'How I Met Your Mother' needs to reveal some spoilers

Life is about the little things, it's almost entirely made up of them really. If I could, I'd draw up some sort of swell pie chart illustrating just how much life is made up of the little things. The chart would show that 99.5 percent of all things are the little things and only 0.5 percent of things are the big things. I don't have to make that chart though, tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" provided the perfect example.

I thought the episode was great (though a couple jokes proved inaccurate). From Robin's blowing chunks to Barney's sleeping with a muscle chick to Marshall's intervention (so happy they brought that back), we got to see just how Ted met up with Stella once more. We were also told that said meeting might actually bring the mother into play. My only big question though, and I'm hoping you can answer it, is what Ted was doing with the yellow umbrella. Surely we've been promised repeatedly that the mother has the yellow umbrella, not Ted. I know we've seen the yellow umbrella walking around New York before and not above Ted's head, I just know it.

Just like Ted though, let's backtrack...

I don't know about you, but I think that a restaurant shaped like a cowboy hat is kind of awesome, I might actually get a kick out eating in such a place (especially if they served me a massive rib-eye steak). The restaurant certainly sounded a whole lot better than putting cream cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel. You don't put cream cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel. Truth be told, you shouldn't even be eating a cinnamon raisin bagel, they're disgusting. They're even more disgusting if they're from Schlegel's Bagels, Robin got sick from a bagel at Schlegel's and heaved on her morning show (which has a clown as the weatherman) because of it. It led to the health department giving Schlegel's a "D" grade (if only New York did that, I've only ever seen those signs in L.A.).

Even if it had been accurate, I think that little storyline wouldn't have been as funny as Barney's trying to score Petra Petrova as his 200th conquest only to end up with the muscle girl from the gym. The thought of that gave me the willies. And, that storyline was definitely topped by Marshall's chart obsession, particularly the chart on how they were all going to like charts again very soon and how it wasn't going to be a "dead cat bounce." I do wish though that Lily had been there to smack a little bit of sense into her hubby. I'm convinced she would have set him straight.

In any case, the show did a really great job of building from each little story to the next to give us the climax of Ted meeting up with Stella again, but I don't know how I feel about that last bit. I thought they ended that story pretty well and to bring it back again now is a little odd. In my mind, Ted isn't going to be getting back together with Stella, but she's somehow going to lead him to meeting the mother -- perhaps in a non-circuitous way even. I want to see that happen, but if she's not the mother I don't like continued hints that she might be.

Spoilers, people, I want spoilers, and failing that, I want your thoughts. I want to know what the deal was with Stella being there tonight. Come on, give me your best guess.

Odds and ends:

• I'm sorry, I don't have a specific best quote tonight for you, let's just go with that whole Barney's terrible batting average with women thing. I thought it was the funniest moment but it's too long and chart-filled to write out here.
• FYI, YouTube doesn't have any real results for "robin scherbatsky morning show vomit."
• Here's the problem with the Steve Guttenberg Police Academy joke... Barney said that Guttenberg stopping after three films would have been horrific, and while it's true that they did seven movies, Guttenberg stopped being in them after four. Mahoney flew away in that balloon at the end of Citizens on Patrol and never returned (no, the animated series doesn't count, and that wasn't Guttenberg doing Mahoney anyway).

The TV and Film Guy's Reviews - Assignment Miami Beach.