On Monday mornings, I go to a different gym than my usual because I go to my piano lesson.

When I walk out of the men's locker room, I see this sign on the wall, and every time I see this girl she scares me. Nobody- nobody - should ever be that happy on an exercise bicycle.

There's a big to-do on ESPN about baseball players taking performance enhancing drugs - well, I don't know what drugs this youngs lady is on, but whatever recreational pharmaceuticals are involved, they must be performance enhancing; it looks like her performance is very, very enhanced indeed.

Ethel is, for the most part, a happy girl - she doesn't have much in the way of depressive spells (and, when Ethel isn't happy, it's the rest of us that are depressed - not her). But Ethel, even at her very happiest, has never looked like this.

Today is Valentine's Day, and we went to a noon meeting, and then went to lunch together - trying to get a table on Valentine's Night can be a very low ROI activity; besides, her father is here, and Silas is at home tonight as well, so we'll just stay home for the evening. She seems to be in a fairly good mood, and I'm grateful for that - but if I ever saw her grinning so big that it squeezed her eyes shut, I would assume that she'd finally found a man worthy of her, and I'd just move out.

I spend a lot of time at the gym, and I've never, ever seen anybody in a spinning class grinning like this - but wait a minute. I just realized that the spinning classes at the gym take place behind darkened glass; maybe, just maybe, there's something about this whole "spinning" thing that generates endorphins. Or - just perhaps - they hook up a DC generator on the tire of the exerbike to a wire that goes right into the pleasure centers of the brain - thus, the harder you spin, the bigger you grin.

Or maybe they put her on the bike and said "Just guess howmuch we're going to pay you for this photo shoot..." and then, when they gave her the amount, they clicked the camera.

My last theory - she's spinning at a Gin Blossoms concert.