OK, and these two I actually paid full price for because I really, really wanted them:

Jo Malone Orange Blossom Cologne
Annick Goutal Le Chevrefeuille EDT

Believe it or not, most of these were over half empty (except for Knowing and Liz Claiborne), attesting to the fact that I was a conscientious perfume user.

As I wandered through the aisles in a daze, jostled by the huge crowds and mesmerized by all the pretty bottles, some smiling, heavily made-up older Eastern-European woman sprayed me with Vera Wang's Sheer Veil perfume. Look, she said as she smelled my sprayed hand, it smells so beautiful on you - and it leaves a shimmer on the skin!

And perhaps that was all it took - some sweet-smelling sparkly stuff on my hand - to make me open the floodgates of 10 years of fragrance denial - or perhaps it was the addictive drugs in the spray that easily crossed the barrier of my skin to enter my bloodstream and brain to make me completely perfume insane.

Whatever it was, it made me ask my perfume-pusher to recommend another fragrance for me, something light and pretty. She led me to the Dolce & Gabbana counter and sprayed me with something called Light Blue. This is a very pretty fragrance she said, it's one of our bestsellers. I could see why - it was light and pretty, smelling vaguely apple-y.

But here's the thing. Even at my most crazy, I like to look (albeit obsessively) before I leap. I wanted to know more about these perfumes before I bought anything new. And where would I look? Why, the internet, of course! And therein lay my downfall, because I started reading the blogs of perfumistas much more obsessed than I. Light Blue? Forget it! The dull signature smell of silly teenage girls around the globe. Sheer Veil? Another uninspired floral. No, to be part of the cognoscenti, it was to be vintage scents and artisan perfumers all the way, no common department store brands need apply. I started making a list of the perfumes I needed to smell, the ones the blogs raved about, Guerlains from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vintage Carons, niche perfumers like L'Artisan and Serge Lutens.

Now I just needed to find them.

Every few years I get obsessed with something new. I was obsessed with dogs, I was obsessed with cats, I was obsessed with exercising and gardening (but not at the same time). Most recently, I was (and am) an obsessed birdwatcher.

Just so you know my scent history, in the past, I always wore perfume. Even as a little girl, I would steal spritzes of my mother's Coty's Muguet des Bois (lily of the valley) cologne and wear it to second grade. I still remember my classmate Reynaldo Vega telling me how nice I smelled and how happy that compliment made me. Positive reinforcement is key to developing habits, both good and bad, and fragrance was becoming a habit. (Ah, the power of men - very little ones included - to influence a woman's decisions!)

Anyway, I soon graduated to dousing myself with other fine drugstore brands. I remember going to the pharmacy after one of my confirmation classes when I was 11 and buying a bottle of Coty's Clover with my very own money. It was a big deal because I had to ask the old lady sourpuss clerk to get it out from the glass cabinet behind the cash register - scary!

And of course, since it was the 1970s, there was plenty of Love in the air: Love's Fresh Lemon, Love's Baby Soft, Love's Rain, and Love's Soft Musky Jasmine, which I ended up wearing throughout my teenage years. There was also 4711, everyone's favorite cheap cologne. (I like a fragrance that looks like you should drink it - the container resembles a fancy liquor bottle, with its little fake seal that you have to break open and everything. And, in the 18th and 19th centuries, you were actually encouraged to drink 4711 by its makers. Well, it's one way to empty a bottle of fragrance quickly.)

In my twenties and thirties, I upgraded to slightly more upscale brands. I wore Estee Lauder's Knowing and Beautiful (neither of which I like today), Dior's Diorissimo (my love affair with lily of the valley continued) and something called Privilege for Women by Parfums Privilege. There were also cheap little colognes picked up on sale from Bath & Body Works with names like Field of Flowers and Wood Lily and numerous bath sprays that matched my scented shower gels. I'm not sure if what I sprayed on myself actually smelled like "waterfresh breezes" or "wild blossoms," but I was willing to give them a try for the names alone.

In the late 1990s, I would wear Clinique's Happy and Tommy Hilfiger's Tommy Girl to work. I luckily got to smell Tommy Girl again just a few days ago when my almost-used-up bottle broke in the bathroom when I was looking for something in my medicine cabinet. Tommy Girl actually works pretty well as an bathroom air freshener, but I think I still prefer Open-Window-Fresh Swiffer as my exclusive floor fragrance. (And it's cheaper, too.)

But my boyfriend told me he didn't like perfume and I got out of the habit of wearing fragrance. So my scented world shrank and dwindled to the almost non-existent smell of the powder-fresh deodorant under my arms. Perhaps I had put too much stock in the opinions of men (very little ones included). But things were going to change!

But I'm being coy - I do know why I shop there, much as I hate it - you can save big money at Shmenards, as their putridly annoying jingle puts it. What I'm scared of is that some retail clerk pushed to the limit of banjo-music endurance will save big money on a rifle and blow everyone away.

But I put that fear behind me because I had to get some stuff for my garden and Shmenards had just sent me a brown paper grocery bag that gave me 15 percent off anything I could cram into it - up to twice its height.

The first time I used my discount bag, my young checkout clerk was nice. I had picked out four heavy rocks for my garden that didn't fill up the whole paper bag, and I had a big bag of cedar mulch in my cart. Obviously, I couldn't fit the mulch inside the brown paper sack, but she gave me the discount for the cedar anyway (saving me thirty cents). We laughed at how stupid the promotion was, and how time-consuming for the clerks.

The next day I went back to Shmenards to buy four more rocks, as well as a forty-pound bag of garden soil. Again, the stones fit somewhat awkwardly inside the bag, and actually tore it (the rocks are heavy and have pointy edges - not good playmates for brown paper bags). I also bought two bags of halloween candy on sale. But, and here's the crux of my tale, I didn't put the bags of candy inside the brown bag because it was all dusty with rock dust, and, duh, it was torn - the candy would fall out.

Anyway, I go the the nearest cash register with my torn bag of heavy rocks, my bag of soil, and the candy in my hand. I tell the young, pretty, if vapid-looking, teenaged cashier that I'd prefer not to put the candy in the torn bag, and could she please just ring up the discount. It's obvious that the bags of candy can fit easily inside. I'm not expecting any kind of discount for the huge bag of soil.

But my perky little pal doesn't believe me that the bags of candy can fit and doesn't want to give me the discount. Look, I say, the candy fits: I hold the little plastic bags inside the torn bag and take them out again. The bag is just torn, I said, and I don't want to put the candy in there, it'll drop out.

I need to call my superviser, she said. I can give you the discount for the rocks, she said, but I'm not sure I can give you the discount for the candy. Oh, God, I thought, this girl is so dumb.

So we wait for the superviser, who finally arrives, looking frazzled and tired. The girl explains that I don't have the candy in the bag, and what should she do? Should she give me the discount on the candy? The superviser looked at me, looked at the candy, and then looked at the bag. She obviously had a normal sense of spatial reasoning, because all she said was "yes" and quickly walked away. Perhaps my spatially-challenged young friend called her superviser over all day long to look at objects inside and outside brown paper bags. Thank God, the superviser was probably thinking as she hurried away, that the stupid bag sale only lasts a week.

And, no, of course I didn't get a discount on the soil (because even Stupid McStupid could see it wouldn't fit). But to add insult to injury, she took a big black marker and drew a big black X over the torn paper bag - I guess to prevent me from attempting any more size hocus-pocus with other Shmenards employees.

I'm probably being too hard on the girl. I'm sure she was aware that the candy would fit inside the bag, but maybe being an extreme straight arrow, she thought she'd get in trouble or something if she didn't do everything exactly by the book, even if her commonsense told her otherwise. And, I thought as I loaded up my car, being a goody two-shoes myself, that maybe I'd do the same thing. But as I put the shopping cart back in the corral, I thought, naah, part of being good means not being stupid.

Anyway, this is why I hate Shmenards.

After being badly miscast in Gangs of New York, Leonardo DiCaprio finally has a role he can sink his teeth into in The Aviator, playing young playboy-billionaire and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes. In contrast to Million Dollar Baby, the film is all glitz and color and flash, another bravura piece of big-scale movie making from Martin Scorsese in almost top form. For any film buff, the best part is the lush recreation of the golden age of Hollywood. There’s Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow, an entertaining cameo from Jude Law as Errol Flynn, and best of all, Cate Blanchett’s sly, on-the-edge-of-parody portrayal of Kate Hepburn. The first scene where the eccentric Hughes and the unconventional Hepburn meet, filmed in the slightly faded colors of a period newsreel, is funny and enchanting. The Aviator is an American tragedy that strangely ends decades before its well-known final act, but the strong performances and confident direction make this one of the best films of the year.

For silly, pure, and almost perfect light entertainment, with just a tad of gore, look no further than the British horror-comedy, Shaun of the Dead. A British parody of just about any zombie flick, the running gag is that Shaun, the slacker hero, doesn’t appear to notice that most of his neighbors are turning into zombies. The inventive screenplay is filled with laugh-out-loud jokes, for example, when Shaun and his roommate argue over the merits of the records they’re throwing at fast-approaching zombies. Even though the movie is fairly violent (characters are eaten by the living dead and plenty of zombies get whacked with Shaun’s weapon of choice, a cricket bat), the film remains light in touch, and the end is actually heart-warming. For lovers of the BBC comedy The Office, there’s a bonus in the casting of Lucy Davis as one of the zombie-fleeing team, and a brief cameo by Martin Freeman in one of the film’s funniest scenes.

I went up to Duluth, Minnesota over the weekend to see the invasion of Great Gray Owls.