For the past month I have been super excited to celebrate Valentine’s Day with Mr. MMM. I picked the perfect, inexpensive, yet hip event. There was a bacon & beer/chocolate & wine event at a local winery. No tickets or reservations required, just respond to the FB invite so they could make plans with their vendors. I did just that. THEN something happened.

Changing Gears

A day before the big event, the winery posted something on their FB page. The post read something like…It’s supposed to be bitter for this Saturday’s event. Please keep in mind that inside space is at a premium and that some of our vendors will be outside. Please bundle up. If you’d like to wait for our next event in March, please feel free to do so…Hmm, that did not sit well with me. We had everything planned out a month in advance. I had set aside cash in our loosey-goosey budget for our Valentine’s date. Now what were we going to do? We even had mammaw all set to come babysit for a few hours and now the actual venue is telling us not to come.

Since the high-temperature for our area was supposed to be a bone-chilling 15F, we opted to scramble to find an alternative. Instead of the winery, we decided to embark on our first ever annual Valentine’s pub crawl, which we lovingly called, Valestival 🙂 Our goal was to hit downtown Lancaster (which is truly artsy fartsy for those of you who think of only Amish when referencing Lancaster. Some hipster places even sell LANC magnets for cars). Okay, back to the story. Our plan was to indulge in mouth-watering appetizers and fanciful, craft brews until our babysitting time limit ran out. We started. First stop, The Fridge-ultra-cool place with tons of bottled, craft beers, artisan pizza, and other delights. Next up, a Taproom by the square. Things were going okay. I say okay because, well…

Did I mention I had been fighting off a cold/virus all week? It wasn’t anything big, just something keeping me a bit under the weather. But then IT decided to rear its ugly head. IT picked our second stop on our first ever Valentine’s pub crawl to hit me like a ton of bricks. I fell so ill that my eyes started to glass over and I could barely keep myself upright (and no, it wasn’t from the beer. At that point, I had only consumed 1 drink). All I wanted was to be under the covers at home in bed. I tried to make it to our third stop, to no avail. And that was it, we headed home. Life threw us some lemons.

Making Lemonade

Yeah, less than two hours later, I was home in bed, sick, at 2:30 in the afternoon. I didn’t get out of bed until the next morning. Instead of spending our cash on a wonderful afternoon bouncing from one cool place to the next, we spent it on decongestants and antihistamines.

The good news? We had quite a bit of cash leftover. We’re going to use that cash to beef up our investments this month. It turns out we were able to make some lemonade out of those lemons! Next year we’ll engage in our second annual LANC pub crawl and laugh about how sick I was this year-hopefully over intoxicating beers (pun intended) and delicious food. Yum!

Did your Valentine’s go off without a hitch? Were you able to meet the challenge from last week to better your financial future?

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