* Okay, full confession here, I used to love The Rosie O’Donnell Show.  When it first came on (in 1996), I had just started my home-based business and my older daughter was in daycare, where I didn’t pick her up until about 4:30 because if you didn’t make it there by 1 Pm or so, the kids napped and then liked to play outside afterwards. By about 3 Pm, however, I was finished with my daily client assignments and would settle in to go through paperwork and watch The Rosie O’Donnell Show (usually while getting dinner started).  Once my daughter started school, however, I had to wrap up work by around 2 Pm each day, so bye, bye Rosie, and then, of course, the show went off the air.  Years have passed, my kids have grown somehow from babies to teens, and now we’re back to a coming-home-time for both of them of around 4:30, for the first time in something like 11 years.  I find myself around 3 PM feeling as if my new life is resembling my old life a whole lot, and my goodness, I’ve missed it! And now, Rosie is coming back into the picture with a new show on OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s network, starting in October, and, well, could I be happier?

* I hear Rosie just bought a home in Chicago (where the show will be shot) in a neighborhood named Lake View.  The house is supposedly 6,000 square feet and cost a pretty penny.  Rosie has teens.  She has dogs.  She plays music.  She makes me laugh.  Not everyone is her fan, but somehow, through thick and thin, I still am.  Between you and me, I’d love her as my neighbor (especially if she really makes cakes like that). Curbed Chicago has these pictures listed, although they may or may not be of the house Rosie bought. (Here’s my “aha moment” of when I found the house my husband and I bought.)

* Rosie is taking over Oprah’s old studio, and she has apparently knocked down walls and changed things up to fit her style. Not unlike what many of us have done when we moved into new places, huh? (AP photo/M. Spencer Green). Rosie said in an interview that she retired at 40 but then realized she needed a plan for “act two.”  (See more “second stories” here.)

* The new show will feature real people talking about real issues.  Sounds like a typical day sitting around my kitchen table, and probably yours (I love this photo of a family stringing green beans fresh from the market).  Do you think Oprah will give us a show, too? (Find out more about your very own Oprah show, so to speak, here.)

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