[bonniemuffin]

Nah, I'm pretty sure he just wanted to encourage me to come up with ways to entertain myself. Thus, my childhood hobbies included building a city out of empty kleenex boxes for a family of little pieces of wool to live in; recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes and coming up with indexing strategies to keep track of them in notebooks; and soaking every plant I could find in rubbing alcohol to find out which ones made dye I could paint with. Weird kid, what can I say.

[loeber]

Sounds like you spent your time exploring creative pursuits. That's worthwhile. Seems like a fun childhood. I believe that it is important to stave off boredom with creative, rather than consumptive activities.