I learned a lot from Laura Sherman.

Driveway Money, for instance, is that cash you find lying in your driveway that fell out of your pocket when you were digging around for your keys — see also, Free Money, or Desert Nachos.

ESPN Commentator and former NFL Coach John Gruden is in love with Laura, because every time he is on TV he looks right at her.

Laura Time is the actual arrival time she appears somewhere, in contrast to the scheduled time of arrival.  Laura Time could be, say, 3 hours after the start of a pub crawl, or minutes after the time you really wanted to leave for the airport when you were moving to Boston.

This past summer I had both the blessing and the curse of becoming good friends with Laura Sherman.  We learned to curl around the same time, but to suggest that she was just my curling friend is completely underrated.  We went camping, fishing (well, she did), watched football, gone to clubs I would have never thought I would ever ever go to, and even became real life hippies.  More often than not, she was a pain in my ass, but more often than not she covered my ass too.  She’s the kind of person that you can’t wait to hang out with, even though you are banging your head against the wall the whole time she was there.

One thing about Laura is that she had this way of saying things that leaving the town of normal but hadn’t reached crazy yet.  That’s the driveway money, or the John Gruden comment.  Though there was something she said to me that made some of the crazy make sense.  She said:

“I Refuse to Be Bored”

Think about it … it’s not that she hates being bored, we all do, but she refused to be bored.  What that meant is that she always had a plan for doing things.  For legal / privacy / decency  purposes, I am keeping the examples to myself .. but know that there was a lot of fun things she did.  Like what I will be doing the next couple of months, many of those things she did by herself.  For her, she wasn’t going to wait for her friends to come if they weren’t sure if they were coming.  For me, well, I’m just new here.  Watching her I realized that the beauty of all this was that she met more people then anyone I ever knew.  It was a simple concept – don’t look for friends to find things to do with, do things you like to do and you will find friends doing them.

So there was the Sherman Mantra:

“I Refuse to be Bored!”

As much as I miss that crazy woman, I must … I MUST follow the Sherman Mantra.  I owe it to myself, and I owe it to whatever fun I can find.

I REFUSE TO BE BORED!!

Now that I am approaching my first weekend of a Bostonian, I need to put that to the test.  Let me just say, it’s going to be easy to do that.

Here is the plan:

Friday
– Finish house hunting in Boston, and initiate an offer on a house.
Saturday
– Take the Ferry to Salem, MA for the last good weekend of the Haunted Happenings at the home of the Salem Witch Trials
– Check out the Halloween Costume Crawl (not specifically in a costume myself … maybe the pup will … but you know it will be terrific people watching)
Sunday
– Attend a Meet & Greet of Boston’s NaNoWriMo Chapter (more on what that is later)
– Packers Game at the official home of Packers Boston

I am still trying to figure out things to fill in time Friday Night and Sunday Morning, but that will come.  It will have to, because quite simply.  I refuse to be bored.

Gotta run … there is surely some Nachos calling my name somewhere.