Seriously playful: Amazing photographs of dogs playing underwater.

This Valentine's Day dessert is adorable, easy-to-make, and full of doughnutty deliciousness.

How to use your profile picture to your best advantage. (Hint: no more smartphone-in-the-mirror pics!)

Everyone's favorite flavor meets shakes, soda, cologne, and so much more. Yes, it's bacon.

The Life-Lifter: In her quest to have a baby, this would-be-expecting mother gets two—from unexpected sources.

Photo: Thinkstock

Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is a story of love found in that most romantic of places...no, not Paris...no, not an ocean beach at twilight...that's right, a toll booth.

I came across this sweet story after talking to a single friend who was lamenting how hard it was to find a good man. Maybe she's silly to be looking for love in predictable places like bars and online dating services. Maybe the key is not to be looking for love at all. Aspiring opera singer Sonya Baker certainly wasn't looking for anything but the way in to Manhattan when she met the love of her life.

According to this New York Post story, Baker was frequently making the drive into New York City for singing auditions when she "noticed a friendly toll collector at Exit 19 in Kingston with striking hazel eyes who was 'desperately cute.'" The tollbooth operator noticed her, too, and for several months they shared instants of friendly small talk. Read the whole article for the heart-melting story of how they managed to see each other more often, and the evolution of their flirtation into a full-scale romance. And know that now they are married, and living what sounds to be a bucolic existence in Kentucky. As Baker told the Post, “It shows you that as long as you are open, you can find people in all sorts of places."

Now if that doesn't warm your heart, I don't know what will.

Read More:
The Typo of Love
Why Finding Mr. Right Is So Rough

Photo: Thinkstock

While it's very rare to find someone who really, truly doesn't like fatty foods (the preference evolved to help our ancestors survived in leaner, pre-vending machine times), scientists have found that certain forms of the fat-loving gene make some people go crazy for the stuff. In a study recently published in the journal Obesity, food and nutrition researchers explain that those with a variation of the CD36 gene (that's about 21 percent of the population) tended to rate salad dressings as creamier, half-and-half as tastier, and cooking oil as more appealing. The study results may help explain why some people have a harder time sticking to a low-fat diet than to a low-carb diet, one of the researchers told Science Daily.

We like that it gives butter-lovers a bit of a break (it's not my willpower--it's my genes!) without suggesting that they completely throw in the towel on diets and healthy eating.

Every Monday, we're rounding up the things, small and big, that make us stop and think. Today, we're inspired by... "Once you put it out there, you can’t take it back, so think carefully before you use the Internet to broadcast your thoughts and feelings."
-Tommy Jordan, the dad who shot his teenage daughter's laptop in a video that immediately went viral.

America's Money Class with Suze Orman is wrapping up tonight, February 13, at 9/8c. That means it's almost time for Suze's final exam, which will take place tomorrow, February 14, starting at noon ET. Oh, and Suze's final exam is your shot at winning $50,000 (or $5,000 if you're one of the five runners up). How, you ask? If you score 80% or higher on the test, you can be in the running to win the money. Here's how to take the exam:

1) You can't take the test unless you're a member of Oprah.com. So, when you're done reading this post, head on over to the upper righthand corner of this page and click "join now."

2) When the test goes up online at noon tomorrow, you can take it at any time in the following 24 hours. Once you begin the test, you will have 15 minutes to complete it, and you won't be able to stop the timer, so make sure you won't be interrupted.

3) The test will contain 12 multiple choice questions and one 50-word essay question. If you get an 80% or higher on the test, you'll be under consideration for the big reward!

4) After the submission period ends, judges will review the essays of all the qualified applicants and pick the winner.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? But the competition is likely to be fierce, so start studying now by heading to Oprah.com/moneyclass, where you can review all the topics covered and catch up on anything you might have missed.

And, just in case any of this seems mystifying, check out these handy videos Suze made to explain the exam. She even gives away one of the answers in the last video. What a nice teacher!






For complete contest rules, click here.

Photo: Thinkstock

"The connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread. To people who lead a less-than-wired existence, that may seem like a bit of a 'duh,' but I spend so much interacting with people on the Web that I have become a little socially deficient." So says David Carr, writing for the New York Times' Media Decoder blog. In this lovely essay, Carr describes the dinner party we all wish we were invited to—a bunch of tech-savvy, hyper-informed journalists and academics eating and chatting and sharing home-baked bread— at which Carr learned that his friend, the super-smart Clay Shirkey, who studies the Internet's effects on society and relationships, had baked the delicious that was being served with dinner. This led to a conversation about where the recipe came from, and suddenly Carr felt he truly knew his friend for the first time. Which led him to meditate on the importance of "nutritive content" in our friendships. It's all well and good to "like" a friend's post on Facebook, but what ever happened to breaking bread with our friends?

As Carr describes his revelatory dinner party, "No one tweeted, no one texted, everyone talked. I’ve noticed more and more that when I go to gatherings, people are walking around in their own customized world defined by what is on their smartphone, not by who is sitting next to them at dinner. The serendipity of the offline world has been increasingly replaced by the nice, orderly online world where people only follow whom they want to and opt in to conversations that seem interesting."

We're busy, and as adults with spouses, partners, coworkers, and children to deal with, many of us forget to make time for our good, old-fashioned friendships. And yet we've read again and again that maintaining friendships are good for us in numerable ways. They may even help us live longer. Plus, Carr's is one of the most pleasant calls to action I've ever read: we should all remember to make time for our friends. Not FaceTime, but IRL time. Sharing nutrition, and the kind of rambling stories that don't make for good tweets. Breaking bread. Actual, real, delicious, beautiful (and here's a challenge: don't take an Instagram of it) bread.

Read More:
How social media can sustain relationships.
Making time for friends keeps you young.