Spaddy’s Coffee in Seminole Heights, earlier this morning. That’s my bike in the foreground. Tap to view at full size.
I try to do a 10-kilometer (6.2 miles) bike ride every day, but once a weekend, I take a mid-ride break at Spaddy’s Coffee, a coffee truck in my neighborhood of Seminole Heights with an outdoor seating area.
I’m enough of a regular that they can often remember my usual order: a “Heights Cold Brew,” which is their excellent cold brew mixed with condensed milk, in the style of Vietnamese coffee.
After all this time, I just noticed that they have something on their menu called “Espresso Lemonade,” which is what it sounds like: lemonade with a shot of espresso. I’ll have to try it the next time I go there.
This was a fun one: The Glazer Children’s Museum celebrated its 11th birthday with a big party at Curtis Hixon Park, located right by their front door in downtown Tampa. We’d already planned to attend when they suggested that I play some accordion numbers between acts on the big stage. I was honored by the request and was only too happy to play for a good party and a great cause!
Ever better, Captain Fear, mascot for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, joined me onstage! We had a grand old time.
I manage to start most days with a 10-kilometer (6.2 miles) bike ride, and I usually snap a picture or two at some point during the ride. This morning, I snapped a couple of our corner just before heading out.
I love the view from our yard. Now that the weather’s cooling off (cool for Florida, that is) and becoming less humid (again, less humid by Florida standards), I can set up my office on our screened-in front porch again.
…unlike the office, you can microwave fish with absolute impunity at home! Today’s lunch was a salad topped with leftover grilled tuna steaks from a previous dinner.
Here’s a video from a couple of Saturdays ago, featuring Anitra running on a giant hamster wheel that uses human power to create sno-cones:
The sno-cone-making hamster wheel is the creation of Joe Donoghue, whose company, Be the Hamster, was providing its services to the Glazer Children’s Museum’s 11th birthday bash.
If you’d like to try out the giant hamster wheel for yourself, you can always attend the Glazer Children’s Museum’s Evening of Play this Friday, October 15th at 6:00 p.m.. It’s a chance for us grown-ups to explore the Museum without the kids, and take part in games and fun activities, including making sno-cones (with optional alcohol!).
It’s 20° C (68° F) in Tampa this morning. Some locals will consider this chilly, but having grown up in Toronto, I find this delightfully cool. I’m going to take the work laptop to the “front porch office” today.
Anitra and I caught Hasan Minhaj’s new show, The King’s Jester, last night at the Straz Center. Long story short: He’s still on top of his funny story-telling game, and still able to weave the hilarious, harrowing, and heartbreaking into a single, beautiful thread.
There were two shows in Tampa last night: one at 7:00 (the one we caught) and a second at 10:00. These were the second and third shows of the tour — the first one was on Friday in Miami — and it had all the energy of a brand new venture. There are still tickets for this afternoon’s show in Orlando at 5:30.
It may help if you know a little bit about the story where he spoke at the Time 100 gala in 2019 about how he called out Jared Kushner to speak to his buddy Prince Mohammed bin Salman “MBS” Al Saud (the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, with whom Kushner chats via WhatsApp) to free Loujain al-Hathloul, an activist imprison for championing women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia:
If you want to find out how one joke got him into comedy — and how another almost got him out of it — you should catch this show. I don’t want to give away too much, but if you’re a fan of his Netflix show, Patriot Act, you’ll learn its secret origin in its show.
If you’re concerned about these shows being possible superspreader events, you may be pleased to know that:
You need proof of a COVID-19 vaccination to be admitted.
You need to wear a mask to attend the show (and no food or drink is allowed inside the auditorium.
I try to do a 10-kilometer (6.2 miles) bike ride every day, but once a weekend, I take a mid-ride break at Spaddy’s Coffee, a coffee truck in my neighborhood of Seminole Heights with an outdoor seating area.
