I can almost taste it. Summer, I mean.

Unbelievable! The other day I was talking about spring, and warm(ish) weather, and Mother Nature must have heard the hopefulness in my voice. That cruel, cruel deity.

The next day, it snowed. And it's been a balmy -30 or so with windchill since then. A far cry from the -3 of a few days ago.

Undaunted, Lily and I decided it was time to celebrate spring regardless of the ridiculous reading from the thermometer. We had recently inherited several cases of tonic water, so I took it upon myself to mix up a few G&T's for my wife and I. Lily likes hers with a touch of agave syrup, and I must say, it takes the edge off quite nicely.

As a child, I was repulsed by tonic water. Club soda, I felt, at least had the decency to not add any adverse flavour to a drink. Indeed, club soda had no flavour, really, yet cost far less than Perrier. Was I the only child smirking at people who were spending way too much on fizzy water? Unlike my wife who claims she was bottle-fed on it (yes, she is a princess) and has grown up loving bubbles in her H2O. Anyway, I remember going to the fridge looking for something to drink one evening and spotting a yellow can, I grabbed it and read "Tonic water". I figured tonic was another word for seltzer, which meant this can would be a great thirst-quencher.

Wrong. So wrong.

I took one sip and spat it out immediately. I thought it must have gone rancid somehow, because that couldn't be what it was supposed to taste like, surely. Unless the liquor my parents occasionally drank was ultra-sweet, and having sipped one or two, I knew that to not be the case. Why would someone take an awful-tasting substance like gin, and cut it with something that tasted worse? What was wrong with these people? Who in their right mind would choose gin and tonic over Kahlua?

Enter my grandmother. She swears by gin, although she cheats a little, and drinks it with diet 7-up, which is just sweet enough to barely mitigate the unpleasantness of gin. Seriously, for those of you who haven't tried it, knock back a slug of gin sometime. You will forever after love the flavour of everything else in comparison.

That said, I now enjoy G&T's, and Lily and I enjoyed a few cocktails before dinner. G&T's are nominally a summer drink, but summer is so short up here, we have to start enjoying summer early, and since we can't wear our bathing suits yet, gin and tonic is the method we must use to remind ourselves that the end of winter is less than three months away. The things we do. Hurray.

-J