Spring 2021 Weekend And A Year Of COVID Memories

Happy Spring 2021! It feels like we’ve been waiting for this to come forever, but also at the same time where oh where did the entire last year go? COVID has honestly made the past year feel like a black hole — so much craziness went down but the normalcy of daily life has also been just stuck in this weird limbo.

I thought now was an apt time to look back on the past crazy 1 year!

March 2020 was when my hospital cut capacity to the point where we worked every other day. It was when I gowned and gloved and N-95’ed up to examine the eyes of a nice old lady just because she had sneezed a couple times that morning before coming to the clinic. Nerves and fears were high at this point as NYC got hammered and the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency.

The first time I gowned up in full PPE (gloves weren’t on, yet) in the era of COVID.

This is my PATH train in what is normally the morning rush hour, suddenly turned eerily quiet.

April 2020 was when I helped out our affiliate hospital’s Emergency Department as part of the Palliative Care team, virtually connecting sick patients with their loved ones who weren’t allowed to come into the hospital to minimize exposure. It was also a (very healthy) time when Michael and I went jogging/biking about twice daily on our days off because there was nothing else to do.

May 2020 was when the streets of NYC filled with protests, after the murder of George Floyd.

June 2020 was when NYC essentially ran out of plywood because all the storefronts were being boarded up, as shop-owners scrambled to protect their businesses in the wake of protests and looters rampaging in the streets. I remember feeling a silent, heart-stilling awe on my way to work as I watched desperate shop-owners frantically covering their windows with anything they could find: if wood was unavailable, they used cardboard boxes, poster board, even brown paper bags to conceal their windows.

Multiple banks along the stretch of a few blocks had their windows and doors broken into.

July 2020 was when Michael got his first haircut in >5 months after salons started reopening…

August 2020 was when we took advantage of the weather and dined outdoors in more streeteries. Outdoor dining popped up EVERYWHERE, and some restaurants designed them super well! Hoboken, Jersey City, and Manhattan encouraged establishments to open up outdoor sidewalk cafe space and built parklets and streeteries.

Restaurants were encouraged to create “streeteries” and “parklets” to accommodate outdoor dining mandates.

Look at these adorable little COVID-era dining cottages!

September 2020 was when we ventured out to Maine! Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, and Mount Desert Island were SO FUN. I suppose I do have COVID to thank for putting Maine on everyone’s travel shortlist during these crazy times.

October 2020 was when we moved to our new apartment in Jersey City! It’s also when we car-camped (lol) in Atlantic City twice (again, lol). It’s also when we brewery-hopped around Bergen County and discovered our love of Brix City Brewing. Brix has since been the source of many miles on the car and many liquid carbs in my belly.

November 2020 is when we visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania!

December 2020 is when I saw real snow for the first time since moving to NY/NJ. And I LOVED IT. It’s also when I got my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine! And I was on call on Christmas Day, again.

January 2021 is when we really hit up Chinatown, hard. We wanted to support the restaurants and shops that had been struggling for so long and probably would unfortunately continue to fight an uphill battle for months to come. Thus, the cheung fun wars and egg tart wars were born. Probably not the smartest idea to choose the most frigid time of year to go on outdoor-only food crawls every weekend, but the cause (and noms) was worth it! We also visited Philadelphia this month!

February 2021 was when I finally experienced my first Nor’easter. Again, I LOVED IT. Snow is magical, and NYC is magical, and a snowy NYC is wondrous. I absolutely delighted in seeing the huge white flurries drift down from the sky. It was literally like in those cartoons with the big balls of snow falling down to blanket everything underneath! As much as it messes up daily commutes and is generally hazardous, yadda yadda, I adored it.

And here we are in March 2021! Just like that.

This first-weekend-of-Spring-2021, fittingly, had wonderfully happy weather. It was cool but not cold, sunny but not hot, and everyone was outside soaking it up. I have to say, I’m proud of NYC and Northeast NJ (at least the parts I frequented) for the continued commitment to mask-wearing. Even outside, people make conscious efforts to keep their masks up and it makes everyone feel a bit more comfortable. Thank you!

On a less cheery note: this weekend, our neighbors decided to flood their apartment (for the second time) and we had water literally coming up from underneath the floorboards in the dining room. Our super had to come up to investigate and it turns out the people living next-door had left for vacation for a week already but left their faucet dripping and also purposefully closed up the sink drain (…genius) … So that water had been building up for a while. Now, our wooden floors are warped and a little mountain range is forming smack dab in the middle of our dining area, where the tiles are pushing up against each other. Does anyone know of a way to flatten out those warped wooden tiles without just ripping them out? It was such a hassle cleaning up all the dust after the last time they were replaced!

No matter, it was Spring 2021 weekend and good times were still to be had. We visited two breweries and a distillery this weekend (Bull N Bear Brewery in downtown Summit, Twin Elephant Brewing in Chatham, and Corgi Distilling in Jersey City) and then took advantage of the gorgeous weather by biking up and down the riverfront boardwalk at Liberty State Park. Highly recommend for a good weather day, especially if you like kites!