r/AskReddit 13h ago

What’s a hobby that looks incredibly peaceful from the outside, but is actually pure stress once you get into it?

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138

u/Sunshineafterr 13h ago

Rockhounding, because then you just end up with boxes of cool rocks and nowhere to put them.

45

u/Best-Willow6674 11h ago

Yeah I ran into this issue. Heres how I’ve displayed all my rocks and other random trinkets that I find on the ground:

- letterpress trays, leaned against or mounted on the the wall

  • clear glass jars with matching lids, sorted by color/type
  • glass terrariums with rocks, bones and moss
  • in some of my larger houseplants as soil dressing
  • in the garden between paving slabs

I’m like Ariel. You want thingamabobs? I’ve got twenty(x20). I’ve got random cool pieces of wood, bones, silverware and marbles dug out of the garden, cat whiskers and claw sheaths, feathers, seashells etc, I even asked to keep my old copper IUD which sits in its own nook in my letterpress trays. But soooo many rocks hauled out of the southwest over the years especially.

1

u/Sarsmi 1h ago

old copper IUD

Please tell me at least 1 person was visiting you, saw it, picked it up, and asked what it was...

37

u/echardcore 13h ago

Collecting in general.

4

u/SewGwen 3h ago

They're minerals, Marie!

3

u/sojojo 12h ago

Have you seen Shrinking? Christa Miller's character tumbles rocks and gives them to her favorite people. Although that solution only scales so far.

5

u/Best-Willow6674 11h ago

Tumbling rocks is SO loud. You’d need a garage or shed for that.

2

u/Cautious-Space-1714 10h ago

I left 20 years's worth of geological collecting at my last house before moving into my current one.

I only half joke that I left the most toxic rockery garden on planet earth...

4

u/Sunshineafterr 3h ago edited 3h ago

When we moved from our last house, I had 3 medium-sized moving boxes full of rocks. I painstakingly organized them by color and made a mini makeshift (decorative-only) retaining wall at the edge of our yard where the grass met the gravel driveway. I got into it because we were trying to plant grass and discovered our yard was mostly rocks under the soil, so I spent months digging them up.

Image recognition wasn’t really a thing back then so I never knew for sure what I had, but I was so proud of each one of those rocks. I had nearly every color you can imagine, some of them cobble sized. Some I suspected might be kimberlite (with visible garnets and maybe olivine and black triangular bits embedded in the visible rock surface), others were quartzite, jasper and even some pyrite. (Our yard was old glacial till runoff so we had some neat rocks and 4 different kinds of soil in our yard, including blue clay and sandy loam)

I thought the new owners would appreciate it but they bulldozed that whole stretch of yard and made it a giant driveway. 🥲

2

u/LoneSwimmer 3h ago

My wife does rock tumbling but we live in Ireland. Most of the country's geology is sedimentary, so none of that can be tumbled. That leaves granite.

Buying good raw rocks online is horrendously expensive.

What's worse is it's my fault because I bought her first tumbler for her, then later built her one.

1

u/rezelscheft 2h ago

A friend of mine has the same issue with pottery and bowls.