For What It’s Worth

More effective than bribing the maitre d’The man pictured above, “Eddy”, was our fishing guide for a few days this week and Thursday night we invited Ed and his wife Paula to join us for a farewell dinner at Harvest, reputed to be Montauk’s best restaurant. Great idea but when we arrived we learned that [...]

Back to work (after the weekend)The tuna and shark population remains unchanged, despite our best efforts, but a few striped bass are on their way to becoming dinners. That’s Sean Mathews holding a bass (Sean’s the one wearing sunglasses). Need the best roofer in Fairfield County? Sean’s your man.

Gone Fishing
Back Friday – please check in then. Thanks!

So you’re thinking of buying a houseOkay, perhaps you aren’t, but maybe you should be. As I mention below, there are a lot of houses out there that have been on the market for a long time. Some of them have come down enough to represent decent values (for instance, a house on lower Lake [...]

A letter from NigeriaYou loved their emails – relative lost in horrible plane crash, secret fund that can only be removed from the country with your assistance, please send all private banking information most hastily – now there’s another chance to quintzupple your money in that wonderful country: real estate!. read the whole thing, of [...]

Does the Back Country get a pass in the Police Blotter?
Greenwich Divaposes this question today because, while the blog’s author knows of several instances of domestic abuse, with arrests, among her neighbors, she never sees the incidents reported in our fair paper. My experience has been the same; I know of drug busts and horrendous [...]

The World’s Smallest ViolinOur local daily reports that a young boy named Conor Holliday “has broken his ribs, wrist, ankle, shattered a bone in his left foot and fractured the Lisfranc joint in his foot – all in the name of the adrenaline rush that is skateboarding.” Mr. Holliday now complains that he dislikes paying [...]

They’re back!
Okay, they may not be as welcome as the swallows of Capistrano (when I Googled that term to check spelling I was asked, “did you mean swallows of cappuccino?” – er, no)) but buyers are finally stirring, poking around after the storm to see what’s still here. Before you sellers get your hopes up, [...]

Busted ones, anyway. Today’s NY Times has a good article on the housing bust in California. We’re not anything close to that bad here (in the area the Times writes about, 85% of the houses bought within the past three years are worth less than is owed on them) but there are lessons to be [...]

33 Crescent Road, Riverside
This new construction (my listing, so take comments with a grain of salt) sold last week for $3.175 million (asking price, $3.195). That should make the neighbors on Crescent happy because the builder, Greenwich Construction, has now sold two new houses on the street for more than $3 million – the other, [...]

$7.2 Million?I recently gave a price opinion for some property in central Greenwich. My advice was rejected, which is fine, but the figure I gave was considered too low, I suspect because there’s another new house nearby asking $7.2 million. Now, asking is not getting, but I’m pretty sure the seller of the house I [...]

Here’s what MADD should be mad aboutdrunk, high, naked driver crashes into parked car while masturbating.
Instead, they have their knickers in a knot over the proposal by a group of college presidents and drinking experts (how does one apply for the latter job?) to lower the drinking age back to 18.
Drunk driving is a [...]

Don’t tell my peers here in GreenwichBut things are bad all over, even in Bulgaria

And Martha’s Vineyard

Copy Editor!The Greenwich Time, fresh from laying off half its editorial staff, announces today that Cops Relish in Golder Verdict. It seems to me that one may relish a verdict but, unless you’re a hot dog, can you relish in anything? And if that’s the intended meaning, shouldn’t the headline have referred to the Goulden’s [...]

Havana, I hear you callingThe Wall Street Journal article I link to below mentions “Climate Crime Cards” that kids can use to spy on, and report environmental crimes committed by their parents, friends and relatives. I wondered if the editorialist was indulging in a bit of satirical stretching so I Googled the term and damned [...]

The New Yorker articleThe Greenwich Time has discovered Nick Paumgarten’s article on Greenwich. Paumgarten’s tone may be a bit pessimistic on the current state of our real estate market (could be because he spent too much time talking with me) but I think he’s right on, naturally. Leave it to our local paper, however, whose [...]

Our Environmental friends on the lunatic fringeI missed this opinion piece when it originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal but it’s still available on the web and it’s fun reading for people of all political persuasions. Well, perhaps not. Here’s a quote:
But now the environmental movement has morphed into the most authoritarian philosophy in [...]

Are newspapers next?Home Magazine shuts down

Parking ticket appealsIn my driving history I’ve probably accumulated 10 parking tickets over 39 years. Spread out over that time, that’s not bad (no, I’m not counting the tickets I got when I attended college in Boston, when, in those blessed pre-computer days, you could ignore the tickets and switch to new license plates on [...]

Soak the richA commentator below says, “Um, Chris, we live in Greenwich, CT – we ARE too rich and are [sic] fellow American [sic] absolutely need it.
A $2B relief package for Americans in financial crisis sounds like a good idea compared to $700B in appropriations for an unending war.”
I don’t know why these people feel [...]