Brown Baggin' It

Oh how I long for the warmer days. It's right about this time of year...the holidays--aka drunken distractions--are long over, and the lengthening daylight and clear blue skies tease us into thinking it's NOT barely 15 degrees outside...that I get a desperate itch for summer.

In all honesty, for many years I really liked winter, and I abhorred the summer. Summer is Wisconsin, is, er, was (I'll get into that in a sec) blazenly hot and sticky and gross, and I'm not a fan. "You can always put on more layers, but you can only take off so many," I used to claim to my friends who looked at me with absolute shock and pure disgust when I'd tell them Winter followed closely after Fall as my favorite season.

I'm done with that now. Perhaps it's my ripe old age of 30, but I just can't handle the winters like I used to (I recall wearing sandals to high school in January). Or maybe it's the cockamamied global warming the kids are talkin' about these days. Summers in Wisconsin are no longer that hot and sticky. Long gone are the 100+ degree heatwaves of my youth. Not to mention Wisconsin winters...for awhile, it would be rare to have a white Christmas and snow days were unheard of. This year has been relatively mild due to El Niñ-something. But the past few winters were most definitely full of city-crippling blizzards and sub zero temps. Long story short, I'm over it.

Now there's a Love on a Budget post in here somewhere, um, ah yes, summer. So late last summer, on a particularly comfortable evening, the BF and I took a walk around his neighborhood. We stopped at a liquor store and bought a couple of 16oz Sprecher beers, each placed into a concealing--yet obvious--brown paper bag. We cracked open those bad boys and continued our constitutional to the lakefront beach nearby and took in the sweet summer breezes and dazzling distant city lights. Now, clearly this may or may not be an illegal activity. Of course I didn't specify that it could or could not have been Sprecher's famous, and delicious, Root Beer. Either way, the activity was romantic, slightly adventurous (oh that zany root beer!), exercise, and--most importantly--cheap.

For many of us warm weather is insanely far away, and recalling this particularly lovely night just drives me even more Cabin Crazy than I already am. In the meantime, however, I guess I'll just uncork a bottle of delicious red wine (LOAB Holiday Gift #11: Alcohol of any kind, even cheap alcohol, makes a great birthday present), stream The Reader from the Roku, and enjoy the electric heat from our fake fireplace. Bottoms up Wisconsin Winter.