For such as smart girl, you sure can be pretty stupid sometimes...

About a month or so ago, I finally discovered the beauty of growlers. For the uninitiated, growlers are 64 ounce jugs that you can take to breweries and pay to have filled with draft beer: cheaper than normal bottles (sort of; definitely cheaper than pints out), environmentally responsible, and you get to have draft beer from great breweries at home. I had a meeting down south on Friday, so I took my two empty growlers along to have filled at Georgetown Brewing on the way back north. At first, all seemed great: a very quick trip off of I-5 and I had two growlers filled with Manny's for only $10 (that's less than $1/beer)! I put them in my trunk and headed back into town. A few minutes after I got going, I started getting a little nervous. Apparently one or both of the growlers had tipped over and was rolling around the back, getting foamy or even worse, starting to leak! There was no good stopping place, so I just drove as carefully as possible. It was the last traffic light before I stopped the car that the sounds became more ominous: a big clanking sound, followed by no more rolling around sounds, and was that beer I smelled? Sure enough, when I parked and popped the trunk, I was greated with a very damp and smelly trunk. I found one growler intact (but halfway filled with foam) and the rest of my trunk filled with 64+ ounces of beer and broken glass. Two days, lots of hosing, scrubbing, and airing, and I think it's all cleaned up. (The beer in the surviving growler was pretty flat by the way.) So, not such a great deal after all. This time.