I started attending the University of South Florida two years ago when COVID was brewing for the first time.
Most of my classes were online at first, but eventually we transitioned back to a more normal educational environment. I lived on campus for a year, but quickly realized that I didn’t like cramped dorm rooms. I have a friend at the University of Tampa and another friend at Hillsborough Community College, and we all like to order pizza and watch football or hockey games on the TV at one of our apartments. My apartment is a studio in Temple Terrace, just a few minutes down the road from Busch Gardens and Adventure Island. Although the studio apartment has a package heating and cooling system with an electric furnace, it’s much cheaper to heat this place in the winter with an efficient radiant space heater. Tampa has fluctuating temperatures in the winter season. Some days it’s cold in Tampa, and other days it’s in the 80s during the afternoon regardless of the winter freeze in the rest of the country. Yesterday the temperature dropped down to 48 degrees at night and didn’t get above 52 during the day when I took a trip to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg. Since it’s so close to the water of Tampa Bay, the wind chill was in the high 30s for the duration of the afternoon. I didn’t wear warm enough clothing and started to shiver in the car driving north on Interstate 275 heading back to my home in Temple Terrace. I had fun in St. Petersburg, but it would have been a better trip had the weather been more mild.