Open for Business

It was 44 degrees here in Our Little Town today, and technically still winter. So naturally we went out for ice cream.

The local soft-serv place always opens up around this time of year, with a fresh coat of lurid pink paint and a few new benches to replace the ones that get worn down over time. Never mind that it’s March in Wisconsin and that this means there is still snow on the ground. People in this state just don’t care about such things.

Do not stand between a Wisconsinite and a source of ice cream. This is one of the first things I learned after moving to this state, along with the Sports Pecking Order (Packers, Badgers, Brewers, Bucks) and why Tom & Jerry isn’t just a cartoon. The ice cream freezers at my local supermarket are longer than some runways and far more crowded, even in the dead of winter when you have to get the stuff into the house before it freezes into granite.

So when the girls and I passed by and saw that the place was open, as we headed home from Not Bad President Elementary, what else could we do but stop?

Lauren and I each had chocolate malts with extra malt, and Tabitha had a “dad sundae,” which is just another of the various “dad foods” that are all, uniformly, bad for you. This particular dad food has vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and marshmallow sauce and can cause tooth decay at ranges of up to three hundred yards. But sooooo goooooood.

It’s nice to take a break like that.