A Month in Tampa
We returned to Downtown Tampa for the month of December. This time, our home in Tampa was an apartment in a new-ish building across the street from the Straz Center for the Performing Arts. When we went to see Les Miserables, it was just a five minute walk from our apartment to our seats in the theater! It was also nice being so close to the Riverwalk, where we could walk north to Armature Works or south to Curtis Hixon Park and Water Street. We could also walk to Franklin Street and catch a free streetcar to Ybor City, or call a Dash Tampa (yellow Tesla) for a $2 ride anywhere Downtown.
One of the first things we did was visit the self-storage facility. Like many nomads, we have a small storage unit where we store mementos and hard-to-replace items. We moved everything to a smaller unit, to reduce our monthly storage costs. It took nearly three hours, but Steve made everything fit!
Back at our apartment, Steve put up the artificial tree we had pulled out from storage. But we hadn’t thought to pull out the bins with Christmas decorations, so Steve trimmed the tree with some new lights and borrowed ornaments. My contribution was a couple of holiday jigsaw puzzles. Okay, they weren’t really decorations, but I had a lot of fun assembling them!
While I was doing jigsaw puzzles, Steve had fun playing with his new toy, the Meta Quest VR headset. When he wasn’t playing Beat Saber, he was golfing.
After less than a week in Tampa, I went back to New York City for a few days to help my sister Marg after her bilateral knee replacement. She was at the Hospital for Special Surgery, a historic institution that was formerly called “The New York Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled.” I stayed in Brooklyn and took the Q train to and from the hospital. It was near the 72nd street station, with colorful life-sized mosaics by Vik Muniz. It was COLD in New York City, but I enjoyed spending time with Marg, my sister-in-law Gabriella, and my nephew Emmett. Marg’s rehab was hard work, and the pain management was tricky, but I predict she will be soon be very happy with her new knees.
Back in Tampa, I resumed some of my volunteer work. I did a couple of shifts with my friend Becky at the Ronald McDonald House near Tampa General Hospital. RMH houses and feeds families while their children are in the hospital. One of the little projects Becky and I did was framing these photographs of RMH guests. Don’t you love the result? Two dads proudly showed us photos of their newborn baby (and their dogs). Another dad told us that his five-year-old son almost lost his arm in a bad car accident, but a surgeon at TGH saved the boy’s arm with a complete reconstruction. It was a success story straight out of Grey’s Anatomy!
Becky joined me for one of my six volunteer shifts at the Metropolitan Ministries Holiday Tent. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Holiday Tent provides food and children’s gifts for about 30,000 local families in need. It was a long but manageable walk to the tent from our apartment. This year, I did toy sorting, kid care, and food stocking. I also helped prepare boxes of non-perishable food that would be delivered to families during the month of January, when MetroMin staff would be busy taking down the tent. It’s always rewarding to volunteer at the tent.
In mid-December, Steve’s parents had their 63rd wedding anniversary, so we celebrated with dinner at Bern’s Steakhouse. It was lovely to enjoy our favorite Bern’s meal together: French onion soup, tableside Caesar salad, and Delmonico steaks, followed by a macadamia hot fudge sundae in the Dessert Room.
We had a long stretch of beautiful, sunny weather. In the mornings, I enjoyed walking on the Riverwalk with my audiobooks. In the evenings, our walks featured lovely sunsets and festive holiday lights. December is a great month to be in Tampa!
