I'm infamous in my family for having what can most generously be described as a crappy memory.  What?  Oh right, memory.  My biggest weakness is a memory for names, followed closely by scheduled events and/or anything I've been asked to do more than five minutes ago.  Just this morning I was in a meeting and I was talking to someone who lives in a neighborhood near a bunch of people I know and we were trying to figure out who we both may be acquainted with.  I could easily pull first names, but last names were hard to come by, and these are people I've known for years.  Of course later while driving to the office I could remember all of them, but at crunch time they eluded me.

My one saving grace is I've always been able to remember faces, and usually in what context I know those faces.  I can be in the grocery store and see someone from my gym whom I've never spoken to and know that's where I recognize them from, and often after only seeing them one or two times.  This was borne out when I took the Cambridge Face Memory test and scored an 89% (average is 80%).  Nothing to write home about, but when compared to the rest of my memory I'll take it.

I will say this in my own defense: as far as I know I've never forgotten my anniversary.  It's the least I could do for the woman who has lived with my forgetting everything from buying food for the dogs (my excuse is that they're too fat anyway), to forgetting to pick up <fill in the blank here> on the way home from work on an almost daily basis.  She's a great gal.  Now if I could just remember her name…