No Happier Hour: Fall Four-ward

It seems I'm not the only one excited for fall these days. There's so many exciting things about that time of year: football, being able to drink pumpkin spice lattes and hot apple cider without ending up in a pile of sweat (though, those days are still few and far between down here in south Florida), and this year, there's one really special even that I'm excited for; my wedding.

This post isn't about my wedding, though. Don't worry.

This is more just me getting to blabber on about all of the wonderful things that make fall my favorite season, besides spring, summer, and winter, of course (I like them all- they all have different perks).

So I present to you, my top 4 reasons for being excited about fall.

If there's one reason that I see that EVERYONE (including myself) is excited about, it's football.

Football means many things. It means tailgating (and sometimes not even making it into the game- that's what portable TVs are for), spending time in bars on inappropriate nights to be out drinking lots of beer and screaming, spending time with my family once the Bucs are playing, and pretty much any and every excuse in the book to make something football shaped.

There ain't a single thing in there that I don't love.

Fall and Summer are close competitors for this section, but since I live in Florida and RARELY ever get to wear boots with jeans and cashmere sweaters, but can wear a sundress 90% of the year, fall wins.

There are very, very few times that you can wear your jeans tucked into your boots, outdoors, without getting heat exhaustion in Florida. I would like to take full advantage of it this year. Not to mention how cute, comfy, and forgiving fluffy fall sweaters can be. Need to hide that pie belly? Pop on a slouchy sweater. New cellulite on the back of your thighs? Some dark jeans will slim that right on out. Love.

I grew up in Sarasota, which is about two hours north of where I currently live (which is BFE, down in the swamp), and on the outskirts of town up there, there is a place called Hunsader Farms. Every year in October, they put on a big fall festival with a pumpkin patch, petting zoo, hay rides, roasted corn, an art fair, and all sorts of other delicious goodies (fresh popped kettle corn being one of my favorites). My mom would take my brother and I here every year to ride the tractors through the fields, listen to some live music, and sometimes pick out a pumpkin.

It's been quite a few years since I've been able to make it up there, being that I was in college and now am stuck with this thing called a full-time job (booo). So this year, it's one of the top things on my list that I want to do. What I would REALLY like to do would be to bring my 'nieces' (friends kids) there, but I don't know if we would have enough time for that. I'm going to give it a shot, though.

The last reason is the most important to me, and it's something that I don't get to enjoy very much these days.

I'm incredibly close with my family. So much so, that I consider my mom to be my best friend. She knows everything there truly is to know about me and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Fall/Winter is the time of year where everyone gets together. There's Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and in our family, celebrating my grandmothers life in January.

It's a picture of a picture, so it's not very clear, but this is my grandma back in her younger days. She passed away January 13th 2001, when I was 12, and she truly was the matriarch of our family. Everyone loved her. The woman was a saint. A tough saint, but a saint nonetheless. She could cook up a mess and catch you doing things without even seeing you doing them.

She's the woman who fed my love of sugar sticks, pickled beets, miracle whip, and coke floats. She let me feed the squirrels, climb higher than any 10 year old should have in her oak tree, and always made sure I got to see Punky Brewster. My grandmother was a crucial part of my raising, and I'll never forget her.

I never got to meet my grandfather, as he passed away from a heart attack before I was born, but we also end up talking a lot about him on those days.