Good idea! I keep a drone for non-windy days though 😎

Also frisbees are great. I just found a new frisbee golf course. One of these days I should actually try playing.

Geocaching is a conduit to so much fun, so definitely keep that one up. When I first moved to SFBA it was the top activity that led me to discovering awesome places to return to. It’s an excuse to get out with friends, and at the same time an activity to do when you’re already out with friends, or solo, on a first date, or when you’re watching your nieces and nephews.

Photography is another hobby that helped me find cool places. The wikishootme site shows places that need CC licensed photos, in case you need a photography sidequest goal. https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiShootMe

Taking geotagged pictures wherever you go also lets you see where you have been on a map, and also where you have not been, which can give you ideas for new places to explore. Use an interval timer to make sure you take photos every N minutes while you’re out, then look back on what you did. Or have everybody in the group photograph the same thing, then see how different people used perspective.

If you’re in an area with lots of shops, spend at least 2 minutes in every single shop on the block, no exceptions.

I love The Book of Questions for conversation starters, so that’s always good to have handy. Take it out with you on a walk with friends. Also if you have a flipper zero there’s a questions app that is similar.

I keep kites in my trunk, because if it’s ever windy and you have nothing to do, you might as well fly a kite. I also keep a picnic blanket in my trunk too, for spontaneous picnics and park naps.

Find or make a list of parks in your area and visit every one of them. Same for other geographical things you maybe interested in, like lakes, book stores, ramen restaurants, hilltops.

Have your whole group each make an alter ego and spend an hour or afternoon getting to know each other’s alter egos. Explore personality traits that your real personality doesn’t have.

Different companies have different broad cultures, and different subcultures within teams. Some companies just don’t have a sense of camaraderie built into their broad culture.

One thing that people don’t always understand, and I always point this out to people I work with, is that your professional relationships are much more important than the company itself. Everybody is going to move on from their current job some day. When that day comes, they will benefit from having strong relationships with past team mates, either by knowing folks who can help them get new work, or by knowing folks who they can bring in to tackle projects at the new job.

Your professional network is one of your most valuable assets in your career. The people you work with are real people, with real families. Relationships with great team mates are more important than the company you both work at now, and will outlast your time at that company. Camaraderie is key to that whole scenario. Make sure you reach out to people you respect and enjoy working with and tell them how much you value that professional relationship. You will both be better off for it.

I am also on the hunt for a good self hosted journal for life journaling (not note taking like some other links in other comments). Here’s what I am trying to replace:

I’ve been using DayOne without subscribing. I’ve had a lot of ups and downs with DayOne over the years, but I’ve finally found a way to use it with the free plan that I’m happy with, that kind of fits into a self hosted setup. I journal on my phone, and also in my laptop. I love that it captures location, weather, music, step count, and activity. After a month or so, I export the journal entries as json, and put them into a private hosted view and search interface that I’m in the process of writing in Python.

The DayOne journal data does not need to be synchronized to the cloud, and can even be encrypted by you, but who knows how much of your metadata is sent to them.

This setup is far from ideal because it’s not entirely private (metadata is probably leaking to the company), but it does have solid data liberation, is free (as in beer), can be encrypted, and the format is just json so it’s easily inspectable and transformable. It’s been working fine for me for several years (I actually have over a decade of DayOne journal history). It’s kludgy and not turnkey, so definitely not for everybody.

Side note for anybody who is using DayOne: I highly recommend making sure your backups are working, and saving a copy of the backup periodically. I store my exported entries in git and over the years have observed lots of instances of corrupt data due to sync problems with their sync server, which is another reason I want to move to self hosted.

Dr Pepper and kumquats.