That Damn Blue Dot

In case you didn't pick up on it from my previous two posts, Tiffany and I get lost a lot.

I'll take the blame here because I am totally and completely without a sense of direction. Like any. I am also very particular about the best way for me to overcome that deficiency in my brain. For example, I operate just fine with listed directions and a little bit less fine with a map like the kind on an actual page. Because I have an old flip phone, I don't have a built in GPS wherever I am. I look up how to get somewhere before I leave the apartment and I write it down the old fashioned way. If I'm in the passenger seat, I like to use the road atlas we keep in the car to trace our path into the unknown.

But I'm never in the passenger seat anymore, at least, not if we're going into the unknown. That's because Tiffany doesn't believe in atlases or sticky notes with right and left turns listed in pencil or pen. She believes, like a growing majority of the population, in the i-Phone.

"Which way, babe?" she used to ask.

"Umm, hold on, let me just look here... have we already passed that one exit I told you about earlier?... oh! Here we are, take exit 324," I'd say.

"I just passed exit 324," she'd say.

And then we'd get into a fight. Poor Tiffany's sister Melody experienced this once when we decided to treat her to an afternoon in wine country. I was navigating in the passenger seat, but I was not navigating quickly enough, so Tiffany tried to force the i-Phone on me. I hate the i-Phone. I can appreciate its genius, but, for some reason, its genius is not accessible to me.

"Just type in the address," Tiffany said that fateful day Melody swore never to ride in a car with us again.

Typing on the i-Phone takes me 45 minutes, never mind that I can type 1 million words per minute on a real computer.

"Okay, done," I said.

"Now, which way do we go?"

"Right," I said. "Keep going this way... hmmm. Okay. It looks like the blue dot is going the wrong direction."

"We are the blue dot, Rebecca!"

"Ok, well, we are going the wrong way then, so turn around!"

At which point, Melody whipped out her Blackberry, typed in the address and began back-seat navigating. But it was too late. The damage was done. My navigational career was over. Tiffany skidded to a stop on the gravel shoulder so we could switch seats.

Which was fine with me because I am an excellent driver.

Except when it comes to parallel parking.

Change I Can Believe In

"Stop!" I yelled to Tiffany on Sunday afternoon.

We were running up a steep, muddy hill in the middle of a park outside San Jose.

"What?" she asked. "Are you okay?"

"A dime!" I said, triumphantly.

"Oh my god," she said. "Only you could find a dime way out here in the middle of nowhere."

It was true--that we were in the middle of nowhere, I mean. We had set out to run a 3.5 mile loop, but, as usual, had gotten lost (more on that later, perhaps). By our estimation on the map I was carrying crumpled up in my fist, we were now committed to a good 7 mile loop, bare minimum, in order to get back to our car. But since that map was the same one we set out with in the wrong direction, we weren't hopeful.

Now that I'd seen the dime, I didn't care.

"It's not even dirty!" I said, stooping to rescue it in all its shininess from the mud.

I slipped it into my right shoe, shaking my foot so it settled flat underneath my arch. Nothing makes me happier than change.

See, Tiffany and I have this change-jar. And it's actually kind of famous among our friends and family members because it's not, in fact, a jar. It's a pretty big flower vase. And I obsess about putting change in it.

As in:

"Wait, I thought I had some change in my wallet," Tiffany will say.

"Oh, you did," I'll say. "It's in the vase now."

The reason for my obsession is that when Tiffany and I started the change-vase we agreed we would use it to fund our eventual move closer to our families. Every time I see a penny, I visualize a mile marker.

Shortly before we moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco (not at all closer to either of our families), we started a change-cup. It was just an after-thought really. We set it on the kitchen counter and started tossing our change in. But we also took change out for laundry and meters. Even still, the cup was worth $80 when we cashed it in for gas money for the move to San Francisco. This turned out to be spectacularly anti-climatic as gas prices were at all time record highs and we were hauling our car behind a U-Haul truck.

Money only goes one way in our change-vase in San Francisco. Well, that's not quite true. We still sometimes take out quarters for laundry, but they are tallied on a sticky note as an IOU.

Once our friend John bet me a ziplock bag of quarters that Tiffany and I would not upgrade any of our forms of technology by a certain date. He and his wife Meg were visiting from Boston, and John had brought the bag... actually, I can't remember why, maybe to pay tolls and meters in California? I had to explain my obsession with coins after I shoved him out of the way to pick a penny out of a puddle.

At the time, Tiffany and I both had flip phones, our ancient laptop was only online if it was plugged into a cable and when there was a show on TV that we wouldn't be around to watch, we slipped a tape into our VCR and pressed record. Of course we did not meet his deadline, and, when Tiffany finally bought an i-Phone, John informed me he'd given the bag of quarters to a homeless man.

Impossible to hold that against him, obviously.

But seriously, who travels across the country with a ziplock bag of quarters?

Lost in the Land of Plenty

On Sunday, I lost Tiffany in a Target store.

We love our Target trips. I'm not sure why this is, exactly. I think it has something to do with the size of the aisles. In the city, we shop in stores with teensy aisles so that by the time we're done shopping I have a horrible case of aisle-rage.

"What are you making that face for?" Tiffany will ask.

"That woman just ran over my toe with her cart!" I'll hiss.

I don't know why they even allow full-sized carts in city-sized stores. Everyone should be required to carry a basket, the way sensible people like us do, or to push a child-sized cart.

But in Target, where we go for things like gigantic packs of toilet paper and Irish Spring soap, the aisles are so big that even Tiffany and I get a cart. We push it around without a care in the world--except for the time I accidentally clipped her heel and she didn't speak to me the rest of the trip--traversing aisles we have no business going down.

"Someday we'll need this stuff," I said longingly on Sunday, as I rolled down the pet toy aisle.

"Oh god," Tiffany said, shoving me off the cart. "Don't get carried away."

Then she got carried away, wheeling us straight for home furnishings to lust after throw pillows.

Anyway. Back to the point--which can be hard for me to follow in a Target store as well--I lost Tiffany in the clothes racks.

We happen to be about the same height as the clothes racks. We are also exactly the same height as each other. (Actually, I'm about an eighth-inch taller than Tiffany even on flat hair days.) But since Tiffany reads my blog, we are exactly the same height. What happens is, once we disappear into the racks, we disappear from view entirely.

I turned around for only a second to consider a pair of rubber rain boots I didn't need, and, when I turned back, Tiffany was gone.

"Tiffany?" I called.

Nothing.

"Tiffany?" I stage-whispered, standing on my tiptoes.

A few taller people stared. I could tell they were considering whether I was young enough to be on my own, so I made a u-turn in the gigantic aisle and pushed our cart into the narrower spaces between the racks.

When you're small, you should wait for your parents to come find you. When you're 29 1/3 years old, feel free to go after your lost half.

I found Tiffany a few minutes later, just behind a sale sign and a shelf stacked high with t-shirts.

"Do I need any more t-shirts?" she asked, feverish.

The answer was no. But Target, my friends, is for yesses.

"I don't think you have the tangerine color," I said. "Go ahead, grab a few. I'll be staring at the flat screen TVs we're not ready to buy yet."

Ding (Almost)! Approaching 10,000 Hits!

Just a little update to let my multitudinous readers know that so far my blog posts have generated 9,842 hits. With 87 posts so far, that averages out to 113.13 hits per post, which I think we can round up to 114 since I know none of you would ever only read .13 of one of my posts.

Ding is the sound I imagine for my 10,000th hit, but, unfortunately, I don't know how to make my blog ding for you. And 10,000 is just a number, but it feels like a milestone so I thought I'd highlight it here and ask that if you are the person who tips me from 9,999 to 10,000, please leave me a comment and let me know! I have no prizes to offer, but I will be thankful for you and your click. (Please don't cheat, however--yes, Jessie, I'm talking to you--by clicking multiple times on a single post to up your chances and my numbers. I'd like all of my hits to be real hits.)

Also, if you haven't noticed you can search my blog with the search function on the right-hand side. It's kind of entertaining to type in random words and see if I've used them in a post.

And, for those of you who use feeds, the little orange icon under my "About this Blog" tab lets you subscribe to my posts in various "readers." I wish I could explain more about that, but I don't really know how it works. It does, though. I have gmail and when I clicked on it, I started receiving my own posts in my google reader, which I'd never used before. Since I write the posts, they aren't a real thrill for me, but such a thing could be just what you need!

Anyway, please keep reading. Follow me if you wish (I've been at 25 followers for a VERY LONG TIME) and share me with anyone you think might enjoy me.

Mr. Reaper

The other night I woke up and the Grim Reaper was crouching--scythe-less--outside our bedroom window.

Now, I knew this wasn't possible:

1) Our window sill is pretty narrow, so the Grim Reaper couldn't crouch on it.

2) The Grim Reaper isn't real.

Still, some play of light shining on some Grim Reaper-shaped object had cast a very Grim Reaper-esque silhouette, and I was scared.

"Babe," I whispered, lifting my head a fraction of an inch so as not to let the Reaper know I had seen him. "Tiffany, are you awake?"

She groaned, in deep sleep. I patted my night stand until I found my glasses and held them up backwards to my eyes to see our alarm clock.

3:42 a.m.

I looked back at the window. The Reaper was still there, shoulders hunched, wearing an overcoat.

I'm sure it's nothing, I said to myself, closing my eyes.

They opened again.

Although I don't believe in the Grim Reaper, there are lots of homeless men who wander around outside our apartment building in overcoats. I was dubious that any of them could fit on our window sill either, but still. Such things cannot be left to chance.

I sighed loudly, hoping to wake Tiffany, but she didn't move.

Slowly, I slid out from under the covers and crawled across the room to the window, which was open a few inches. Our blinds were drawn and closed completely. I cautiously stuck my hand through two of the blinds, where the Reaper's right hip was.

You will all be relieved to hear, I'm sure, that my hand encountered nothing but air.

My plan, if I had touched a right hip, was to push.

As it was, I stood, walked upright back to my side of the bed, slid back under the covers and went to sleep.

With All My Lemon Tart Heart

(For the record, I did not forget it was Valentine's Day, at least not in real life. I did, however, forget that my blog readers might be expecting a Valentine's Day-themed blog. So I now provide one.)

Tiffany and I don't really do Valentine's Day. Actually, now that I type that out, it isn't quite true. We used to do Valentine's Day a lot more than we do it now. The problem is, it comes just over a week after the anniversary of our first date, and, consequently, can get de-prioritized under the who-needs-two-fancy-occasions-so-close-together rationale.

But back to hearts. In the story of how Tiffany and I got together, she will always get credit for making sure we got together. But I get credit for the first official date: salsa dancing at the Brooklyn museum. That was tough to top, but just over a week later, for our first Valentine's Day, Tiffany topped it by precisely 85 stories when she took me to the 86th floor observatory of the Empire State Building and kissed me way up there in the sky.

For our second Valentine's Day, when I was still living in New York and Tiffany was still living in Boston, I took the $10 Chinatown-to-Chinatown bus to surprise her. It was a Tuesday night, and I had a class the next morning. I was feeling very romantic. I was also feeling ill. I had a terrible cold, and my plan backfired. I told Tiffany I had ordered her a heart-shaped icecream cake and that she had to pick it up at the ice cream shop down the street at 9 p.m. Well, of course, I was at the ice cream shop, but Tiffany forgot to pick up her cake, so I had to call her:

"Did you get your cake yet!?" I asked.

"Oh! I forgot. I was just sitting down to eat my popcorn for dinner," she said. (Before Tiffany and I moved in together, she used to eat snacks like popcorn for dinner. I get credit for teaching her popcorn is not a meal.)

"Well, why don't you go get it?!" I pressed.

Pause.

"Are you my cake?"

"Yes, I am, please hurry up, I'm freezing and I feel like sh*t," I said.

Anyway, this year for Valentine's, Tiffany and I are having dinner at home. I wanted to make a lemon tart as a special dessert, but I thought it would be too ambitious for a Monday night. We made it together last night after she got back from class. Or we tried to.

"Tart fail!" I screamed, when I opened the oven to check on it after its allotted baking time had passed. ( "___ fail" is a phrase I picked up from our good friend Gladys who had a "Veil Fail!" on her wedding day when she couldn't lift her veil from her face.)

Part of my tart shell pastry had fallen down in the oven and all the lemon filling had spilled into the pan. Even though Tiffany scooped it back up and re-built the pastry breach, it was pretty ugly. It did taste delicious though, which, in our kitchen, is all that really counts. Tonight, leftover ugly-lemon tart with the strawberries I forgot to serve in my panic last night. They're red, after all, and kind of heart-shaped.

We're only three stories up here in our little apartment, but the view's just fine when Tiffany walks through the door. Which she should any minute. Gotta go.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Some Tuesdays (Yes, I Know it's a Monday)

"I don't feel like cooking," I said to Tiffany last Tuesday night.

We had just walked in the door from work and were laying on our backs, feet-to-feet, in our hallway. Some Tuesdays are harder than others.

"Me neither," Tiffany said. "But I can do it. I'll make chicken."

Eventually, we managed to pick ourselves up off the floor and change into our pajamas.

In the kitchen, I kept Tiffany company and half-heartedly put away a few dishes while she cut the chicken up.

"Bring on the spices!" she cried, and I grabbed a few bottles. Garlic powder, oregano and pepper.

Tiffany sprinkled them generously and then turned to cut up some cauliflower. It was a very pale meal we were preparing. Her phone rang, and she went off to answer it and some e-mails for work. A few minutes later, when I had surrendered to the television, she put the chicken in the oven.

Later, I got up to take it out. I peeled the foil from the casserole dish and peered in. There was a little mountain of spices on the middle pieces. All the other chicken was naked.

"Babe," I called. "Did you mix the chicken and spices up?

Silence, then:

"Oops," she said, shuffling in to have a look. "Huh! I knew I forgot to do something!"

We burst out laughing, then did our best to salvage our meal by stirring the pieces all around and dumping them on a bed of lettuce with feta cheese and salsa. It was okay, but we had to make chocolate chip cookies later to compensate.

Like I said, some Tuesdays are harder than others.

Claims Adjusters, Avert Your Eyes!

We all make mistakes. If we're lucky, nobody yells at us about them.

"I did a bad thing today," Tiffany said when I walked in from work the other night.

I put down my bag, tossed my Tupperware from lunch into the sink and considered the options.

She might have finished all the cereal without my having had a bowl. Or the peanut butter, which I sometimes rely on for emergency PB&J sandwiches.

"But you can't get mad at me because I already feel terrible," she began again.

Hmmm. That sounded slightly more serious.

"Okay," I said. "What happened?"

"Well," she said. "I made myself eggs with spinach for breakfast this morning. Then I washed my dishes."

So far this all sounded great to me--healthy and clean.

"And then I left and came home a few hours later... and the burner was still on," she finished, pointing to our stovetop.

I blinked.

"Wow," I said.

"You said you wouldn't say anything!"

"I just said wow!" I said. "Okay. Well, I've left the oven on after dinner lots of times."

She nodded.

There were lots of things I wanted to say, but I had made a promise. And it's a good thing I kept it because the next day...

"I did a bad thing too," I said, coming in the door from a doctor's appointment.

I told her I had scooted to my appointment, locked my helmet under the scooter seat and gone inside. When I was finished, I got into the elevator to leave the office, rummaging through my bag for the scooter keys. But they weren't there. I found my house keys, my wallet, my sunglasses... no scooter keys. And then, as I came out of the office doors, I looked up and two men were staring at the scooter. While I watched, one of them gingerly reached down and pulled my keys out of the seat's lock. He handled them in that obvious way people do when they want everyone to know they are not stealing.

My jaw dropped. They looked up and saw me.

"We were just about to take these into the building's security," one of them said.

"Oh my god!" I said. "My girlfriend is going to kill me!"

Thankfully, the men believed the keys were mine. And, as you know, Tiffany did not kill me. In fact, she didn't even yell.

She said, "I've done that before too."

For Best Results, Let Rise Six Years

Lately, it seems like Tiffany loves me more and more every single... not so much day, as loaf of bread I make. It's clear to me now that the path to a person's heart really is through the kitchen, and I don't mean on the way to the microwave.

This is great news because I actually like cooking, plus I am secure in the knowledge that Tiffany will still love me on nights I just want to have a cardboard box full of pizza delivered to our door. I know this because when we started dating--six years and two days ago--she loved me when I served her a brick of cream cheese with soy sauce poured on top and called it an appetizer.

Anyway, when I have the time--and I have a lot of it on weekends now that she's in chemistry class--I cook. Well, mostly I bake. I try to put together one real meal a weekend, but breads are where it's at for me. There's something very reassuring about dough; it's so forgiving. Just when I think I've really screwed it up--as I try to peel it in all its stringy stickiness off my countertop--it totally responds to a little extra flour. Plus, I get to slam it around and push into it and roll it out and tear off bits to chew. It's the perfect therapy: mindless and all-consuming work at the same time-- just me, my measuring cups, a big bowl and lots of flour.

And with only a little effort, we get the smell of fresh baked bread AND the taste of fresh baked bread. You'll never hear so many "I love you's."

And what's not to love about that?

Lions and Bunnies and Bears... Oh My!

While Tiffany was studying quantum theory Saturday morning, I was scouring the shelves of a toy store looking for every stuffed rabbit I could find. I knelt on the floor, pushing aside bears and puppies and gorillas and penguins. Occasionally, I'd move an animal left or right and it would let out an indignant "squeak!" or "ruff!"

I wasn't looking for a stuffed animal that made noise, though. I wanted old-fashioned bunnies with floppy ears and pink noses--four of them to be exact. That's one for each of the four babies we owe a "welcome-to-the-world" gift. The bunny is half of one of our go-to infant gift sets. The other half is a copy of "Runaway Bunny," one of the books my mom used to read to me and my brother.

It's hard picking out a stuffed animal. I always want so badly for the one we pick to be "the one." You know, the one the kid never relinquishes as other contenders end up in the laundry, the bottom of the toy basket and, finally, Goodwill.

Tiffany and I each have a childhood favorite on our bed. Mine is Leo the Lion. My first-grade teacher and family friend gave him to me after I was a lion in our school nativity play (you are correct, there is no lion in the story of Jesus' birth, but apparently they needed extra parts). Leo's mane is matted from sleeping next to me over the years, and he has a reconstructed face. That's because when I went away to college--before I got the courage to take him with me to my dorm--my mom's new puppy Murfee ripped Leo's nose off and ate the stuffing inside. Afraid I wouldn't be able to survive without him, my mom recruited her next door neighbor to sew on a new face. The "donor baby"--now a mane, four legs and a tail--became one of Murfee's favorite toys, and Leo was like new, literally (Thanks, Pat!)

Tiffany has Bertha the Bear. At one point, Bertha had clothes, I'm told. But now she's naked, except for a faded red-checkered bow, which is fine because Leo is naked too. Bertha doesn't have a mouth anymore. The black thread that once formed her smile now hangs down from her nose like a single whisker.

Anyway, at the toy store, I was rushing because the scooter was parked in a tow-away zone. When I found a bunny, I smushed it under my arm and kept looking. I couldn't risk setting it aside for some toddler to snatch. I found six bunnies, but one was a puppet. I thought it might be scary, so I cast it aside. Another, a pink one for the only girl baby on our list, I loved until I realized her head was twisted around facing backward. Even after I figured out that her head and limbs could be rotated, I let her go. The possibility that she might go hours facing the opposite direction of her paws before an adult fixed her orientation freaked me out.

Eventually, I found my four (and no ticket on the scooter!). Hopefully, the store will restock soon because, if you can believe it, there are more babies on the way. While Tiffany and I are busy studying chemistry and writing blogs about random every day things, our friends are busy reproducing like... well... like rabbits.