On to the next one! For me, 2022 was defined by pickleball, art, pizza and cats! The pizza and cats are recurring themes from birth but thanks to our friend Alex who introduced us to pickleball at the end of 2021, the fastest growing game in America took over most of our weekends in 2022. If you haven’t played pickleball yet, it’s the sport for people who didn’t grow up playing sports and is super accessible to people old and young and of different levels of physical fitness. We have had weekends where the youngest player was 20 and the wisest was in their 70s! We have our own nets and set up in one of the parks around Miami Beach. If you are in Miami and want to join, give us a holler! We’ll let you know the next time we are going to set up, and almost every weekend is someone’s first time playing so don’t let that stop you from having a fun day in the park! (see the form at the bottom of the post or just shoot me a DM!)
Next to pickleball our weekends were dominated by scuba diving thanks in great part to my parents gifting us underwater scooters at the end of 2021 which we didn’t get brave enough to use until 2022 and haven’t looked back since! Think James Bond Thunderball with less violence. We pack up our dive gear on to our bike trailers and pedal on down to South Point on Miami Beach to scoot our way to the reef. It’s mostly a soft coral garden with lots of juvenile fish. Some of our favorites from this year were the guitarfish, the electric ray, baby nurse sharks, the pork fish that lead us to their sunken home, eagle rays, angel fish and of course puffer fish with their cute expressions of concern.
One of the my favorite reasons to scuba dive is it gives me more material to create underwater art! I love finding cool sea creatures and turning them into art pieces to share with people that both love scuba diving and those that have yet to meet our underwater neighbors. This year has been my most productive year from an art perspective, and I owe a lot of that to my friend Carol for organizing the Queer Art Show Case as part of Miami Beach Pride. That was the first showing I did since the pandemic started and kickstarted me back into putting brush to canvas. Since then I started the organizing queer art shows in the library of the Gaythering! We have featured five artists so far and looking forward to keeping the fair going. The Gaythering is my favorite space for the community and I can’t thank them enough for letting us take over once a quarter and provide a safe space for us to get together and celebrate queer art, fun music and good friends! Hope over to the art section of my website to see more!
Looking forward to another year filled with more pickleball, art, pizza, cats and of course friends!
One of the worst parts of 2022 was having one of our best friends move to Ohio but we know she will be back and we will be waiting with open arms, a pickleball paddle and the new pizza of the month from Harry’s a few doors down from home.
