On Friday, I stopped by Produce Wagon, the fruit and veg stand that operates in our neighbourhood, just a few blocks away from the house on Tuesdays and Fridays. It’s always nice to see Patti and Fabiola, and was even better to find out that they’ve added an extra hour to their schedule — they’re now open at 13th and Crawford on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 9 a.m. to noon!
The vegetables I bought ended up in this morning’s scramble (pictured above), and will play a part in tonight’s dinner, which will be ma po tofu.
Lanfranco Pescante’s Instagram post. He seems a little too eager to kill, and waaaay more concerned about the flag than the old man.
Crazy times like this often lead to rising tempers, and rising tempers sometimes lead to career-limiting moves on social media. Case in point: Lanfranco Pescante, co-owner of Tampa’s Nocturnal Hospitality Group (which owns Franklin Manor, Osteria, Mole y Abuela, Mision Lago Estate, and Shibui), went a little too far on Instagram. It’s one thing to defend the flag and old man who got hurt carrying it at a protest, and it’s another thing to go completely unhinged about it on social media and call for people to get shot:
Pescante wrote all this in an argument with the Instagram account @officialthebody, whose posts have been in support of protesters and pointing them to resources.
The Tampa Bay Times article is worth it, just for the new ironic twist that Pescante’s t-shirt in his file photo provides. It just begged for a caption:
Produce Wagon. Photo by Joey deVilla.
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“Is that new?” I wondered when I first biked past Produce Wagon at the corner of E. Crawford and N. 13th Avenue a couple of weeks ago. The red wooden wagon with the cheerful sign is only a few blocks from our house, and I’d been biking right by it for a few days. Yesterday, I went there when they were open (at that location, they’re open on Tuesdays and Fridays from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m.).
Produce Wagon. Photo by Joey deVilla.
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I was greeted warmly by Patti Mars and Fabiola Garcia, the proprietors. I asked them if they’d just started because I hadn’t seem them before (we’ve been in our new house for a year now), and since their wagon and sign looked pretty new. Patti told me that they’d only been running Produce Wagon for a couple of weeks, but that Fabiola comes from a family with three generations’ experience in selling produce.
Produce Wagon. Photo by Joey deVilla.
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According to this Patch.com article, Patti and Fabiola had been thinking about opening a produce stand for months, but couldn’t find the right location at the right price. They shelved the idea until they heard an NPR report about how people aren’t eating as much fresh produce because they’ve been going to the grocery less often due to the pandemic. That’s when they decided to resurrect the produce stand idea and provide a way for people in the neighborhood to get fresh fruits and vegetables. Their produce comes from the wholesale markets east of here, which they pick up twice a week, very early in the morning.
I picked up some dinner fixings from them: zucchini, mushrooms, a vidalia onion, and a can of coconut milk. They also have cans of red, green, and Massaman curry paste, which I’ll keep in mind, as the nearest Asian grocery store is a couple of miles away. They’re understandably a little pricier than my usual produce market, Bearss Groves, but they can’t be beat for convenience and the opportunity to get to know another neighbor. I think I’m going to be a regular!
Produce Wagon’s price list. Photo by Joey deVilla.
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Produce Wagon is currently open at these locations and times:
Here’s a post I started back in February 2019 and didn’t finish — until now! Jo Koy returns to Tampa at the end of February, and I wanted to publish this before then.
There aren’t many theaters like this one left. It first opened in 1926, and was the first commercial building with air conditioning. It had its heyday during the golden age of movies but fell into disrepair during the era of suburban flight in the 1960s. The city rescued the theatre in the early ’70s, with Hillsborough County’s arts council taking over the theatre’s program and selecting its films and events. This effort became the model for saving endangered theaters nationwide.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
We had VIP tickets, which entitled us to a quick selfie session with Joseph Glenn Herbert (that’s his actual name; “Jo Koy” is derived from “Jokoy”, which is one of many possible Filipino nicknames for “Joseph”) himself:
Part of the patio at the progressive dinner’s first house.
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Last Friday, our neighborhood — Northeast Seminole Heights, an area with trees, bungalows, and hip restaurants and bars galore — held its annual progressive dinner (or, as it’s called in the UK, a “safari supper”). It was a multiple-destination dinner party, where four different courses were served in four different houses within walking distance of each other. While we’ve gotten to know some of the people in our neighborhood thanks to the weekly happy hour at Ella’s Americana Folk Art Cafe, Anitra and I are still new to the area. We figured that this would be a chance to get to know more of people who live nearby.
Our house is a five minute walk from the Hillsborough River, on whose banks you’ll find the pricier houses. The progressive dinner’s first stop was at one of these houses, which had a large patio complete with a huge outdoor tiki bar.
One view of the bar at the progressive dinner’s first house.
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We were among the first to arrive, but we weren’t lonely for long. There were easily eighty or more people on the patio in short order.
Another view of the bar at the progressive dinner’s first house.
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This was the appetizer course, and people came hungry! Luckily, the place was prepared.
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The patio was built right up to the edge of the river, which provided a great view. I had to get a photo:
A view of the Hillsborough River from the first house.
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After about an hour, it was time to mosey on over to the next place. I took one last photo before leaving:
One last photo before leaving the first house!
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I was so engaged in meeting new people at the next house that I didn’t take any pictures there. The soup and salad course was served there, and there were several to choose from. The stand-out dish was a cold spliced pear soup, which was fantastic. I got a couple of servings of that one.
The main course was served at the third house, which had a nice large kitchen island and buffet counter:
The third house’s nice large kitchen, as seen from the living room.
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As the place where the mains would be served, they were expecting the biggest crowd. Luckily, they had a back yard big enough to accommodate everyone and had even set up rows of tables, a fire pit, live entertainment, and a couple of off-duty police officers:
The back yard at the third house.
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There was a break in the entertainment so that the dinner’s organizer, Christie Hess, could address the crowd. She’s been putting the event together for the past 12 years, and it’s a key part of the neighborhood’s character. I’m glad that we’ve got people like her here.
Christie Hess addresses the crowd.
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Here’s another look at the crowd. It was a cool night by Florida standards (52°F / 11° C), so Anitra wore her festive zebra-strip fun fur coat:
Another look at the crowd.
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Finally, we made our way to the dessert house, which was also on the river. As with the other courses and houses, the food was a group effort. Our contribution to the dessert table was an assortment of brownies.
The dessert house.
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Some folks stayed closer to the house (and desserts), while others chose to get a better look at the river:
The view near the river.
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Another view near the river.
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While we were done with the houses, we weren’t yet done with the party! The final stop of the evening was London Heights pub with a handful of drink tickets…
Some of the taps at London Heights that evening.
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…and an invitation from Willie, one of the owners, to perform some numbers to close out the evening.
The accordion comes in handy once again!
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It’s been a while since I’ve lived in a place with this much of a sense of community. I’ve talked more with my neighbors here in the past five months than with the neighbors in the old place in the last five years, and I’m a schmoozy guy. The progressive dinner was a great excuse to walk around the neighborhood and get a better look at a couple of places, as well as to catch up with the people we already knew, and get to know dozens of other folks in the area. I look forward to greeting more people on the streets here by name, and hope to be at more of these local get-togethers!
On Friday, February 2nd at Oxford Exchange — a fantastic combination of bookstore, shop, restaurant, coworking space, design studio, and event venue in downtown Tampa — author Daniel Pink gave a presentation as part of the promotional tour for his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.
The presentation took place upstairs, in Oxford Exchange’s Commerce Club, a space with many beautiful rooms, including a large conference space where the Friday breakfast salon series of talks called Café con Tampa takes place. If you live in Tampa Bay and want to hear and meet the area’s big thinkers and movers and shakers, you should attend.
Pink opened his talk by dealing with the elephant in the room: the scar on his forehead, which gave him a very Harry Potter-like appearance. He said that he wished that there was an interesting story behind the scar, but it was simply the product of slipping in the shower. The bad news was that the result was ten stitches in his forehead. The good news — and the reason why would soon become clear — was that it happened in the morning.
“We lead lives that are series of episodes,” Pink said at the start of his talk. “Episodes by their nature have beginnings, endings, and midpoints. Each of these has a different effect on our behavior.”
His talk, like his new book, was about the oft-overlooked importance of when we do things. Among the questions he would answer, either at the talk or in his book, were:
When should you exercise — early in the day, or late?
Why should you never go to the hospital or schedule an important doctor’s appointment in the afternoon?
Why does beginning your career in a recession depress your wages 20 years later?
Why do both human beings and great apes experience a slump in midlife?
Why is singing in a choir good for you?
When during the year is your spouse most likely to file for divorce? “One of them is next month,” quipped Pink. “Check your email.”
“When we talk about units of time — things like seconds, and minutes, and weeks — you realize that most of them are completely made up,” he said. “They’re not natural in any sense; they’re things that human beings have created to corral time. But there are unit of time that are natural, like the day…and that has a big effect on us.”
With that, he introduced his thesis: that during the day, we experience a pattern that in turn affects the way we feel and how we perform.
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He talked about a Cornell study using software called LIWC — Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count — to analyze 500 million tweets (“None of them written by the President,” he joked) for emotional content. The researchers of the study wanted to find out how emotional content varied through the day. This kind of study is called sentiment analysis, and in performing it on a large corpus of tweets, they found a pattern:
In the early part of the day, they saw that “positive mood” has a peak.
In the middle of the day, around the early afternoon, that general mood entered a trough.
And finally, as the afternoon wore on, positive mood rose again, in a recovery.
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He then pointed to Princeton researcher Daniel Kahneman’s“Day Reconstruction Method”, in which he gave people diaries to track what they were doing and how they were feeling for every hour they were awake. Its purpose was to determine what activities made people feel better or worse (commuting was the daily activity that makes people feel the worst), but it also gave them a look into whether time of day affected “net good mood” — and according to their data, it does. “Net good mood”, it turns out, experiences a peak in the morning, a trough in the afternoon, and recovery in the evening.
This peak-trough-recovery pattern occurs in many places, and while the pattern is hidden to many people, its effects are decidedly not.
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He then went to a different topic: standardized testing in Denmark. Danish students take these tests on computers, but the students outnumbering computers, they had to schedule students to take the tests at different times of the day. When they mapped performance against time of day, they found something interesting, which they summarized as follows: a general trend that the later a student took the test, the worse they performed. In fact, the effect was pronounced enough that it was written up like so:
“For every hour later in the day, scores decrease… We find that an hour later in the day causes a deterioration in test score that is equivalent to slightly lower household income, less parental education, and missing two weeks of school.”
Given that policy and decisions about a student’s future can hinge on a standardized test, the edge or setback created by when the test is taken could make a big difference.
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He cited some scary medical peak-trough patterns:
Anesthesia errors: 4 times more likely at 3 p.m. than 9 a.m.
Hand-washing in hospitals: Drops as the day goes on.
In colonoscopies, they find half as many polyps in afternoon exams as in morning exams.
Doctors are more likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics in the afternoon than in the morning.
“We’re very intentional about what we do — anyone here have a to-do list? We’re intentional about who we do things with — that’s why we have HR departments. We’re intentional about how we do things. But when it comes to when, we’re kind of loosey-goosey about it.”
This is a shame, because the difference in our performance between the time of day when we’re at our peak and when we’re at our worst can be just like getting legally drunk.
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One way to help mitigate the effects of time of day on how we perform is to determine your chronotype, which is a fancy way of whether you’re a morning person, or a night owl. It’s simple to do: make a note of the time you go to sleep on “free days” (that is, a day when you don’t have to go to work the next morning) and when you wake up, and calculate the midpoint between those two times.
If the midpoint is before 3:30 a.m., you’re a Lark or morning person. 15% of people are Larks, and a disproportionate educators are Larks.
If it’s after 5:30 a.m., you’re an Owl or night person. 20% of people are Owls.
It it’s between 3:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., you’re a Third Bird — something in-between.
If you’re a Lark or Third Bird, you follow the pattern of peaking in the morning, trough in the early afternoon, and a late afternoon recovery. Owls go through the pattern, but in reverse: they have the recovery in the morning, a trough in the late afternoon, and a peak in the evening.
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Whether you’re a Lark, Owl, or Third Bird, you should adjust what you do to match the peak-trough-recovery pattern:
During the peak, you should do analytic work.
When in the trough, do rote, mechanical work: administrative tasks and other things that can be done “on autopilot”.
The recovery period is one where your analytical powers are improved, and your mind is more flexible, which is great for insight tasks.
To prove the bit about the recovery phase and insight tasks, Pink presented the audience with a couple of brain-teasers which the majority of people get wrong. I’d seen the first one before — it’s “The Linda Problem”:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?:
a) Linda is a bank teller.
b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
(The answer is a; case b is a subset of case a, and therefore can’t be more probable.)
He then presented another one, which I’d never heard before:
Ernesto is a dealer in antique coins. One day, someone brings in a beautiful bronze coin. The coin has an emperor’s head on one side and the date 544 BC stamped on the other. Ernesto examines the coin, and instead of buying it, calls the police instead. Why?
I find that I do my most clever, creative programming in the evening, because that’s my recovery period, and as this audio recording from that part of Pink’s talk will show you, it’s my insight time:
It’s not every day that you get to impress one of your favorite authors.
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Since attending the talk, I’ve been giving more thought to the way I arrange my day. I’m taking Pink’s advice to change my schedule so that I’m taking on tasks that require analysis and vigilance during the morning, “turnkey” work in the early afternoon, and saving my creative and learning tasks for the late afternoon and evening, when the elevated mood but lower vigilance lend themselves well to that sort of thing.
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I’m also going to put more thought into when and how I take my breaks, as we tend to underestimate their restorative power.
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Click the photo to see it at full size.
He showed a graph based on a study of Israeli parole boards, which showed that judges were more lenient after taking a break, and grew less lenient as time wore on.
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According to Pink, the science of breaks is where the science of sleep was 15 years ago. Back then, the value of sleep was being introduced in popular culture, and the same is now happening for taking a break. The data shows that we should take more breaks, and we should take certain kinds of breaks. The idea of “powering through” and not taking a break is as bad as sleeping less to get more done.
Here’s what’s known about taking the right kind of breaks:
Something beats nothing. Even a micro-break of a minute or two is better than no break at all.
A break where you’re moving around is better than one where you’re stationary.
Social beats solo. Breaks taken with people of our choice are more restorative.
Outside beats inside. Nature has powerful restorative effects.
Fully-detached — not talking about work — beats semi-detached.
Taking breaks — and especially the right kinds of breaks — can help mitigate the effects of the trough.
Click the photo to see it at full size.
Pink then went into the Q&A session, where we learned a few things:
The idea that amateurs take breaks and professionals don’t is completely backwards — it’s the other way around.
During adolescence, our chronotype shifts towards “Owl”, which is why many high schools are now wisely scheduling the school day to start later.
A couple with twin boys — one who’s a Lark, and one’s an Owl — were concerned about their Owl son’s performance on the upcoming SAT. Pink suggested that they could mitigate the morning’s effects on the Owl son by encouraging him to take a walk before the test, preferably with a friend.
Having a brainstorming session? Don’t hold it in the early afternoon.
There’s also something called the “Fresh Start Effect” — we’re more likely to stick with a change in behavior on “fresh start” days like a Monday, or the first day of the month or year, or on the day after your birthday rather than two days before your birthday.
When people make decisions, they generally have a default decision. When being pitched to, this default decision is “no”. People are more likely to overcome the default during the peak, and immediately after a break.
“This book has changed my behavior more than any other book I’ve written,” Pink said. “I became much more intentional about my own schedule… I take breaks in a way I wouldn’t have before — I always make a break list now.”
On when to work: If you goals are to lose weight, boost your mood, or establish a habit, exercise in the morning. Exercise in the evening is better for avoiding injury, if you want it to be more enjoyable and less effortful, or if you want to break records (a large number of which are broken between 4 and 7 p.m.).
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We then went downstairs to Oxford Exchange’s bookstore section to get our copy autographed…
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…during which time Anitra asked Pink for recommendations for books that he found interesting. He wrote these on a post-it:
My coworker Justin Downey was unfamiliar with Pink’s work, but came along based on my recommendation and greatly enjoyed the talk. I think we have a new fan!
On Friday, I stopped by Produce Wagon, the fruit and veg stand that operates in our neighbourhood, just a few blocks away from the house on Tuesdays and Fridays. It’s always nice to see Patti and Fabiola, and was even better to find out that they’ve added an extra hour to their schedule — they’re now open at 13th and Crawford on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 9 a.m. to noon!
