Bay Area | June, 2021

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June! The month in which everything returned, all at once. We got to start the month with our first in-person Accountability meeting since the beginning of 2020! What an incredible feeling. We even got to hug people and meet Nicole’s puppy in real life.

Such beautiful bounty from Stephanie’s garden. And Courtney and her baby bump!

Thank you for hosting us in your magical space, Steph.

Love.

This also marked two years since Alex’s and my first date! So of course we got takeout from our first date spot, Pintoh Thai in Oakland.

Talya.

Anniversary celebration dinner at Rintaro– one of our first dine-in experiences. And we were still outside, fully masked when not eating.

So delicious, and such a wonderful experience for returning to restaurant dining.

Dropping off some Korean pony tail radishes from our Radical Family Farms CSA to Cassie (and Rusty) and then making a visit to Discount Fabrics to source materials for a little DIY sewing project.

Later the same day, Cassie and Michael biked over to Mission Bay for some oyster happy hour fun.

And then they came over and we made dinner! Purple radishes also from Radical Family Farms… which turned bright blue after cooking! Wild.

Beginnings, re-beginnings, and also endings. We decided to give up our garden plots at Parklab. We had already been neglecting them so everything except our rosemary had died anyway.

We also ventured back out into large crowds! This was my first Giants game since 2009, despite having lived down the street while they won the World Series. But we’re back!

Garlic fries, of course.

Here’s that DIY sewing project. This is my lens bag cover, which honestly was just poorly made from the very beginning. But the rest of the lens bag is still ok, so I decided to remake a new cover to fit it. Before:

After, with new neoprene and mesh, but the velcro and zippers salvaged from the old cover!

More delightful veggies from our Radical Family Farms CSA. A teeny tiny Tokyo turnip, and rau ram.

Next sewing project: cushion covers for our Purple seat cushions. The grey is the original cover, and the dark and light florals are Rifle Paper Co. fabrics gifted to me from Courtney, Cassie, and Do-Hee for my birthday. One is for Alex and one is for me during the day! And we can uncover and bring the cushions to the ballpark by night.

My SF family.

Potato salad with dill from the CSA. And Tiger Sugar boba after spending a small pile of money to get my car’s AC repaired.

Back at the ballpark for our second event– this time a movie!

The screening of In The Heights as part of SF Pride celebrations.

Afternoon tea time is also back! With Whitney, visiting from NY.

Then it was Dragon Boat Festival! A.k.a. the holiday where we make bahtzang, or rice dumplings wrapped in leaves. Alex and I joined two friends Sophia and Leslie in trying to make them. Turns out people say it’s very difficult for good reason. There are many regional variations, but we chose to do soy eggs, braised pork, and only I added peanuts while no one else likes them.

The folding is ok, but the tying and keeping it sealed without falling apart is quite the trick.

Quite a few exploded in the cooking pot, but more than half made it intact, so that was exciting! And pretty tasty!

And the return to indoor dining… Alex’s friend was in town from LA, and he got a 5-top for a random weekday, asking if we wanted to join with some other people we didn’t know. Sure? Haha. If you’re going to reintroduce yourself to indoor dining, you might as well go all out at House of Prime Rib!

Next, second shooting for Courtney at a wedding on a 101° day. First we had to make a pit stop at the Dry Creek General Store for lunch and Reeve Winery so I could pick up our wine club wines from the last two quarters. 

Hot mama rockin the hot hot wedding. I don’t know how she does it.

Meanwhile, my fiddle leaf fig has not enjoyed its new home in Cupertino. It shed all these leaves in a week and now just has two funny looking leaves atop each very long and skinny stem. And my very cute tiny pineapple unfortunately has ripened, which means you just have to cut it off, and it doesn’t make more pineapples.

The end of June also brought the end of our Chinese class, with funny moments like this when I was occasionally the only student in class. Alex was the only person who ended up with “perfect attendance” even though he was often late. But I missed two days due to weddings. We both got A’s on the final test though! Would do again, but at 90min/day 5 days/wk it was incredibly time consuming, so I don’t know that we’ll ever have time for it again like we did during a pandemic.

Korean BBQ! Back to indoor dining indeed! And our gym is back in SF too. So I started a new “You Can Run” program on my Peloton app. So far so good. I never knew there was an ideal running cadence (180 strides per minute) before doing the program.

More veggie experiments from our RFF CSA.

Fireworks night at the ballpark. They have fireworks twice a year, pre-programmed but on seemingly random nights after the game.

Checking out the new Pier 70 building. They’ve been renovating a lot of these old shipbuilding and iron works buildings on the shoreline in Dogpatch, and soon the whole shore will be connected with parks too. They had a craft fair in this building which is also the new offices to Gusto.

Afterwards, lunch with Whitney and Ryan at the new Harmonic Brewing location atop Chase Center. Their food program is run by Greg Mindel of nearby Neighbor Bakehouse, so of course they’re great in the delicious carbs department. 

Another day, another market! First we rode our bikes over to the Farmer’s Market at Chase Center.

We happened upon a panel talk with Adam Rippon and others for Pride Month.

Then we biked over to Hayes Valley for the Urban Air Market. 

With lunch from Souvla afterwards.

I also went and got my first mani pedi in over a year. Still with masks and plexiglas dividers, but I appreciate the precautions.

And last but not least, fruit tea from Wanpo in Palo Alto, and a craft room that doubles as an exercise room!

Such a full month, and a deceptive return to ‘normalcy,’ at least in some senses.

Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She compulsively documents and blogs all of her daily adventures, even in quarantine. Follow her on instagram and view more of her professional work at annawu.com.