Bay Area | February, 2023

February recap! We start with an in-person gathering at Lindsey’s home for the Office of Accountability.

A mini staycation up in Healdsburg for some wedding recon! We’ll be having a wine country wedding up here soon. This was not the final setup we decided on for our tablescape, but somewhat related!

Menu tasting with Chef Chris.

And checking out the villa we’ll be staying in for wedding weekend!

Epic vineyard views.

A quick stop by the SingleThread farm stand.

And a work session back in the hotel… please note the beginnings of my incredibly elaborate to-scale floorplan for our wedding. I named each and every one of the layers.

Then, drinks out at Little Saint, which is newly independent from SingleThread. The upstairs is now open as more of a bar-lounge, and they feature live music on Thursday nights. I actually ran into my old boss there! More on that down below. But dinner was just down the street at Guiso’s — a creative take on paella that was more like a gumbo.

Next, some shopping around town, treasure hunting at an antique shop.

Japanese beer glasses we’ve been ogling for ages, over at Forager. And baguettes from Troubador.

Ah yes, my old boss, whom I haven’t seen since I last worked for her 14 years ago, running an after school program in Oakland! Turns out I became a photographer, and Zoe became a flower farmer! She’s so close by in Healdsburg, she gave us a lovely tour of the farm, and we’ll be sourcing as many of our flowers as possible for the wedding day! Absoltuely loved this small-world, full-circle moment.

Cheers to a lovely time in Healdsburg, as always. Dinner at Spinster Sisters in Santa Rosa.

Back in San Francisco, it was fan fest at the Giants stadium! You can go around and line up for autographs at different booths. It’s luck of the draw which players or team affiliates you get, but we got pretty lucky with our special season ticketholder lines: legendary broadcaster Jon Miller and JD Davis, and most famous player still on the team Brandon Crawford, plus Austin Slater.

Then it was time to close this loop on this Duke-UNC game at the Duke bar in SF, Northstar. We watched Duke-UNC back in March  2020 as Covid was just beginning to descend upon us all (definitely not a good choice, it was so packed and everyone was screaming over each other). But here we are, 3 years later, watching the same game at the same bar.

Then it was time for a rainy race, the Kaiser Permanente race in Golden Gate park. Cassie, Michael+baby, and I did the 5k while Alex did the 10k. Funny enough it started pouring rain just as we were supposed to be lining up for the 5k. Here I am laughing under the cover of a tree… luckily it cleared up shortly afterwards so we didn’t have to run while completely being drenched.

Hooray! We did it!

Dim sum afterwards to celebrate.

Our first visit to the gigantic Amoeba in Haight-Ashbury. I enjoyed the extensive classical music selection.

But meanwhile, the library also has a nice selection of current pop records, for free! Thanks, tax dollars! I love the library.

My friend Margaret was in town for work! I got to catch her for dinner at Liholiho.

And then my friend Nancy invited me to the ballet! My first time back since pre-pandemic times.

Alex continued with his new climbing hobby, and we took Vince out to go try Pliny the Younger afterwards! This is an extremely popular, extremely limited release whereby people wait in line for 4 hours to try to get a taste of this special beer. Or storm their local establishments when they get their hands on one single keg to tap for the day. It usually sells out in under an hour. I don’t actually like beer,  but that just means an extra serving for Alex!

Next, en route to Tahoe, we stopped through Davis and Sacramento for a night. Here’s our first visit to Armadillo Music in Davis, accompanied by Alex’s college friends James & Steph and their little ones.

Taiwan Best Mart, and more record shops in Sac.

View from our hotel of the California State Capitol. DoCo = Downtown Commons.

We decided to be Sacramento Kings fans for a day! It was quite fun! Their stadium is pretty nice, with an impressive view straight into the arena as soon as you walk in from the outside. 

The Kings had not made the playoffs for 17 years, but this was a young and exciting team, and they made it to the playoffs this year! In fact, speaking from now, in May, they just lost to the Warriors in the first round. But they will be a team to watch for the years to come! And best of all, the Kings started a thing this year where if they win at home, the have a giant purple laser that they light on top of their stadium, with everyone chanting “LIGHT THE BEAM!”

They lit the beam! It was very fun! Haha, we’re back to being Warriors fans now. Back in the Bay, boba with my brother.

And being guests at a wedding for once! A lovely Chinese banquet for Steph and Ian.

Back at Amoeba. This is one of my favorite records.

We rode our bikes over here. 

And after wandering around for a while, we realized there was actually a record swap happening on the other side of the city, at Harmonic Brewing. So we hopped on our bikes and rode over just to catch the last 30 minutes of the sale! Alex found this record, from the same shop we were just visiting in the Haight, here as a pop-up. It’s titled San Francisco Giants but it’s actually a jazz record by local jazz musician Greg Errico, ft. Carlos Santana and others. It’s actually pretty great. Kicked off the “novelty records” section of our collection.

Treasure hunting x1000! Cassie and I visited the Oakland Museum’s White Elephant sale for the first time ever. Imagine an entire warehouse building, larger than costco, divided into impeccably-organized departments and subsections within subsections, all of amazing flea market finds. It’s the most well-organized and perfectly labeled rummage sale I’ve ever seen. Plus, they have folks repairing things on site. I will definitely be back next year.

I went home with 5 records, but this was regrettably not one of them. Cassie got another film camera to add to her collection.

We also saw this old mahjong set, but we passed because I think it was like $200.

But my biggest score of the day was a pile of SF Giants shirts! Alex and I want to make a t-shirt quilt out of Giants shirts so we can bring it to the freezing night games. But after scouring Goodwills for the better part of a year, I had only found 2 shirts total. I didn’t think I would find any at the White Elephant sale either, until I noticed that they had an entire section of t-shirts that were specifically for local sports teams, and within that, a whole section for the Giants! There were about 15 shirts there, of which I chose 9 to take home. I could suddenly be picky! I even passed on this Bumgarner shirt becuase I thought that might be too many Bumgarners staring at us from our quilt. Seriously, this is the most organized sale I’ve ever seen.

Last but not least, I talked Cassie into getting this adorable tea set. The cups look tiny but actually hold a reasonable amount of tea for drinking! We tested it back at her house.

Baby ate some berries!

Then it was time for mahjong club!

Dumplings + mahjong, complete with the little cheat sheet that Stephanie came prepared with. Love it.

And we got to taste Alex’s home brew for the first time! This was the IPA he made at my craft day birthday. And it was amazingly delicious! I don’t even like beer, and I thought it was pretty great. Will do again!

Yunhai & Frankie Gaw sightings at Liang’s Village in Cupertino, plus a visit to H-Mart in search of “soup soy sauce” for this month’s cookbook club… more on that below.

But first, Jeep school! Alex signed us up for this day-long Jeep Jamboree event, where they teach you how to do some off-road driving, and you get to try it out with guides in the Vehicular Recreation Area here in Hollister. Verrrry interesting.

First they talked to us inside a tent, and then they divided us into two driving groups, each of which followed a guide Jeep in a long caravan. We were the first car in the caravan after the guide, and luckily we made it through the whole course, no real problems!

Unfortunately, everyone else behind us got stuck in the mud, haha. It had been snowing and raining and all sorts of strange things, so the terrain was less than ideal. But our short Jeep and our mud tires did great!

After lunch, we went back out to a different part of the trail.

But actually most of the time was spent parked and waiting around in line.

Beautiful though! You can see rain over the hills. It was definitely interesting, seeing this whole Jeep subculture.

The next day, you could actually see snow-covered Santa Cruz Mountains. Not normal!

Then we all learned the word “graupel” in San Francisco, as we were blanketed in the dippin’ dots of winter precipitation. Tiny little snow pebbles everywhere!

Cleaning my new-old records, some of which were quite dirty, and one of which is probably unplayable, but it was only $1, so I can only feel so bad. I, of course, label every record and enter it into my spreadsheet too, haha. 

Behold, my Giants shirts collection! Plus more that we’re still wearing as shirts… I think we’ll see where we are by the end of this baseball season and decide if they’re all ready to be turned into a quilt.

More wedding preparations! I heard most of these wax seals ended up torn off the envelopes anyways, alas. But thank you to Do-Hee for doing all our wedding design work, including my requested AA monogram!

 

I also drew this pattern, a version of which got turned into the back of our invitations.

Circling back to cookbook club, this month’s theme was Korean American by Eric Kim!

Alex made LA-style kalbi, featuring Sprite and Asian pears in the overnight marinade.

I made galbitang, which I love!

Michael and Krishna decided to buy an entire palette of this wine (that’s 672 bottles of wine), sight unseen, at auction. Luckily, it’s pretty good Only 671 one more bottles to go!

And the day after cookbook club, I made my go-to favorite, Taiwanese beef noodle soup.

My Australia puzzle! My friend Tim got this for me in Sydney in early 2020, saying he would bring it to me the next time he visited the states. Well, 2023 was the next time, and true to his word, he brought it to America with him!! Above and beyond, thank you so much. 

And finally, #annatifftime to round out the month! Another Sydney, Australia, friend!

Phew, that was a full month. So grateful for all the gatherings and all the fun treasure hunts in February. On to the next!

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