{"id":590,"date":"2005-03-04T13:44:00","date_gmt":"2005-03-04T13:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=590"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T07:00:00","slug":"my-sisters-birthday-and-pa-booze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2005\/03\/my-sisters-birthday-and-pa-booze\/","title":{"rendered":"My sister&#8217;s birthday and PA booze"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mmm Friday.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s my youngest sister&#8217;s birthday today, she&#8217;s turning 16. Egads, 16! This is a big birthday for her because in Maine you can drop out of school without your parent&#8217;s consent when you&#8217;re 16, and she&#8217;s been claiming she would for a couple years. Because of her recent change of schools and tutoring I&#8217;m hoping that she&#8217;s changed her mind, but I can so easily see her getting upset and annoyed one day and quitting on a whim. I&#8217;ll give her a call tonight to see how she&#8217;s doing.<\/p>\n<p>The week slowed down a lot for me after tuesday, which is great, I&#8217;m not feeling mopey or stressed out anymore. I&#8217;m really looking forward to movie night tonight at <lj user=mtj>&#8216;s place. Michael is going to stop by the beer store this afternoon, and hopefully swinging by the liquor store as well to get me a bottle of wine. I&#8217;m in a wine mood.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings me to another subject, Pennsylvania&#8217;s liquor laws.<lj-cut><\/p>\n<p>Pennsylvania is a &#8220;dry state&#8221; which basically means they have stupid alcohol laws.<\/p>\n<p>All &#8220;Wine and Spirits&#8221; shops are state run, and often have strange hours. Just last year they opened a few on Sundays, which was quite a radical change.<\/p>\n<p>You can only buy beer in restaurants that have a liquor license (and there are plenty around here that don&#8217;t) or at a &#8220;Beer Store&#8221; where they only sell beer by the case. Many establishments have skirted the law a bit by opening &#8220;restaurants&#8221; that sell cheap take-out food and have TONS of beer by the bottle and six-pack, but those are mostly in the city.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s all very strange. I guess they established this model because they are against drinking, thinking that if you limit the places and times people can buy it at you might limit their drinking somehow. I think it&#8217;s done the opposite, at least in our case. When you buy beer you can&#8217;t just buy a six-pack to enjoy for the evening, you need to buy a whole case (and now that I have a whole case in my fridge you better believe I&#8217;m going to drink it!). When we drop by the liquor store we stock up because going to the store when it&#8217;s open is a pain and who knows when we&#8217;ll have the time to come back?<\/p>\n<p>I should look around for alcoholic statistics nationwide (most of what I find just deals with under-aged drinking), taking into consideration rural vs city areas (because we all know that there is nothing to do in rural america except drink &lt;\/sarcasm&gt;). Does Maine have a higher rate because you can buy hard liquor in some grocery stores? Do Pennsylvania&#8217;s crazy-feeling laws actually make fewer people drink?<\/p>\n<p>We should just abolish these silly laws, and the drinking age. I think they often turn out doing more harm than good. I drank much more before I turned 21 than I do now, and I know that&#8217;s true for most people.<\/lj-cut><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mmm Friday. It&#8217;s my youngest sister&#8217;s birthday today, she&#8217;s turning 16. Egads, 16! This is a big birthday for her because in Maine you can drop out of school without your parent&#8217;s consent when you&#8217;re 16, and she&#8217;s been claiming she would for a couple years. Because of her recent change of schools and tutoring [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}