Recently I was at a conference and as I was heading back to my hotel room, a dear friend and colleague asked me if I had running shoes with me. A weird question, but I said yes, and she asked me if I wanted to head out with her to the batting cage for 30 minutes of swinging at balls. Oh, yes, please!

I ran to my hotel room and stripped out of my skirt, dress shoes, dress jacket and dug out a pair of leggings and a tank top, grabbed a pair of socks and my running shoes. I was so excited to do something even a little bit physical

I have not played baseball in over ten years. I don’t think I have even picked up a bat and glove at any point in the last ten years.

There were a couple of options for pitching speeds and balls. We chose a softball pitching at 40 km/hour. I spent my first 20 balls swinging at air. And I still felt a lot of joy just swinging the bat around. My friend was doing better, but was still only hitting about a third of the balls. After a couple of rounds, we decided to move down to the softball pitches at 20 km/hour. At this speed, we each were able to hit 75-85% of the balls.

It was such a joy to feel the power of my bat connecting with the ball and watching it fly away into the air. Several of my hits saw my ball fly over the top of the pitching area and across the batting cage area. I was mesmerized by watching the balls that were missed or hit, or fouled roll down the slightly sloped ball area and spin towards the automated pitching machine.

Equally entertaining were the failed pitches from the pitching machine. Sometimes the ball would spin around through the pitching machine and slam up against the roof of the pitching hut due to a pre-mature release of the ball. Other times the ball would be released a little too late and the ball would go slamming towards the ground halfway in between the pitching machine and the batting area.

For thirty minutes, it was a taste of childhood and a mouthful of stress released with each contact between the bat and the ball. Coming back to Ottawa, I was determined to find a batting cage and make this a date with myself. It took me a bit to find a place that had a pitching machine, where I didn’t need to go with anyone else to pitch to me. I finally found one in Carleton Place and headed out for 30 minutes of unlimited balls. Swing batter batter!

On a weekend morning, I headed out to my car and drove the 20 minutes from my home to the batting cages. On the day that I was there, there were not that many people there on a Sunday morning. I had pre-booked an appointment because I wanted to make sure that I would have the space available for me. The batting cage provides a batting helmet (or you could bring your own), and bats (also, you could bring your own). As with the day out with my friend, it took me a while to get my rhythm together of hitting the balls, but once I started connecting, I had a lot of fun swinging and hitting, swinging and missing. You could adjust the speed and angle of the balls being pitched and that made it easier for me, keeping the pitches at a 20 km/hour pitch and a gentle angle. This was not practice for a return to playing regular baseball – it’s been such a long time – but it felt joyous to play at baseball for a little while. Choose joy wherever possible.

I certainly could have played around with the bats and the balls for more than 30 minutes, but at the end of 30 minutes, I had enough of swinging the bat around. It felt a bit indulgent to have spent more time driving in my car to get to the batting cage, but there aren’t that many self-pitching batting cages around, which kind of surprised me. Although I could have ridden my bike out to Carleton Place – and I have before – but I wasn’t feeling that all that ambitious. In the end, 30 minutes was the right amount of time to spend with myself on this morning.

After hitting my fair share of balls into pop-ups, foul balls, swings and misses, balls that might have been home runs, and balls that would have gotten me on base, I was reading to wrap up my date with myself.

Cost – $39.55 (including taxes) for 30 minutes of unlimited balls, a helmet and a bat; cost of the gas to drive 40 minutes (wasn’t tracking)

Rate: 10/10 – this was a fun and joyful date with myself

https://www.marked.ca/batting-cage

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow– John Lennon

Early on when I started this self-dating adventure, I decided at one point that I wanted to send myself flowers, and in dreaming big, I wanted to be surprised to some extent when I received them. I hoped that in ordering them in advance, I would forget not only what I had ordered and possibly even when they would be delivered. At some point, I did order myself flowers to be delivered and I was delighted that when they were delivered, I had completely forgotten what I had ordered.

Flowers delight me, but I don’t often indulge in buying them for myself. As I write this post this evening, I am taken back to times in my life when flowers have been such a source of joy, and surprise. One of my past partners loved giving me flowers and loved it so much that he committed himself to providing flowers to me every month, and he did that from the beginning of our story until about 4 months before the end. Sometimes the flowers were fulsome bouquets filled with vibrant pinks and purples and leafy greens. Once the flower was a stained glass iris, with shades of rich purple glass and muted greens and it hung on the wall of our bedroom until after he moved out and then I took it down and smashed it against the patio stones in my backyard. That was a bad decision because I spent months finding shards of glass with my bare feet every time I walked outside and onto the patio.

I remembered the time that my biggest crush sent me flowers. She is married to the most lovely woman, and I still crush on her knowing that we will never cross that boundary with each other. She is a dear friend and a trusted colleague. One year when I learned that I had been successful in being offered a significant job that I really wanted, she sent me a bouquet of flowers, of roses pink and white and something else of a delicate shade of mauve. They arrived at my office with no note on them. For days I had no idea who had sent them to me, but I kept them on my office desk and they greeted me every morning with a silent acknowledgment that somebody had been thinking of me. One day she called to wish me congratulations on my new gig and asked me if I liked the flowers. She told me that she had sent them because I was someone who deserved to have flowers sent to me. Funny, I had forgotten all about that until I started writing tonight.

So, flowers are a date of sorts and are a kind of gift that has come to mean a whole variety of things in the gift giving realm. I wanted the surprise of flowers… I had not totally forgotten when they would be delivered, but in a fluke of not really paying attention to dates, I had ordered them to be delivered on the Friday before Mother’s Day. This ended up being a lovely treat for me, because while I am a mother, as a single mother I regularly downplayed any attention on Mother’s Day while my daughter was growing up. Her father did not assist her with planning anything for me for mother’s day when my daughter was younger and she would feel upset on the day of Mother’s day that she did not have a gift or anything special for me. I would tell her that the only thing I needed from her was a big hug and anything else was not required because her hugs were the only thing that mattered. As a result, celebrating Mother’s Day has always been low key and I just made myself okay with that.

Perhaps on a subconscious level, I knew that the weekend was Mother’s Day, but it was not front of mind when I ordered the flowers. I was delighted with the flowers when they arrived and even more so when I saw the note that I had included for myself – “I love you more and more each day. Me” What was really interesting to me is that the order somehow was doubled and I received a duplicate order of flowers. I was only charged once, so I am not sure how it got into the system twice. So, a double bouquet of rich vibrant spring flowers!

I am on this journey of deepening this love for myself and exploring what my needs and interests are, and how I want to spend my time. I am learning what activities really engage and inspire me. What things I might have ignored doing because they weren’t of interest to my past partners and now I am reminding myself of things that I enjoy doing, like art galleries and theatre.

And, so, I am sending myself flowers because I want flowers in my life. Perhaps this time I will order them a little further out or maybe ask my daughter to order them and pick a date so that I can be well and truly surprised.

Flower delivery – $78

Rating – 10/10

Because of a short vacation jaunt out to Alberta, it has been a couple of weeks since I took myself on a date. I had a busy week filled with long days and evening meetings prior to my time away, and I returned home to full week, of yet more long days and evening meetings.

One of the things that I have appreciated about this decision to date myself is that I am regularly looking for things to do that interest me. I scour the on-line blogs for ideas of things to do, scanning the event calendars of EventBrite and the various venues in Ottawa for things that inspire, intrigue and engage me as date-night possibilities. I am a planner by nature and having things booked in my schedule that might be a couple of days away, or a couple of weeks away provides me with a sense of anticipation of activities to look forward to.

This was the case as I returned to Ottawa on a late Tuesday afternoon. I had meetings booked late into the evening on the Wednesday and the early evening of the Thursday. However, several weeks earlier, I had purchased tickets to see a play entitled “Calpurnia” at the National Arts Centre. My Thursday evening meeting was something that had just been squeezed in prior to my vacation, but I was sure that I could still accommodate my date night plans. When Thursday night rolled around, I was tired and a part of me wanted to skip my plans for the theatre and head home. A part of me wanted a hot bath, cozy jammies and my bed. Another part of me had been in my head this morning encouraging me to put the effort into what I was going to wear for the day in anticipation of a date night with myself. I put on my favourite skirt – it is silky and mid-calf with a mix of neutral colours of black, beige and white. It goes with so many other colours, but I paired it with a simple black top and a colourful teal necklace made of shells. My favourite part of my outfit was my genuine Texas cowgirl boots that give me an extra spring in step.

The National Arts Centre (NAC) is about a 17 minute walk from my office downtown, so as my meeting was planned to run right up until the start of the play, I switched from participating on my computer to participating on my phone for the last twenty minutes as I walked to the NAC. Once I got moving towards the event, I felt really good about my decision to have planned for the theatre, and two that I had decided to leave my car at work and to walk for the evening.

The NAC has kept the restrictions in place for everyone to continue to wear masks, which continues to add a feeling of security for me. I had purchased tickets to a play entitled Calpurnia, by Audrey Dwyer. In short, it is a play that is named after the housekeeper Calpurnia in the book (and movie) To Kill A Mockingbird. The play has a small cast centring around an Afro-Caribbean family living in Toronto. Julie is a twenty-something woman living with her father (Lawrence),a judge, and her brother, Mark, a lawyer. Mark is struggling to live up to his father’s expectations and the play concerns an evening where Lawrence has invited one of his friends/colleagues (James) over to dinner in a plan to see Mark receive a partnership offer in James’s law firm. Also invited for dinner is Mark’s white girlfriend – and Julie’s friend – Christine. The family has a Filipina housekeeper Precy. Julie is a screen writer attempting to write a play focussing on Calpurnia, the maid in To Kill A Mockingbird and her brother accuses her of not being black enough, of not being able to relate enough to the reality of Calpurnia to write an effective play.

I won’t give away the rest of the plot, but it was an interesting exploration of the dynamics of race, economic class, white privilege, and the expectations that we have of our children. It was a thought provovoking and engaging play that kept me completely focussed on the events even as I was tired after a long day at work.

After the play ended, I made my way out to the street and spent some time walking around the edges of Confederation park beside the NAC, enjoying the night air. It was a cool and crisp evening and I felt relaxed and content with the evening. I made my way across the city streets, slowly walking back to me car. I felt this desire to stretch my evening out and not rush my return to my car. As I strolled the streets, I focussed on taking relaxed deep breaths and feeling fully present in the moment. By the time I reached my work building there was a feeling of deep relaxation.

The evening was uneventful as I arrived at my car and made my way home. I reflected that had I not bought these tickets weeks in advance, I would have likely left work that evening and headed home for a quite evening curled up in my bed or on my couch. That would have been fine, but I really want to challenge myself to use at least some of my time with more engaging activities. I enjoyed the evening and my time out at the theatre.

Cost of the date – $72

I rate this date – 9/10

I love to cook. I love looking at recipes and finding new things to try. Making food for the people in my life is absolutely one of my love languages. With my daughter, I am prone to make her favourites because she has certain textures and flavours that she loves. I will put the effort into making meals for other people, but for myself, I will often do what I call functional cooking or batch cooking. Functional cooking is the slapping something together at the end of the day and it could be anything from a peanut butter and jam sandwich to cooking a salmon filet and microwaving some broccoli. It gets me fed, but it does not have the love and care of when I am cooking for someone else. When I am dating someone, and well into the depths of the relationship, I love to cook for them. It relaxes me and helps me also feel loved to nurture someone else in this way. But I rarely put that extra effort into something special for myself.

Two days ago I was scrolling through Facebook in the middle of the afternoon while I was procrastinating on finalizing a report I was working on. In the midst of my feed popped up a recipe for Tuscan Butter Chicken. It was from one of those sites that has a whole story about the meal, how to cook it and the entertaining tidbits of minutia that the author thinks is important to set the ambiance for the dish. I didn’t care – I loved the picture of perfectly cooked pink shrimp nestled in a creamy sauce with pops of green and red (spinach and tomatoes) woven throughout. The story told me that there was nothing really Tuscan about the meal except that the flavour combination reminded them of time spent in Tuscany.

Middle of the workweek. Check. Time for a micro-date to spend some time making something a little more special looking and feeling. Double-check.

I wrapped up work half an hour early and headed a block down from my office to the grocery store with the recipe – and therefore my shopping list in hand – shrimp, garlic, fresh basil, baby spinach, grape tomatoes, fresh pasta. I added in some fresh spring asparagus as well because it looked so yummy and I love pasta brimming with veggies. Once home I put on my favourite dance tunes mix and started prepping my meal by sauteeing the shrimp and while those were cooking cleaning and chopping up the rest of the ingredients. I put a larger pot of water on the rear cooking element to get it boiling while I worked on the sauce.

Once the shrimp was cooked I was ready to transfer them to another bowl while I cooked the rest of the ingredients. Now, this is important, because the bowl was right beside me, on the front element of the stove. The pot with water on the rear element waiting to boil water. As I started to put the cooked shrimp into the waiting bowl, I realized that I had accidentally turned on the front element instead of the rear element and as the shrimp and some of their juices hit the very hot glass bowl, the whole thing exploded, covering my kitchen floor and counters with shards of glass. The lid that I had miraculously been holding over the sautee pan protected the rest of my shrimp, but the stove, my counters, my floor was covered in fragments of varying sizes of glass bits.

This did not feel very date-like!!! I turned the shrimp off, turned the other front element off, and actually turned on the proper element to get the water boiling. Then I found a pair of sandals and my broom and started the clean-up. I cleaned up as much as I could on the stovetop, but had to wait for the element to cool before I could clean up all the glass. With that taken care of, I went back to preparing my meal. Soon my kitchen began to smell the fragrant scents of melted butter and sauteed garlic. I added grape tomatoes, basil, asparagus bits, and heaps of baby spinach and after all, that sauteed down, I added freshly grated parmesan cheese and some heavy cream. It smelled so good!

By this time my pasta was cooked and I tossed it in with the shrimp, vegetables, and rich creamy sauce. I poured myself a glass of homemade sweet tea in a fancy wine glass and sat down to enjoy the dinner that was super simple, but definitely more effort than I had been putting into my meals lately.

I have decided that one of the criteria for me to consider something a date with myself was that I put a little extra effort into doing something for myself because this is not just about spending time with myself but finding ways to nurture myself a little bit more. At the end of my meal, I felt complete and indulged. I packed up my leftovers for other meals and finished cleaning up the stove from the earlier glass explosion.

Cost of my micro date – meal supplies, approximately $20

I rated this date an 10/10 (even with the bowl explosion)

This weekend’s dating adventure took me out to a talk sponsored by Nature Canada by Suzanne Simard, the author of Finding the Mother Tree. One of the ways that I have found to discover what might be happening in my community that would be good “date” material is by scrolling through the Eventbrite listings and seeing what is out there. This talk intrigued me because one of my book clubs had just finished reading “Finding the Mother Tree” and I had been listening to Suzanne Simard defend the book “Life in the City of Dirty Water” by Clayton Thomas-Muller on CBC Canada Reads. I partnered this event with another event that I found on Event Brite which was a fundraiser for the Ottawa Food Bank, with the Ottawa Guild of Potters – Great Bowls of Fire. The Great Bowls of Fire ticket allowed me to pick out a handcrafted and BEAUTIFUL bowl, as well as a multitude of choices of take-out soups and bread from so many different local restaurants.

This date allowed me to tap into a couple of things important to me. One, opportunities that are fundraisers for causes that are important to me are events that I am interested in. Being in a relationship often allowed me the opportunity to extend the invitation to my partner as an activity to do together. Two, opportunities to explore ideas that let me think about things differently stimulate my intellectual curiosity which is also an important part of my identity and something I look for in potential partners.

One of the things that I really appreciate about myself is that I do like a plan, and I particularly like when a plan comes together. Tonight was not that night. I had planned to attend the Great Bowls of Fire fundraiser, and then there was theoretically enough time to take my beautiful handcrafted bowl and fresh soup down to a park and sit and have my soup for my dinner before heading out to the evening talk. What I had not counted on is how long it would take at the Great Bowls of Fire – even though I arrived early – and that the takeaway soup would be cold. In hindsight, it makes sense that the soup would be available cold, I just had not planned for it. And due to COVID protocols, they were only allowing small numbers into each of the rooms at a time. It meant that things moved slowly. Since I had arrived early, I did have my pick of all the styles that were available.

I chose a beautiful blue bowl that had this light blue spiral on the inside of the bowl. It reminds me both of a shell and of the logo for community health centres. It also fits beautifully in my hands. After spending time perusing the handcrafted bowls, my bowl was carefully wrapped in plain newsprint paper to protect it for transport home and placed in a sturdy brown paper bag with handles. I was handed four tickets for soup sampling and headed up the flight of stairs to the second floor of the community centre for the soup options.

Now, I have to say that this event is a lovely event for a date night, or a get-together with friends. I greatly appreciated having four tickets for soup samples because there were so many to choose from, so I didn’t feel deprived that I wouldn’t be able to share soup with someone else, had there been someone else with me who might have been inclined to share. It took me a couple of circles around the room to finally land on my four samples – mushroom veloute, cheddar and broccoli, curried vegetable and roasted carrot and brie soup. There were several bread choices, but I wasn’t all that interested in the bread options having realized that the soup was in fact, not going to be my dinner tonight.

I was distracted for a bit by additional bowls that were for sale in the middle of the soup room and I allowed myself some time to wander around the table and pick up a second hand-crafted bowl for the evening. This bowl was also shades of blue, with a blue-flecked creamy interior. What I most loved about this bowl was its shape – it was quite deep for a soup bowl, with slight ridges alongside the outside of the bowl, plus a small little dimple on each side, about halfway up. It was the only one like it on the table, so I nabbed it.

What I thought might take me half an hour ended up taking me close to an hour and now I only had about an hour of time before the talk this evening. I was hungry and my cold soup was not going to cut it this evening. I headed back to my car and started driving in the direction of the church where the talk was going to be held. Parking was a challenge and so I ended up further down the street than I had planned. I ended up stopping at a little Thai restaurant and ordering pad thai as take-out and eating my dinner in my car, parked on the street about three blocks away from the church where the talk was being held.

I prefer to arrive early for things, and the talk was no exception. My daughter told me once that I think that I am on time when I am early, when I am on time, I am late and if I am actually late, I rather lose my shit. There is lots of truth in her observation. The flyer for the event suggested that people arrive starting at 6:15 pm so that there would be sufficient time to check everyone’s COVID vaccination status. I arrived shortly after 6:30 pm and found the first three rows of the church already filled with participants, masked, and chatting amongst themselves.

The even started right at 7 pm and Dr. Suzanne Simard was an engaging speaker. What I really enjoyed reading in Simard’s book was the revelation that trees are not solely a source of timber or pulp, but they have a complex and interdependent circle of life that not only connects tress to one another but also are social, cooperative creatures that are connected through their underground network and share a method of communicating and connecting communally in ways not all that different from our own. This level of connection happens across species and is essential for the bio-diversity of the forest. What is really amazing from her research is the discovery that the oldest trees in the forest are connected to over 80% of the vegetation in the forest area around them.

I describe myself as spiritual and not religious. For most of my life, I have believed that there is an energy that connects us all together and Simard’s book and talk reinforced some of that thinking. Somewhere along the line, I recall reading that Simard’s work formed the basis of the mythology of the Hometree and the sacred Tree of Souls in the movie Avatar. I can’t find the reference for it, but I can see the threads throughout the book.

After the talk there was an opportunity for people to ask questions, but I was done for the evening. After sitting for 90 minutes on church benches, my back and my butt were sore and uncomfortable. The beautiful thing about dating myself, is that there is no one else to negotiate with on my dates. I discretely and quietly stood up and walked to the back of the church and made my way out and into the quiet night. I walked back to my car, the sound of my cowgirl boots hitting the sidewalk as I strode back to the car.

What I appreciated about this date night was my willingness to adapt to changes in my dinner plans and to give myself full permission to be able to leave an event early when I just did not want to be there any more. It wasn’t that it was bad, I had just gotten what I wanted out of the evening.

This morning I woke up and felt a leap of joy and delight at finding my new handcrafted bowls sitting on the counter. I chose the deeper of the blue bowls – the one with all the ridges, speckled cream interior, and two little dimples on each side of the bowl. While I would only rate the date a 6/10, I really enjoyed taking the time to get ready to go out for the evening, to take delight in selecting a bowl for the evening, and listening to a conversation about a topic that I wanted to learn more about.

This was date number 4 and it was the date that I spent the most money on. My other dates were either free, or by donation, and at most I spent money on a latte. Tonight’s date cost me $55 for the Great Bowls of Fire and $25 for the Dr. Suzanne Simard talk. Spending money doesn’t necessarily make for a great date – it is honestly all about the intention and the energy that I bring to the events.