“I don’t have hobbies,” billionaire Warren Buffett once said. “I just have passions that look like it.”

That is true of a lot of people.

It surely also fits these next two little stories...

• YOU CAN EXPECT to see any number of things in and around a downtown like Bloomington’s including restaurants, night spots, tall buildings, boutiques and shops, an arena.

And now, a sprawling 25-ton lady.

“She’s an amazing woman,” says Tom Kirk.

If that name doesn’t ring bells, Kirk is the 46-year-old who’s made his home along Garling Drive in southeast Bloomington a must-see drive-by. By day, he runs an excavation/recycling company. By night, to more exercise an inner passion, he turns those daytime scraps and abandoned 2,000-pound artifacts into a local Stonehenge — of humongous rocks, odd stone formations, discarded mechanical parts. Inside his home he has a kitchen sink that once was a construction-site end-loader bucket and a spiral staircase made from bulldozer truck pads.

And now, downtown in a warehouse yard under the Main Street viaduct, is his latest exercise in creative spirit -- his 50,000-pound, mermaid-like figure.

“You first look,” says Dan Thames, of Normal, one of those to spot it, “and you think, ‘weird!’ Then you look close and see it’s art, like it’s a woman being poured from an old concrete truck.”

Yup, that’s Kirk!

“In the spring,” says Kirk, “she’ll be holding an illuminated fire ball.”

Exactly!

Started in September, taking three months to make in what became a 200-hour labor of love, Kirk’s lady of the 25 tons is sculpted out of a clay model specially created by another B-N artist, Carmen Lozar.

There’ll be, assures Kirk, “many more features to come in the very near future.”

Kirk’s “after-work” passions obviously never stop.

• IN MANY A BOY’S LIFE, LEGO building bricks and their creative possibility are a part of it.

You put up a simple building or make a car that actually rolls, then get called down to dinner by your mom, and tomorrow’s another construction project.

For Scott Walker, a one-time LEGO-loving 9-year-old who’s now 49, it’s a passion revisited, a nice distraction during a recent work sabbatical from being a successful Denver-area business and education entrepreneur.

“There has always been a part of me,” says Walker, a 1990 Bloomington High product, father of three, and married to Anne Anderson, another BHS grad, “that has wondered what would be possible to build if I had more than a 9-year-old’s allowance.”

The result of that thought is frankly amazing.

Using (not a typo) 15,000 LEGO bricks, Walker has built an exact replica of the storied Durham, N.C., athletic center where he went to college – Duke University, home of the basketball-powerhouse Blue Devils.

A guy who remains a big fan of his alma mater and its Cameron Indoor Stadium where all the Duke legendry has been made, Walker began by drawing up to-scale plans of the structure. Pages of them. He scoured by night for exacting LEGO pieces. He drew storyboards of his planned construction.

Then, in a year-long process of building a 31-inch long, by 20-inch wide, by 15-inch high structure – complete with an elevated roof and interior with 30 LED lights (the only non-LEGOs in the entire project) – to a 1:160 scale, he built a remarkable copy of the building.

Such an amazing re-creation, his free-time passion now has been presented to Duke University officials. They love it.

His passion for detail with plastic bricks also has garnered the attention of a national website that celebrates LEGOs aficionados (BrickNerd.com), and this fall it did a major feature story of Scott’s passion for project.

The kicker?

He has another endorsee – legendary Duke basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewksi, also known as Coach K.

As one who regularly attends a Duke fantasy basketball camp, Walker says, “I was prepared for Coach K to make some crack about being used to me shooting bricks instead of playing with them. But he was very enthusiastic and immediately said the model should go on display in the real-life Cameron.”

“That,” says Walker, “is the greatest outcome I could have imagined.”

And so it often goes with the passionate and out-of-the-ordinary creative spirit.

Those after-hours “hobbies” in life?

They often are much much more, creative pursuits originally intended “to get away from it all” that instead do something else -- they truly add … for everyone else to enjoy, too.

Warren Buffett, move over.

Bill Flick is at flick@a5.com.