I enjoy soldering quite a bit. I'm an embedded software engineer so I sometimes have occasion to build prototype boards. I will order through-hole versions of microcontrollers for this even though the final products will have tiny surface-mount versions. Strictly speaking, I could do most of what I need to do on breadboards, but I have found it both useful and fun to transfer breadboarded circuits to stripboard. I work part of my week from home. At my office I have access to lighted stereo microscopes and other expensive tools for surface-mount soldering, but at home I just have a couple of irons, a Hakko and Radio Shack. At work we use lead-free solder; at home I use old-school lead 60/40. I have tried to switch to lead-free solders at home but I hate them; the poor wetting and the way they burn up the iron tips. Leaded solders are very forgiving; often times you don't have to get a blob of solder perfectly placed, and it just flows into the right shape. Lead free, not so much, at least in my experience. I know I can do things with extra flux and all that, but with leaded solder I generally don't even need to apply extra flux to get good connections.
The last project I built for work was a little development board built around and Atmel microcontroller. The last project for fun was a flashing LED Christmas Tree kit. I have built a number of those and I am teaching my kids to build them. I also sometimes make other little LED toys for my kids, things with 555 timers or programmable unijunction transistors and RGB LEDs.
My skills at surface-mount soldering are still pretty laughably bad although using the tools in my office I have managed to solder some tiny surface-mount resistors. One of my co-workers has been mentoring me a bit in how to do that. It would be pretty much impossible to do in my home office without the stereo microscope and Weller with a super-tiny tip.