Remember the movie, "Contact?"

Remember how Matthew McConnaughey plays an earnest young minister, his frat-boy buffness supposedly mitigated by his oddly feminine pashima scarf/shawl? And Jodie Foster is sooooooo youngish Kate Hepburn, with the shaky voice and the intense gaze and the searing intelligence and the strong fragility?

You know what I love about this movie?

I bet you're thinking, "Oooooooh, deep thoughts! Mankind, the universe, are we ALONE?!?!?"

Nope, I'm thinking outerwear.

Jodie's lush green winter coat, to be exact. The one with the barely there shawl collar and the barely there flare at the skirt? The one that almost (but doesnt' quite) alleviate the severity of that god-awful bun hairstyle she wears? The one that says, "I could be worn by a Jane Austen heroine OR Jodie Foster as an aerospace scientist?

Yeah, well. What? I LIKE it. Shut up. SHUT UP!

"Pop-Up Pirate" for kids. Fun for the whole family, really! So simple, yet it bought me enough time to regain my sanity today. Plus, there is just something adorable about listening to your 3 year old try to talk like a pirate.

When Filene's merged with Macy's, the Filene's at the local mall ended up on the chopping block. They sold everything including the fixtures, and in the last week they were open, I wandered in and managed to score some luxury bed linens at over 80% off. A 500 thread count fitted sheet for the bed, a duvet cover and a couple of billion thread count sateen pillow shams. None of them matched, but they all went together, and MAN do they feel nice.

My New Purple Sneakers

I'm not sure why, but every time I glance at the tag that says "5000m" I think it says "Zoooom!"

My Special $2 Bill

In my jewelry box, there is a $2 dollar bill. If you look carefully, you'll see a thin red line across the top edge. When the current $2 bill first came out, in 1976, my grandfather had a bunch of them turned into a pad of bills. You know how a notepad has that red plastic coating stuff to hold all the pages together? Well, my grandpa used to carry around a pad of these bills in his pocket and peel them off in payment of a grandchild-friendly task. Could be a hug, could be "Bring Grandpa a drink." Then he would look at your hand, say how many fingers high to pour from the decanter in the bar into the highball glass, and off you'd go to fix Grandpa a drink. And when you brought it back to him, he'd peel off a $2 bill and hand it to you. Swear to God.