Happy Birthday to my Blog!

While My Girlfriend Studies Chemistry is 1-year-old today. That's right, I've written 127 posts about my relationship with my girlfriend Tiffany and my family and, guess what, I've still got a relationship and a family to write about!

To celebrate, I thought I'd offer up a little quiz along with a regular post (immediately preceding this quiz). You can find the answers to each of the following questions among older posts (hint: try the search function in the top right of my blog) and submit your answers via comment, if you choose to participate. First person to answer all 20 questions correctly gets to pick my next blog post topic.

Good luck! And more importantly, please keep reading! Post me to your Facebook page and share me with your friends!

1) Where did Tiffany and I meet?

2) What derogatory term did Tiffany use to describe my state of residence when we first met?

3) What did I make for Tiffany on Valentine's Day this year?

4) What is my family's favorite game to play on Thanksgiving?

5) What song did my brother and I used to sing at the top of our lungs when we lived in the same state, same city and same house?

6) On what forms of transportation is my mom "like a six-year-old girl--gleeful and mischievous"?

7) What phallic vegetable did I use to make a most excellent lasagna last summer?

8) Am I a regular snowboarder or goofy?

9) What is my worst travel experience in life so far?

10) What was I drinking when I told Tiffany I was gay?

11) What part of my body did I get stuck underneath our scooter?

12) Did Tiffany and I send out a Christmas card picture last year?

13) What was my brother wearing when we tried to wrangle a bull?

14) Is there any part of putting together Ikea furniture that I am good at? If so, what?

15) Which of us fit into a pair of fabulous red shoes?

16) If Tiffany and I split the difference between my family's location and hers, where would we be living?

17) Why has Tiffany been studying chemistry?

18) What is the name of our most recent plant?

19) What did I used to get my brother for Christmas growing up?

20) What did I once use to sled down a dirt hill?

Quality vs. Quantity

Tiffany and I met Lily, the daughter of our good friends Meg and John, on Sunday, a couple of weeks before her 1st birthday and exactly six days after she took her first steps (Yes, the entire country celebrated and the sky exploded in color on the day Lily first put one foot in front of the other.).

We were late meeting her. Late on Sunday specifically, by a few hours, and late in general, by a few months. On both counts, this is because Tiffany and I have a tendency to over-commit (this should come as no surprise for a couple who on some weekend mornings can do laundry, make lunch for the week and get in a run all before breakfast).

On this trip back to New Hampshire and Boston, we had over-committed ourselves in stupendous fashion. We had allotted four hours to Meg, John and Lily. By the time we got to them, at the soccer game in Boston where Meg's sister was playing, we had about 37 minutes. We had come straight from a New Hampshire brunch with Tiffany's high school friends (only three hours for them, due to the hour travel time required to get Tiffany and me from one state to the other, which we spent in the car with Tiffany's cousins: transportation + quality time = uber efficient). We lost an hour in an unexpected dinner with Tiffany's sister and boyfriend who had flown in to surprise the family, and another hour en route to pick up our friend Jessie (one previous hour, over breakfast after Tiffany and I flew in on the red-eye: eating + quality time = uber efficient) because I was holding the iPhone.

When I called John to let him know we were finally on the way, he just laughed on the other end of the line.

"I'm so sorry!" I wailed.

There were 20 minutes left in the game when we arrived at the stadium. But by the time we got to the right entrance gate after heading off in the wrong direction, we lost another four minutes.

"Hurry!" I shrieked over my shoulder to Tiffany and Jessie as I sprinted off in my flip-flops.

With injury time and the minutes we spent lingering in the parking lot, we earned back some of that clock, but I doubt we made much impression on Lily. I coaxed a few smiles out of her by offering up my wallet, cell phone and sunglasses (the closest things I had to toys), but the one time I picked her up she squirmed and made an "I'm-about-to-cry-face" so I put her back down again quickly.

In the parking lot, we walked past our car to Meg and John's, and then they drove us back to ours.

"I'm not sure whether this makes you the best kind of friends or the worst," Meg said, of our brief encounter, as we hugged goodbye.

Then John offered me a handful of peanut M&Ms for our car ride home, and I felt assured of the answer.

Fireworks (and Family)

A few years ago, Tiffany's dad Gary started a new tradition. On the Saturday after the Fourth of July, he invites a few branches of his extended family up to his New Hampshire lake house for a cook out and a major fire works display sponsored by the lake homeowners' associations. Gary and his girlfriend Sherry (with the help of the rest of the family) do it up nice: grass fed beef and turkey portobello mushroom burgers, organic hot dogs, homemade desserts.

Until this year, Tiffany and I had only been able to make it once. In an unfortunate coincidence, Gary's tradition falls exactly two weekends before one of my family's biggest traditions in Mississippi. It's hard to fit in two cross-country traditions in a single summer month, and often Tiffany and I have to skip one or the other or both.

As the weekend of his party nears, Gary starts to fret about the weather. If it's cloudy, you can't really see the fireworks; if it rains, the whole display is pushed back a week meaning no one he loves is around to see it. Gary checks the radar for northern New Hampshire a few times a day and curses any clouds that creep into his patch of sky. This year, especially, he fretted:

"Well, girls, I have some bad news, there's a new state law banning fireworks of a certain size, so the show may be less grand than usual," he started.

That wasn't all. There was a chance of thunderstorms for Saturday and, worse, the chair of the lake's fireworks committee had announced he was stepping down after this year's display. The very future of the fireworks was iffy with a chance of non-existence.

Besides the fireworks, though, there's plenty to do. Like being thrown--flip-flops and all--into the lake. Sharing sandwiches out of a cooler. Getting up on water skis and promptly going back down again. Watching your girlfriend's cousin teach his whole family how to do the Dougie in the living room. Posing for a family picture so long your quads give out. Sneaking pieces of homemade spanakopita before it's officially put up for grabs.

And, yes, eventually, after all of that and more, there are the fireworks. We all troop outside to watch them, perched on Gary's back steps or sprawled on the damp grass. I held Tiffany's hand, and looked up so long my neck started to cramp. I like the ones that look like willow trees in the sky. The loud ones make me jump.

"Well, girls, hope you enjoyed the show," Gary said, as we packed our bags to go the next day. "And I hope there's something to see next year."

We fretted with him--for solidarity's sake--but we aren't very worried.

It's not like we fly across the country to see a bunch of colorful combustibles.

Ahhh, Su(nburn)mmer

It's that time of year when Tiffany and I really become an interracial couple. You know, summer. Or, as it happens in San Francisco, that one rare gorgeous weekend when it's warm enough to wear a tank top without shivering. Well, of course we wore tank tops. And, of course, my Greek/Peruvian-blooded girlfriend went from tan to tanner while I went from white to red. No, I'm serious. If I'd been wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of blue shorts today, people might have stopped to salute me.

This is the reaction Tiffany and I get when it's tank top season, however long that may be wherever we are:

"Oh my god, Tiffany, what a gorgeous tan! Oh! Hi, Rebecca... ouch! Someone got too much sun!"

When Tiffany and I hold hands at our whitest and brownest, respectively, our interlocked fingers look like some sort of public service advertisement for embracing diversity. Sometimes I think my whiteness actually helps her. I reflect the sun in her direction.

We went paddle-boarding on Sunday with a couple of friends who are as vanilla as me, and they had so much sun screen on we stuck to them when we hugged. They tag-teamed their whiteness--she covered his shaved head with SPF 85 (!!) and he took care of her bare shoulders. I think it would have been easier to protect my skin if I'd fallen in love with a girl with a compatible hue. Alas, my love is as brown as a berry. And I'm... ouch.

There's a Reason People Aren't Fish

One day last week, I swam 1/2 mile without stopping for the first time. But I didn't believe myself, so on Sunday, I made Tiffany go with me to the pool to make sure I hadn't counted wrong (thank God, I hadn't).

She took me to her pool. When we got there, we stopped on a platform overlooking the lanes so I could get the lay of the water. I didn't like what I saw. There were at least 20 lanes and all of them were full.

"What are these people doing?" I said. "Don't they have anything better to do on a Sunday?"

Tiffany raised her eyebrows but kindly didn't point out the obvious.

"What is that woman doing?" I asked, pointing my finger at one of the slow lanes.

"Sidestroke."

"At least I'm better than her."

Tiffany rolled her eyes.

"I'm not sharing a lane with any of these people," I said, "look at that woman! She looks like a turtle trying to flip over! Is that the backstroke? That man there isn't even swimming. He's floating. They all look like idiots."

Tiffany dragged me into the locker-room before I could berate the entire pool. When we came out in our flip-flops, the lanes were still full. Despite my glaring, no one got out. We had to settle for the right side and left side of two adjacent lanes for our new strategy, devised after my first triathlon debacle, in which Tiffany will set the pace and I will follow slightly behind her so she can see my bobbing head when she breathes to her right and I can see her kicking feet when I breathe to my left.

"I can't touch!" I cried, as I slipped into the water. Tiffany's pool is deeper than mine.

"You don't need to touch," she said, "you're swimming, remember?"

Then she looked at me. Took me in in all my glorious swim-capped goggled-ness, and burst out laughing.

"What?"

"I love you, but you look... like an idiot."

Date Night!

Tiffany and I went on a date to a movie on a school night last week. Of course, I'm not in school, and Tiffany is between classes right now, so technically "school night" is incorrect, but it's how we refer to Monday thru Thursday nights in a bit of nostalgia for the years when school nights were the worst thing ever. "Work night" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Work nights do, however, have the same effect on us. We rarely go out Monday thru Thursday. This is partly because we both get up before the garbage trucks and partly because we're mental octogenarians.

On this particular occasion, I was running late from work, so Tiffany picked me up on the scooter. She doesn't like to go out-out on the scooter because the helmet messes up her hair. Also, it's hard to look glamorous on a beat-up two-wheeler with a gigantic dent and a missing tail light and side-mirror. One of my presents for her most recent birthday was veto power on a trip for which I insist--in the name of efficiency and frugality-- on the scooter. So far, she hasn't used the coupon.

We were headed to the Castro for the opening night of the gay and lesbian film festival. As I'm sure you can imagine, the gay and lesbian film festival is a really big deal in San Francisco. One of Tiffany's clients gave us tickets (thank you!), and, when we got there, the neighborhood was hopping with the usual characters (If you remember, this is the neighborhood where we saw two, count-'em two penises one Sunday.). Parking would have been a disaster, but not on a scooter! We slid right into a space between two cars at meters and pranced into the theater, failing to notice the gigantic "No Parking" signs that had been taped to the meter poles.

When we came out two hours later, a gigantic party-supply truck was trying to back into what would have been a huge series of open metered-spots except for this beat-up scooter plopped right in the middle of its path.

"Why is our scooter all by itself?" Tiffany asked.

"Uh-oh," I said.

A crowd of gay men had gathered to watch the truck-scooter face-off unfold. It was obvious our scooter would lose.

"Wait!" we screamed, darting across the street. "It's ours! Wait!"

Thankfully, they did. The man directing the truck rolled his eyes as we fumbled to put on our helmets and find our keys.

"Go, go, go," I hissed to Tiffany.

"My earrings are stuck on the helmet!" she cried.

The gay men laughed at our panic.

"I told you it was lesbians," one called drily to another as they smoked outside a bar.

"Well, duh," Tiffany whispered to me as our scooter finally started. "Like gay men would drive an old thing like this."

Nanas Know Best

It's a good thing I stopped caring about winning when I walked off the soccer field for the last time in college.

On Saturday, I did my first triathlon. I didn't win. I wasn't last, either, but three of the people I beat were: 74-years-old, 9-years-old, and recovering from a kidney transplant. Literally, that's what the announcer said about each of them as they crossed the finish line.

The swim killed me. And, because Tiffany is my caring, wonderful, supportive girlfriend and would never abandon me in search of a medal, it killed her too. I didn't like not being able to see more than a few inches in front of me in the lake or having bodies splashing all around me. With no black line at the bottom of a pool to follow, I had to stop every few strokes and make sure I wasn't swimming in the total opposite direction.

I thought I would be fine. In fact, I was so confident as we waded into the lake (which at 70 degrees was warmer than the 50 degree air temperature) that I reassured a girl who looked more nervous than me.

"You'll be fine," I soothed before lowering my body into the muck and beginning my freestyle stroke in water so shallow I was pulling up algae.

In fact, she was fine. She left me in her wake, plodding along steadily while I alternated between freestyle, treading water, breast stroke and willing the lifeguards away from my vicinity. (Despite my glacial pace, I did not need to be rescued. But they were watching me closely.)

Anyway, I called my grandmother later that day to tell her I'd finished.

"Congratulations!" she cried into the phone.

"I didn't win, Nana," I said.

"But you finished!"

Aren't Nanas wonderful?