I teach Spinning (i.e., group cycling) at the local Y. I’ve been told that I play good music during my classes–generally a mix of indie rock, retro and classic R&B, the occasional big band or jazz tune. About a year ago, a guy we’ll call R. started taking my class. He’s in his early 50s, a very kind person whom I especially like because he’ll take classes or do things that challenge him or take him out of his comfort zone. One day, I included the song “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” by Cake in a class. R. asked me afterward who did the song. He really liked the group. I used “Rock and Roll Lifestyle” in a class a few months later and he asked, “Is this Cake?” I said it was, and he said, “Great song.” So I made him a fan. Fast forward a few more months. He came into the Y early one morning and said, “Hey, can we go on a date?”

I said, “Sure, if your wife and my husband don’t mind.”

He replied that Cake was playing in Cleveland on May 17. I started jumping up and down and he actually jumped up and down one or twice (or at least bobbled happily). Neither of our spouses wanted to go, so last night we went on our merry way to see Cake at the Masonic Auditorium in downtown Cleveland. It was great. Music can bring unlikely people together in wonderful ways. Don’t you just love that?

What my husband and daughter gave me:
Breakfast, including a kitchen decorated with balloons
A card
A big bar of dark chocolate (72% cocoa–swoon)
Two hours to go biking

What I gave myself:
I made myself climb Sherman Road between Chagrin River Road and County Line Road in Gates Mills, OH. It’s four climbs over 1.1 miles–two short, steepish inclines, one long and steep climb (I’m told it’s a 16% grade), and a last, long, long climb that isn’t quite as steep. I climb it at least once a season to keep myself honest and always feel better for the effort.

What Mother Nature gave me:
A blue heron that stood sentry by our pond, checking out the lunch buffet. Watching one of those take off and gain enough altitude to clear the trees and houses makes you realize why some birds just said “Forget it” and went flightless.

Okay, what do you call this?

I call it a bathrobe or maybe just a robe. My husband calls it a housecoat. My understanding is that house coats are thin cottony things with flowers that my grandmother and Mrs. Loopner wore. They look like this:

It’s not a marriage breaker, but still. You’d think the guy would have brought his vocabulary into the 21st century (or at least the late 20th century). What do you call it?

I’m happy to say that my friend Stephanie Liscio and I have taken over the Cleveland Indians blog for the ESPN SweetSpot blog network. Our blog is called ItsPronouncedLajaway.com (in honor of legendary Cleveland player Nap Lajoie). We’ll be writing throughout the season on what’s going on with our favorite baseball team.

I fell in love with the Indians as a nine-year-old in 1977 and never looked back. My brother and I would play baseball or whiffle ball all day with the kids who lived behind us and then watch the Indians every night on TV. We didn’t get to go to many games as kids. We had a large family, not a lot of disposable income, and parents who weren’t all that interested in baseball, so feeding the baseball hunger was up to us. We watched it, read about it in the paper, collected our baseball cards, and dreamed about the Indians. I wanted to be the first woman to play in the major leagues. That dream was quelled when I was about 11 when I realized that I wasn’t a good enough ball player to be The One. I’m shopping a novel called Heart, Brains, and Balls to agents and small presses right now. It’s about The One, although an unlikely one. We’ll see what happens with that. In the meantime, I’ll still be writing here, on the baseball blog, and everywhere. Cheers.

Up at 5:30 a.m. to teach a spinning class, make breakfast, chores, the kid had a friend come over, more chores, errands. On the way to Target, the kid fell asleep in the car. I parked, locked the doors, and figured I’d hang out for a minute or two so she could sleep just a bit more. I woke up 20 minutes later.

Parents need more sleep.

We finally have a US birth certificate for our daughter. She was born in China and was legally adopted there more than four years ago. After a lot of procrastinating, we jumped through the hoops at the Probate Court to re-finalize the adoption here because her Chinese birth certificate is four pages long and, well, it’s in Chinese. The first time we got the birth certificate, the state listed the name incorrectly. Not hers. Mine. I didn’t change my name when we were married, so to pair my first name with my husband’s last name creates a person who doesn’t exist. I do exist, and I’m her mother. We called the Probate Court and they called the State Department of Health and they fixed it and we finally finally received the corrected birth certificate (two copies, thank you).

Having a US birth certificate will make it easier to register her for school, etc. etc. She’ll never be able to run for president because she wasn’t born in the United States, she was born in China. China isn’t part of the United States. Hawaii and 49 other states are part of the US. Hawaii became a state in 1959, so if you were born there in say, 1961, you can totally run for president. Totally.

I don’t mind that my kid will never be able to run for president. Those who have met her are convinced that my daughter is the Future Empress of the World. I mean, who the hell wants to be president when you’re going to be the Empress? Those of us born in the United States will just have to settle for being president and winning more votes than any other individual in American history.

Cinnamon made my life better this morning–twice. I added a bit to my instant hot chocolate and some to my oatmeal*. A dash of cinnamon is the quickest way to soup up instant cocoa, and of course, brown sugar and cinnamon in your oatmeal is a classic (see Pop Tarts, instant oatmeal, etc.).

According to the Epicentre Encyclopedia of Spices, Cinnamon has been in use for more than 2000 years. In ancient Egypt, it was used medicinally, to flavor beverages, and for embalming (yum!). Recent studies have shown that it may lower blood glucose, triglycerides and LDL cholesterol in people with Type 2 diabetes. It also reportedly helps flatulence, nausea, and indigestion. Plus it smells marvelous. So there you have it. Cinnamon can make you smell better, fart less, settle your stomach, lower your cholesterol, spice up your drinks, and preserve your dead body. What’s not to love?

*The breakfast of champions is not, as some would have you believe, a bowl of Wheaties with milk. It is a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of hot chocolate.

Do you even have one? I ask because the last typewriter factory in the world is closing down.

My introduction to the joy of typewriters came via my mother, who was a writer and editor (when she wasn’t busy raising six kids). She had a little Remington (I think it was a Remington). When I was little, I would turn the lid of her typewriter case over and sit in it, rocking back and forth, pretending it was a boat. She would write and I would sail, both of us in the happy haze of our imaginations. The first typewriter I ever owned was an old Royal that I bought for $5 at a garage sale. It was made of cast iron with huge keys that forced you to strike it like you meant it. You couldn’t write garbage on that sucker–your body wouldn’t allow the wasted energy.

I still have two. One is something I picked up at the AAPA auction last year, and one is a little Olympia that my mother bought me at the now-defunct Cleveland Typewriter back in 1985 when I started college. I deliberately chose a manual typewriter. When I got to college, most folks had electric typewriters and a few had very early computers (I have no idea what kind they were). But I wanted the manual.

I love the feel of a manual typewriter, of consciously striking the keys and seeing the imprint of the letter on paper. It signifies a commitment. Sitting here at my laptop, with a keyboard that requires no effort to depress each key and typing countless pixels doesn’t have the same feeling of permanence. It can (and does) encourage junk writing. At the same time, it makes revisions a breeze and saves reams of paper. When I used to write on a typewriter, more of my thinking and plotting went on in my head or on scraps of paper. Revisions meant you had to slow down and think and retype every damn word in order to ensure the manuscript was clean and perfect. I still often do revisions by hand–printing out a draft, reading the hard copy and making notes or adding/deleting things in the margins or on the back of the page. It’s a holdover habit. I don’t know if people who grew up writing on computers do that or not.

Although anyone could have seen this day coming (and I’m sure many people thought it already had), the loss of the last typewriter factory is, well, A Loss. It’s a loss for people who love words, for people who love simple yet beautiful mechanical objects, for people who still have a sense of romance surrounding the sound of a metal key slapping a sheet of paper.

Be kind to your typewriter. They aren’t making any more of them.

The husband and I were sitting in the living room reading last night; he on the sofa, me in the easy chair. Suddenly he jumps up and says, “I swear I just saw a mouse run under the sofa.” The living room opens to a hallway and the kitchen–there’s no door. He immediately starts moving furniture to block the entrance. He already had the kitchen table on its side and was moving it into place when he looks and me and says, “What are you doing? We have to block it in.”

I’m embarrassed to say that my first instinct when he said there was a mouse in the room was to pull my sock-clad feet off the floor and scan the room from the relative safety of the chair. I’ve always prided myself on not being squeamish. When our daughter split her forehead open (she was running in the house, slipped, and hit her head on the door frame–this is why mothers say don’t run in the house), I was the one who held her hand while the doctor stitched her back together and he was the one turning green and looking as though he was going to pass out. I once dislocated two fingers and reset them on my own. I’m an old school punk who used to slam dance to Suicidal Tendencies and the Pink Holes for crying out loud. Ironically, I was reading Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein, which examines contemporary girlie-girl culture. She reaches a lot of the same conclusions as I have (although with far better research). The kid is five and has drunk the Princess Kool-Aid. I tell her that most of the time, the princess just sits around waiting for some prince to come and rescue her and who wants that? And yet there I was, huddled on the chair, waiting for my handsome prince to catch the fucking mouse.

I felt shame for about four seconds, then hopped off my chair/pedestal and grabbed a kitchen chair to help block the entrance way to the living room. We tipped all the furniture to look underneath and didn’t see anything. Finally, behind the bookcase and lamp in the corner, he saw it. It was a baby field mouse, dark gray with a little pink tummy. It was about the size of two cotton balls. Honestly, it was freaking cute. We threw an old towel over it and he took it outside and released it. Realizing that no mouse gives birth to just one baby, we looked around. Mouse number two was on the stairs. I’m proud to say that I caught the second one, although I still gave the husband the privilege of taking it out and releasing it. He put a couple of traps upstairs in the crawl spaces that are conveniently located off my upstairs office. So I guess any other mouse in the house doesn’t get the free pass the first two did. (I must add that although my husband can frequently be grumpy, he is kind to animals and people working in the service industry, two behavior indicative of good character. So in that respect, maybe I did marry a prince.)

Dear little mice, please stay out of our house. I guarantee you it will be better for all of us.

The kid and I were driving to meet some friends for dinner last night. We were on Monticello Boulevard–a pretty main street through a residential area. Two lanes each direction. A voice pipes up from the back:
Kid: Three-five.
Me: What?
Kid: Three-five. That’s how fast you’re allowed to go here.
Me: What’s three-five?
Kid: Um, fifty-three?
Me Not quite–it’s 35. You say it in the order the numbers are written.
Kid: 35. That’s how fast you’re allowed to go here.
Me: Do you think I’m going faster than that? (I was actually going 40.)
Kid: No. I’m just reminding you.
Me: Thank you.

I slowed down.