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I’ll admit it: when I started this blog series, I forgot how much it rains in the beginning of summer. When I had the summer laid out ahead of me, I had the months sorted out like this:

June: Sunny! This is when people do a lot of the fun summer activities like days at the beach and tanning. Everyone tries to catch up on how pale and out of shape they got during the winter by tanning and exercising (this is why there are so many middle-aged men running around without shirts.)
July: Sunny and hot! This is primo barbeque season and the month when everyone tries to make camping “their thing.” Fourth of July camping makes everyone forget how much work camping normally takes so the habit dies pretty quickly. Everyone is starting to think that it’ll never be cold again.
August: Summer is too hot now. It’s humid and I want to stay inside with the A/C on. Everyone is waiting for late-summer storms and trying to find something to do that doesn’t involve sweating through three different shirts in the same day.

Obviously, I didn’t quite nail it on the assumptions. I could’ve written this post on rainy day ideas much earlier, but better late than never, right? Luckily for all you introverts, these rainy day ideas can get you through the beginning of fall, when the rain goes from being warm, Nicolas Sparks-ish rain that lets you smooch Ryan Gosling to the type of rain that gives you the common cold/pneumonia/consumption/polio if you stand in it for too long. Without further ado, here’s the final post in the Introvert’s Guide to the Fox Cities: Finding your way on rainy days.

When it rains, your first natural instinct is finding water and staring at it for a while.

The task of writing an introvert’s guide for having fun on rainy days is admittedly an easy one, as storms typically allow introverts to stay indoors and relax. That being said, it’s still easy to fall into a rut if you’ve been doing the same thing for days on end, so it’s never a bad idea to try out something new. If you haven’t made a trip to any of the museums in the area, rainy days are the perfect time to expand your horizons. Learn about the history of the area, view incredible works of art and mindblowing (no pun intended) pieces of blown glass. I’m talking about The History Museum at the Castle, The Trout Museum of Art, and The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. Don’t forget to check out Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center and Galleries as well! Stormy weather will prevent you from breezing through the museums quickly without taking everything in. This approach also works well in the coming months, as our September issue will feature our annual Fall Arts Guide.

If museums aren’t your thing, take a trip to the Appleton Public Library or Half Price Books. There’s no shame in taking part in one of the most stereotypical rainy-day activities as long as you dive in headfirst. The APL is great if you’re looking to check out some books you can’t find anywhere else, and HPB’s friendly atmosphere allows for hours of browsing. Reading on a rainy day will also give you a little boost to the ego for doing something other than watching another six hours of Netflix without moving from the couch.

I’m not really going to count this as its own standalone idea, but rainy days are great for going out to eat- check out the introvert’s guide for Fox Cities dining here and here.

Go find a road and cross it in the rain! You can feel like you’re in an angsty music video.

Looking to see the movie that everyone has been talking about? Use the rain as an excuse to-you know what, you don’t really need an excuse to go see movies. You don’t need much of an excuse to do anything on this list; rainy days are beautiful because they give you an opportunity to do what you want without fear of judgment from others. Do you want to try cooking a dish you’ll almost certainly ruin? Do it. Have you been trying to do more jigsaw puzzles but you don’t want to seem like you’re 80? It’s raining. Do it. Have you always tried to read the sidewalk poetry in downtown Appleton but there’s always too many people and you’re forced to walk too quickly to read it? You’ll get a little wet, but go ahead and do it. Rainy days are the second most introvert friendly days of the year (hello, blizzards!) and you don’t always need to push yourself way out of your comfort zone to feel like you didn’t waste the day. Enjoy the rhythmic pattering of the rain against the windows. Appreciate the sense of everyone hunkering down for the storm, heading indoors until the thunder passes. Make rainy days your own and allow yourself to let your guard down; do what your heart leads you to do.

As a last little note, this blog series has been a lot of fun to write and I really appreciate all the support you all have given me through reading the blog, sharing it, and giving great feedback. I also want to give a HUGE thank you to everyone here at Fox Cities Magazine for showing me the ropes and helping me out with the blog series and a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes unnoticed. I hope that the series was helpful for all you introverts out there (or any extroverts trying to get a better feel on what to do when you’re hanging out with an introvert!) and I hope your summer was a blast. Alright, the whole end of this post has been sappier than a maple tree, so I’ll wrap it up with a quote from Shakespeare:

“It’s a very strange silence that I’m living in right now. It’s a silence that has a lot of activity and noise in it from a zone that I don’t live in on this earth.”

Did I say Shakespeare? I meant Gary Busey. Same thing, right?

-DM