Burning that Candle Until There are No Ends Left to Burn

"I think we may be efficient to the point of inefficiency," Tiffany said last Sunday morning.

I looked across the table at her. We were enjoying the exactly six minutes we'd left ourselves to eat breakfast. It was 10:39 a.m. We were leaving at 10:45 to meet friends at the Chief-Raiders football game.

"You may have a point," I said.

Already that morning we'd cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, picked up our broken down scooter, swung by the farmers' market for our veggies, stopped by the grocery store and made the breakfast we were eating (actually, we made the breakfast we were eating twice. Tiffany knocked the first skillet of breakfast off the stovetop while she was trying to make our lunch).

"Do you think other couples spend this much time preparing stuff to enjoy later?" I asked as I washed the dishes in our remaining 90 seconds. "Or, do most people procrastinate all that stuff so they can enjoy what they're doing right then?"

But there was no answer.

Tiffany didn't have time to answer. She was too busy dressing for the game while simultaneously laying out her clothes for the next day.

Free Sh*t!

Zero.

That's how many beers I drank at the Chiefs-Raiders game we went to with a couple of friends on Sunday.

10.

That's the number of Raiders souvenir beer cups I came home with.

Tiffany doesn't even let me drink out of plastic cups at home anymore (something about the leaching of hazardous chemicals) and still I can't pass them up. In fact, I have a problem passing up anything free.

When I was training for my first triathlon and was terrified I was going to drown, I gave up desserts for six weeks. But at the two baby-triathlons we did for practice, they gave away Costco muffins and brownies at the finish line. I took one of each and then went back for one of each three or four more times.

"Babe, we're going out to breakfast," Tiffany whispered as I took another bite of blueberry deliciousness.

"But this is free!" I grinned.

"Actually, we paid $65 to run this race."

"Good point," I said, turning on my heel to go back for more.

Anyway, I'm not going to keep all the Raiders cups for myself. I'm nothing if not generous with my free stuff, plus we already have a stack of Giants cups I don't get to use. I'm going to send a few of the new ones to unsuspecting family members. I'll just save one for our own cabinets so that I can open the door and think:

"I paid nothing for that perfectly good cup."

before reaching for one of the glasses we paid for.

A Little Bit Country...

I went looking for an outfit for my brother's rehearsal dinner one night last week. By myself. I'm a weak shopper, so this was brave of me.

In a stroke of rare luck, I found exactly what I wanted on a mannequin. I stopped in front of it and stared while shoppers pushed past and around me.

"Can I help you?" a salesman in a pair of skinny black jeans asked me.

"I need something a little bit country," I told him. "This is perfect."

He clapped his hands excitedly.

"Ooooh! Halloween!"

"No," I corrected, "my brother's wedding. In Texas."

He whisked me away to a dressing room, promising me the mannequin's ensemble--a flannel western-style shirt dress with a belt around the middle--as well as "some other fun stuff to try."

He brought me back a sleeveless denim dress that poofed out at the bottom.

"This is so chic," he said. "And it's marked down from $300..."

My eyes widened.

"Chic is not really the word for me," I said politely, pointing to my sneakers.*

"Just try it!

"Fine," I grumbled.

A couple of minutes later, I opened the dressing room and waved him over.

"See," I hissed. "Un-chic."

"I see," he said solemnly.

He handed me the mannequin outfit. With the boots I had at home, I thought it would be perfect.

I told him so.

"Fabulous!" he said, "With some great makeup..."

"I only really know how to do mascara."

His face fell.

"With some great jewelry..." he tried again.

"Yes!" I agreed. "Jewelry I can do.

We high-fived and both went home happy.

*Chic is totally not the word for me. In fact, when writing this post, I first wrote "sheek." It didn't look right, so I looked it up and one of the online definitions said "if you spell 'chic' this way, you most likely have no clue what 'chic' means..." Truer words were never written.

Thirty is the new Someday

I'm turning 30 in a few weeks. And I've decided I'll be making some changes when I do.

Tiffany and I are super thrifty. We're constantly saving our money for something-like a house or a coffee pot that starts automatically--in a distant future we call Someday. The trick is, we never get to Someday. Instead, we continually push the future further back. Sometimes it feels like we'll never get there and instead forever have money in savings but live in a one-bedroom apartment and make Tiffany's coffee manually after we get up.

Recently we decided we're ready to claim a piece of the future now: nice hotels.

Last month, we booked a spur of the moment trip to San Diego to see if we could find The Sun That Forgot San Francisco. We used a buy-one-get-one-free airline coupon and rented an economy car ("Is a gold car okay?" the woman behind the counter asked us. "Bling-Bling!" we exclaimed).

We settled on a reasonably priced room at a place with a pool and hot tub, just a quick walk from the beach.

Then, our future beckoned. Mostly to me.

"We don't really need a pool and hot tub," I said. "We'll never use it. How about this place? It's $30 bucks cheaper and we can use that money to rent surfboards."

I had doubts as soon we pulled into the parking lot. After we hand-cranked our gold car's windows up and manually locked all the doors, we came face-to-face with a leathery-looking man being ushered away from the "lobby" by staff. He had unkempt hair and smelled of pee.

"Is he a guest, do you think?" I whispered.

"Here we are!" Tiffany cried, throwing open our door to a reveal a room with peeling wall paper, a decrepit looking sofa and... some other stuff. After my first glance, I stopped registering what I saw and visualized my Happy Hotel Room, which smelled clean and had pillows without impressions from other people's heads.

I knew I had no right to complain since I had pushed for the cheaper room. Still...

"I'll pay for another place!" I blurted out. "I don't care how much it costs--I want to be able to walk barefoot in our room without cringing!"

Once I knew the future was brighter (not our immediate future but our second-night's future...what? 24-hour cancellation policy, people) and after I had piled all the moveable furniture against the door, I relaxed a little in our scary room.

"When I turn 30," I said shuffling to the bed in my flip-flops, "no more cheap hotels."

The rest of our trip was fantastic. We found the sun and the beach and pretty much didn't look for anything else.

Which brings me to the next piece of the future I'm ready to embrace:

"When I turn 30," I said to Tiffany on our second day as I piled my t-shirt and shorts on top of my face and stomach to cover my burns, "sunscreen."

Video 1

About two years ago, Tiffany and I touched something on one of our remotes and a little message called "Video 1" appeared in the top left corner of our television.

Try as we might, we could never again find the button that removed that message from the screen, so, since then, every television show or movie we have watched has included that visual. When something took place in the top left corner of the screen--think football or basketball scores and a surprising amount of background action in scripted shows--we couldn't see it.

We accepted this small inconvenience the same way we accept the fact that our TV's speakers make a subtle crackling sound. Our TV is a low priority, as is most technology--and I use that term loosely--we've invested in together. For illustrative purposes, I will share that when we don't want to miss a good show, we pull a dusty cassette tape off a shelf, insert it into our VCR and press record.

"Why does it say Video 1 on your TV?" my brother asked last week, when he came into town for a quick visit.

"I don't know," I said. "We can't figure it out."

"How long has it been like that?"

"It was like that the last time I was here," our family friend Rebecca contributed from the couch, ratting us out the same way she used to when we were children and left her out of a dangerous game. "That was eight or nine months ago."

"Give me your remote," Brandon said.

I handed him the only two we use--the ones for the cable box and the DVD/VCR player.

"No, the TV remote," he said.

"Ohhhhhh!" Tiffany and I looked at each other excitedly. "It's there, on top of the DVD player. We've never touched it!"

Brandon touched it. And, just like that, the Video 1 message disappeared.

I once was blind. But now I see my whole TV.

Ain't So Tough, Tough, Tough

When I was little, I used to want a broken arm. I didn't want to break my arm. I wanted it to be all of a sudden broken, without pain, so that I could look tough and have a cast that my friends could sign and oooh and ahhh over.

I thought I had gotten over this. I haven't.

Last weekend, as you may remember, Tiffany and I ran this race called the Tough Mudder. I wasn't nervous until a few days before.

I began to picture the myriad ways I might injure myself: I could drown in the ice-filled water, for god's sake; or scalp myself as I crawled under the barbed wire; or trip and be crushed under the weight of the log I was supposed to carry down the mountain.

Actually, what happened was, I got a splinter.

No, I'm serious.

I hurt my hand too--the man who hauled me over one of the walls on the obstacle course crushed my metacarpals in the process. But that injury was invisible.

Tiffany, on the uninjured hand, fell and scraped all the skin off one of her forearms. It looked so tough. And, apparently it hurt a lot too.

"Careful!" she warned me, any time I approached that part of her body. "It hurts a lot."

"I bet," I said sympathetically. "My hand hurts too. You can't see it, but it really hurts."

Everywhere we went after the race, people noticed Tiffany's scabbed-over arm.

"Wow, did you get that in the race?"

"Yeah."

"And did you run the race too, Rebecca?"

By that time, I had already taken the splinter out of my finger (which really hurt!), and there was no point in holding my invisibly-bruised hand out for them to see.

Like a good partner, Tiffany ooohed and ahhhed over my invisible injury the same way I did over her visible one. She took my hand and turned it over, held it under various lights and ran her fingers over the still-functioning veins. When we got home, after she poured hydrogen peroxide over her arm, she gave me a bag of frozen peas for my hand.

And then we sat on the couch and talked about how tough we were.

Putting Our Relationship to the Tough Mudder Test

"Just so you know," I told Tiffany as we pulled on our spandex at 5 a.m. on Sunday, "this is not just a race. It's a test of our relationship. If we can survive this..."

Tiffany rolled her eyes.

My brother is getting married next month. In between trying on our matching bridesmaids dresses and looking for shoes, Tiffany and I have been doing a lot of talking about how you know your one is the one.

Anyway, a few months ago, we signed up for this race called the Tough Mudder. It's a 12-mile run up and down the ski slopes of Tahoe during which you must complete a variety of obstacles, like: swimming through ice-filled water, carrying logs down narrow mountain paths, climbing a series of too-tall walls.

I was joking about the race being a test of our relationship. But it turns out it was, and we didn't start out well.

"You are the worst person to do something like this with," Tiffany said before we'd even gotten to the starting line.

I was in the middle of a tiny panic attack. Having been told--only moments before--that if we drowned in the mud or fell backwards down one of the too-tall walls, race staffers would identify our lifeless corpses by our wristbands, I realized I'd put the wrong one on.

"They're going to know who we are," Tiffany said, pointing to our foreheads, where our race numbers were scrawled with permanent marker.

I ignored her and sprinted back to the car to get the green band.

We started talking again after the swim through ice-filled water. I'm not sure if we had actually gotten over our anger or if we had such a severe case of brain freeze that we forgot about it, but it doesn't matter. When we emerged from the tank, I grabbed Tiffany in a bear-hug, ice cubes spilling out of my sports bra, and screamed:

"I love this! And you!"

"My crotch!" Tiffany responded. "I can't feel it!"

Things went beautifully until mile 11. Perched on the two-inch wide top of a 10-foot wall, it became clear I would not be able to pull Tiffany up without falling off myself. She had helped me, and now I was helpless to help her.

This is it, I thought to myself. We're doomed as a couple.

Just then, another participant came up behind us.

"Like a boost?" he called in a thick Scottish accent.

"Yes!" Tiffany cried. "I would love a boost!"

"She would!" I said, swallowing my pride. "Thank you!"

"Don't mind my hands," he said, proceeding to put them all over my girlfriend's lower region.

On the other side of the wall was another wall (this happens in real life sometimes too). Tiffany and I climbed the second wall on our own, hurling our bodies against it at full speed, pressing off mid-way with one foot and grabbing for the top.

Strangely, I did feel better about our relationship after the race even though we hadn't been able to complete it on our own.

Hey, sometimes you need a little boost.

And you should always take it. Even when it comes from a burly man in a kilt.