When I was a kid, I once complained to my mom about boredom during a particularly slow summer, because I grew up with kids who weren't exactly on my level, which always left me wondering what to do next. Naturally, I developed an enormous amount of entertainments while alone. In response to my "whining", my mom ordered me to the basement for a big, white, plastic bucket to pick out every dandelion in the backyard with my little next door neighbor, because she didn't want "weeds" in "her" lawn. She would also suggest we do laundry, wash dishes, fold clothes, and other horrors when we hinted at boredom, so I learned industrious, productive habits early on.
We did that for awhile, then became actually bored, after exhausting every avenue available to us through this venue: we decorated ourselves with flower crowns and garlands, then went indoors and pretended to be Greek Goddesses, wrapping ourselves in bedsheets, giggling in the guest bedroom downstairs, doing playacting that I sourced from the books on the shelf. Finally my mom came downstairs to see what all the commotion was about, to find me and my friend jumping up and down on the bed, grabbing each other when we fell down, laughing over the stupid romantic phrases adults used in soap operas, like "Darling, I'm yours!", pretending all the world was a stage.
I still do that, and I still appreciate a really nice yard, even ones with hundreds of wildflowers one might consider a "weed" in passing, as I still love hammy, over-dramatic, bad acting for sport; life lessons learned in childhood, now made into art. Such is the life.
