Teresa, what an exciting package! It's great that Diana added to your pink transferware collection! That's a great haul from Trader Joe's. I love the bag, too. How will you use that walnut oil? I'd love to hear. Didn't someone else get some Orange Muscat Champagne vinegar? I think I need to check that out!! And that chocolate sounds devine! The kitchen towel is pretty. And that framed photograph is stunning! My new favorite! Enjoy all your goodies!! Diana...what a great package you put together! A lot of nice thought!

Well, they can change the eyes to blue with colored contact lenses and they can change the hair with dye, but they're going to need someone really tall. And fair-skinned, though I suppose they could change that with makeup, but it would be a pain to carry that throughout the series. Diana Gabaldon has said that Jamie Fraser is built like a basketball player, not a football player. Not that she'll probably get any input into casting. If you like "Outlander" and are interested in people's ideas of casting, go to Youtube and search on "Outlander casting." Tons of stuff, some of them very good. Though the consensus always seems to be that Jamie should be played by Gerard Butler, who is much too old for Jamie in the first couple books, though he *is* tall. I'll be interested to see how they'll handle the sex scenes, which are so amazingly written in the books. It wouldn't be "Outlander" if they made it into a family show, but it also wouldn't be "Outlander" if there were naked women running around in every scene.

Holly, that's too bad!! Thanks, Aprilflower! You must delurk more often! I liked the Outlander series, although I think I missed one or two. I've never played a game on the Kindle, but I picked up the Shuffled Row word game offered free. If I don't like it, it can just be removed from the K. I put The Outlander on the K too, but I don't have plans to re-read it.

Context is always important. I live in a neighborhood where there are graduate students and medical students and residents in and out, and furniture gets left of the street or rotates through used furniture places. Medical students and residents frequently come from medical or other professional families and have grown up in "decorated" houses and you will see two sorts of sofas left behind. One type was brand new when they moved in (seeing this more and more) and cheap enough to abandon or give away after a few years. The other is a very good quality, but old and very specifically upholstered sofa that may have started out in the LR or in a decorated basement or something that has been held onto because it's a good sofa. Maybe it even came from their grandparents' decorated house. Which looks worse sitting on the street or in a resale shop, divorced from its' setting? It's not going to be this one, which is a cheap, generic and inoffensive sofa that upon closer look is not really well made: It's going to be this one, which at some point was part of a fabulously and very specifically decorated room that was really committed to looking like something, regardless of whether it's your taste or not. I think it's similar to celebrities and models. Some celebrities and models are actually kind of ugly when they are not made up for work. Because beauty and ugliness are often just a few degrees apart, but they are usually at the other end of the spectrum from ordinary.