July in San Francisco

[Monterey, January 2011.]

San Francisco in July is an exercise in patience. This is my fifth summer here, and each year I am shocked anew — it’s drizzling? It’s freezing? It’s gray and depressing every damn day? In July??

Well, yes. For some reason, July 2011 is particularly bad. I can’t exactly say why: perhaps it’s the piles of work, the lack of a real vacation in nearly a year, an ongoing, nebulous, and thoroughly disheartening injury preventing me from logging my usual 30ish miles a week, the feeling like I am always, always behind in everything — whatever it is, I am trying desperately to hold on ’til Indian Summer and sun and free time. I can see it on the horizon, it’s just that it’s a bit hazy.

So I am sticking that photo up there to remind myself: there is so much beauty in this world if only we take a moment to remember, and to look for it. The fog may be omnipresent, but it also can be beautiful — all pearly mist and mysterious wisps. The cool summers here are, I chide myself, vastly preferable to the muggy heat of the East Coast (no air conditioning in the city most days! What a gift!). We are perched along the sea and so must resign ourselves to living with its moods and temperaments. It’s not so bad really.

Tonight I will cook, to console myself and ease into the weekend the best way I know how. I will (hopefully) sneak out of work a 1/2-hour early and go home to make pesto from scratch, poach salmon in lemon juice and white wine, bake a chocolate cake. The oven will be get a good workout, which pleases me for many reasons, not least of all because it will warm up the apartment. I will make thick, fudgey ganache and open a bottle of red wine. It’s Friday, after all, weather be damned. And one day soon, we will see the sun again.