child, and then scream at the parents for not keeping the kid out of the way. Madness.
Perhaps such cyclists (for it was far from all of them) have decided to treat pedestrians exactly the same way some cranky motorists treat them.
And watch out for mountain lions on bikes. They always attack from behind.
Khayyam wrote:It's occurred to me before to do a puzzle while listening, but I haven't yet tried that. Maybe I will. A jigsaw puzzle would likely be better than a Rubik's cube, which was my first idea. I suspect the cube would take too much concentration to enable total focus on the audio.
Unless...unless maybe I learned the trick to solving it and then repeated it until I could do it mindlessly, and then added in the audio.
The problem with a Rubik's cube is that once you know how to solve them, they don't take very long. So you'd have to solve it, mess it up again, and so on. Maybe that'd work for you, but it'd start to feel pointless to me, at least compared to a puzzle where you're working toward one logical goal.
I like to listen to audio while cleaning and doing household maintenance, especially major projects like cleaning out and washing the fridge, sharpening all the knives and tools, raking leaves, washing windows, etc. For me, it's not just about keeping my hands busy, but doing a physical activity with sufficient structure and purpose. That being said, I still get less out of this than I do listening with a pen and paper and taking notes. As such, I have to pick and choose what audio to listen to while doing something else, and what I want to focus on more closely.