Sunday/Monday 1/13 and 1/14

Yesterday was a weak sun day - quite warm, but not a lot of sunshine.  We grocery shopped in the morning and on the way back, we stopped to see something that we learned of at the BBQ.  There is a person nearby who takes in endangered exotic animals.  Your can't enter the yard, but you can look through the chain link fence to see the animals.  There were a boatload of parrots, three beautiful tigers, a bear, and a baboon.  It was quite unique to see the animals in the yard of a regular home and right around the corner from a school!  The animals were well taken care of and looked very healthy.  We came home, did a bit of laundry, baked some banana bread (and a small one for Kelly) and then sat at the pool with our books for a bit.  We drove into Tampa and met Kelly at a mall.  We left our car there and piled into Kelly's car.  She took us for a tour of downtown Tampa and down on Bayshore Drive.  Most of the houses there were in the $1,000,000 range or better - huge homes overlooking the water. We drove to the restaurant, Bern's Steakhouse, and got quite a surprise as it didn't really look like much from the outside.  It had been a grocery store before it was converted.  The inside was magnificent!  Everything was fabulous - from the decor to the impeccable service to the fabulous meal!  Dave had grouper while Kelly and I had steak.  The steaks are aged and cut and cooked to order - it was so tender, you could cut it with a fork!  The meal came with French onion soup, a lovely fresh salad, garlic toast, onion strings, baked potato, veggies (although Kelly and I both opted for extra onion strings as the veggies were marinated in bourbon).  Everything was delish!  We then had a tour of the kitchen, which was enormous - they can cook up to 200 steaks on the grill.  They even had a separate kitchen for the seafood.  The wine cellar was next - room after room of wine, 100,000 bottles there and another half million in a nearby warehouse.  The oldest bottle of wine was from 1815 and sold for $2700!  They had a bottle from the 30's that commanded a small price of $30,000!  We then went upstairs to the dessert room - we sat in booths that looked like oversized wine barrels with one end cut out for the door. We listened to live music while dreamily eating our desserts.  There were many things to choose from, but I decided to have chocolate, chocolate, chocolate - a light chocolate cake with chocolate mousse filling and dark chocolate crust. Kelly had chocolate mousse and Dave had strawberry/key lime tart with raspberry/strawberry sorbet.  Needless to say, we were stuffed when we left - although, I confess, we each had a doggy bag with us.  It was a lovely evening and I highly recommend that if you get to Tampa, you try it.

Today we were wicked busy at work.  Someone had put away the books that came in Friday afternoon despite the note from Doug telling people to leave them for me.  I had to look through every section to find all of the misfiled books - it took me about 45 minute to put everything where it should be.  We had a lot of things in the back that had to be brought out and put in place.  I washed some appliances that came in on Saturday and then, of course, we had the usually buyers and individuals who dropped merchandise off.  We were steadily busy until 11 and the next hour was really slow, but it picked up again for our last half-hour.  We did the pool bit this afternoon as the sun was great!  We haven't decided where we will go tomorrow - I will have to give it some thought.