Update: I didn’t realize, but the the trailer is already out. I could probably watch computer animated food gloriously falling out of the sky for two hours, but it looks like most of it will be a not-so-interesting backstory.

This seems to be a big year for classic children’s books turned into movies. That is, I just heard about one more aside from Where the Wild Things Are, so I’m calling it a trend.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was another one of my favorite books as a kid, and Sony Pictures is apparently releasing the computer animated movie this September. Unlike Wild Things, It looks like there isn’t an attempt to capture the fun visual style that makes the picture book so special, so that makes it less exiting. But my favorite Bill Hader of Saturday Night Live is in the cast, it seems, and that’s a big plus.

About a month ago John and I decided that it was a puzzle kind of Sunday, so we trekked out to FAO Schwarz and got the most fun-looking jigsaw puzzle they had to offer. They didn’t have a very wide selection.

The castle ended up giving us hours of entertainment—hours and hours more than we were expecting, and at some point it seemed more like work than entertainment. (The myriad foliage was way harder than the plain blue sky.)

Finally we finished it. We don’t have the wall space for a framed generic-looking puzzle, so our accomplishment sat in the middle of our living room floor for a week or so. Then we had guests coming over, but instead of taking it apart and shelving it, we did the obvious thing and carefully pushed the whole thing up against a wall in our bedroom.

That was weeks ago, and I finally gave it a good stepping on last night by accident.

As cool as this looks, it’s now time to put the puzzle away.

A lot of various strange smells have come and gone in the hallway of our apartment building (burnt dog food smell is a common occurrence, for some reason), but the strangest yet may be this morning’s extreme fake watermelon scent that reached me all the way into the far corner of our bedroom.

I just poked my head out the door, and it’s overwhelming. It’s like someone shampooed the carpet all the way down the hall with kids’ watermelon shampoo, or else Bubbleyum is holding a convention in the apartment next door. It’s insanely sweet and sickening and fake-watermelon-y. WHAT COULD BE CAUSING IT. This question will haunt me for the next few hours, or until the smell goes away.

I was summoned for jury duty recently (it involved waiting for a few hours and not getting my name called), so I had occasion to walk around the vicinity of New York’s City Hall. There are a surprising number of odd lots stores in the area. Why, I don’t know, but I stepped into one out of curiosity.

(I apologize for the bad photo quality; my camera phone was scratched a while back when it fell out of my purse during an airline check-in and skidded across the floor.)

This particular store had a generous supply of the usual: candles, small gadgets, Panasonic batteries, and a random assortment of packaged foods.

I thought these Spider Man piggy banks were interesting. Or rather, the sheer number of them was interesting. Are there that many people in this world who desire a Spider Man piggy bank?

Then, toward the back of this brightly-lit store was a section of… Adult DVD Movies?

I partly convinced myself that the “Adult” in “Adult DVD Movies” means “not G or PG-rated DVD movies,” but I still wasn’t going to get close enough to the giant pile to read the titles.