The episode opens with Ted telling us just how desperate he is to find design work for Mosbius Designs that he's working on a restaurant shaped like a cowboy hat.  When he hits a bit of designer's block, Robin sends him outside to get a bagel, but through a series of three random events he finds himself at a street corner holding a yellow umbrella running into someone pivotal to the mother telling story.  So who is it?  First the three random events that led to the perfect timing!

Instead of going to his usual bagel place, Ted went the opposite direction because Robin got food poisoning from the usual spot.  She even vomited on air.

Ted stops to take a look at a magazine, delaying his trip a bit.  That's because Barney was on a quest to land his 200th woman (only 200?) and he wants it to be from his date with Russian supermodel, Petra.  Instead, when he hands his printed out list of women to Robin, she reveals he counted the same woman twice.  After desperately trying to nail every woman in the bar, he ends up sleeping with soe muscle bound chick from gym.  When he gets back, Robin reveals that he also repeated a number, so in fact, the muscle bound woman was his 200th.  Ted stopped at the magazine stand to look at a picture of the muscle bound woman in a fitness magazine.

Ted stops to give a homeless guy a dollar.  When Marshall discovers the print department at GNB, he goes a little crazy with printing out signs for everything until the guys stop him with an Intervention.  When Marshall has to give a presentation at work, he discovers all of his signs are gone!  The guys threw them out!  He makes an emergency phone call to Ted, who has to buy them off some homeless guy for $1 million dollars.  He agrees to pay $1 / day for 1 million days.  Hence the dollar he had to give the homeless guy.

At the end of the episode, it turns out the woman who taps him on the shoulder while he was holding the yellow umbrella was... Stella!?