I'll Take Manhattan

This weekend, Manager Dad and I wanted to give Spawn an end-of-summer last hurrah by planning a weekend activity that was more fun than our usual trip to Costco. I have a friend who lives in New York City who was going to be out of town, and she very nicely (although I am pretty sure I saw fear in her eyes) agreed to let us stay in her apartment.

With the free place to stay, I thought we could do a weekend on the (sort of) cheap, but I must have been smoking something because as anyone with half a brain cell can tell you, Manhattan is not known for its great bargains. Everything we wanted to eat, see, or do cost a minimum of eighteen dollars per person. We probably could have stayed home and bought a used Toyota Corolla for less money.

But if Mastercard is to be believed, you can't put a price on family memories, and I was determined to expose Spawn to some legendary New York attractions. So naturally, first on the list was to sample authentic regional cuisine at a Times Square tourist trap themed restaurant. According to Us Weekly, Brad and Angelina took all five hundred of their kids to a place called "Mars 2112," and they're all worldly and shit, so if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me. They start your 'experience' by stuffing you into a sort of elevator pod thing which simulates a rocket ride to outer space:

The Girl: (cackling) THIS is the coolest restaurant EVER.

The Boy: (terrified) I think we are really blasting off into space. (Grabs both of my ears and shouts directly into my nostrils). DON'T LEAVE ME ALONE ON MARS! I PROMISE TO BEHAVE FROM NOW ON!

The Girl: (turning green) Actually, I think I am going to throw up.


We got out of the simulator and The Boy spotted the costumed 'aliens', which made him completely unhinged, so he spent the entire meal in a state of panic, hiding under the table whenever any of the waitstaff even LOOKED in our general direction. We wound up throwing away most of Spawn's $15-a-plate dinners because the pasta was "too slimy" and the sauce "too chunky." After that, we gave up on restaurants and fed them a diet of bread, bottled water, and bananas, just like the monkeys at the Central Park Zoo.

We did a double-decker bus tour, although we had to de-bus after twenty minutes due to kid boredom and the absence of bathrooms. A pedicab bike tour through Central Park was a lot more successful, although it wasn't quite as much fun for the kid that was biking us around. Between the screeching of the bike's gears and the pained expression on his face, it was clear that he regretted offering to take all four of us in a cab built to safely carry MAYBE two people, and even then only if those two people were Kate Moss and Keira Knightley.

Hands down, Spawn's favorite part of the trip was shopping. We gave them each a $20 budget, which lasted about fifteen seconds at their "retailtainment" stores of choice: American Girl and the Pokemon section of the Nintendo store. Even I was excited about the Nintendo store because they had a stash of Wii Fits*, which I'd been dropping hints about as a potential birthday present ever since we got the evil Wii in the first place.

So thanks to the magic of capitalism, the trip was a smashing success. Spawn had so much fun that The Girl cried the entire train ride home because she didn't want to leave the city.

And now, back to reality, and the new school year, which starts Friday. I'd like to give a special middle finger shoutout to our local Board of Education. Thank you so very much for making the first day of school the DAY BEFORE the Labor Day holiday weekend.

*Warning: Do NOT subject yourself to the Wii Fit unless you have very high self esteem, and/or have been drinking. I took the "fit test" and despite the fact that I run 35 miles a week, it began taunting me, first criticizing my my Body Mass Index and then asking me if I trip and fall a lot because it thinks I am uncoordinated. But the kicker was when it loudly announced that my Wii Fit age as SIXTY ONE. I will NEVER hear the end of this from my family.

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I Swear To God, I Am Not Making This Up.

Step aside, Kum & Go. There's a NEW sheriff in town.

Sent in by alert fellow blogger reneedesigns at ButWhyMommy.

Nothing below the fold today, bloggy friends.

DIDN'T I TELL YOU NOT TO CLICK??? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF?

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It's Good To Be Queen

Manager Mom is back in the house!

My 2008 "It's Business Time" West Coast Road Trip is over, ending on a climactic half-day strategic partnership event at the mad glamorous Denver Airport Marriott Doubletree.

I was gone a LONG time. I missed five mornings and was supposed to miss six bedtimes. But thanks to an unexpected travel karma niblet, I got home four hours early - just in time to catch The Boy in the middle of his bath and get myself a wet naked hug.

"Manager Mom," you are probably not thinking to yourself, "How could your coach class travel plans POSSIBLY have gotten you home EARY?"

American Airlines gets zero credit for my triumphant return. What happened was that meeting had a lot of high-falutin biggywigs there, and one of them canceled their travel plans at the last-minute, which meant an open seat on the corporate jet.

So being the selfless team player that I am, I stepped up and volunteered to be The One. And while I could pretend that I felt bad for the coworkers that didn't get on the plane, what I really want to say is, OH HELLS YEAH, bitches, THAT is how Manager Mom likes to ROLL!

I have unilaterally decided that I am NEVER AGAIN going to be subject to the cramped seating, anger-filled atmosphere, and virulent flatulence that are the hallmarks of today's air travel. From here on out, I'm all about sinking into the sweet leather seats of the Gulfstream G-Whatevermodel, Cristal in my pimp cup, posse at the ready.

There's just one TEENSY problem. I am WAY too low-level be able to ride the jet on demand. My lack of status was made abundantly clear when I tried to eat a Caesar salad that I found in the galley, only to have another passenger yank it from my hands so that she could give it to someone who was actually important.

I hope I'll never have to travel again, because coach travel will be pretty hard to take after this.

P.S. can somebody PLEASE teach me how to use photoshop?

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And the "Company With The Smuttiest Sounding Name" award goes to...

I was in a meeting today where a guy from our sales group was presenting recommendations on how to improve our business performance within the convenience store channel, and when we got to a page with this company's logo on it, I completely lost it and started sniggering like a nine-year-old boy who gets his first glimpse of a real girl's boobies.

So I had to check out the website to make sure that this was a real company, not some subversive sales-team inside joke. And it totally is! The phallic gas nozzle and the kid with the shit-eating grin on his face just makes it even more entertaining. I mean, really. Is this a gas station website or a cautionary tale to frighten teenage girls into taking a vow of chastity?

They're located mostly in states ending in -kota or -braska, but that's no excuse. They have porn in those states too, don't they? Unless someone over there is working on a name change, I see limited growth potential in this company's future...

P.S.Don't click to read more. There's nothing there. I'm just too much of a moron to figure out how to get the code out of my post html.


DIDN'T I TELL YOU NOT TO CLICK??? HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF?

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Exploiting The Rich: Let The Music Play

Spring has finally gotten all sprungly.

I know this to be true because Manager Dad has officially flipped the Cool Weather/Warm Weather switch on his wardrobe, moving from the daily uniform of khaki pants and button-down dress shirts to khaki pants and short-sleeved polo shirts. It’s a whole new wardrobe management ballgame.

Aside from being a symbolic milestone, the switch has the practical effect of shifting five units per week from our local dry cleaner to our home-based Laundry Mountain. This adds up to approximately four extra loads over the course of the summer. While I don’t enjoy the additional labor, this does save about $50 a month on dry cleaning, leaving me all the more to indulge in my fondness for smokes, booze, and cheap hookers.

So while we were talking about saving money, I wanted to share another way I’ve found to entertain your family by taking advantage of the sweat labor of rich folk. (My first post, about the charms of Old Greenwich, can be enjoyed if you have a few extra moments in the bathroom by clicking here.)

The magical land of which I speak today is New Canaan, Connecticut (estimated median home value=$2,000,000). A town which is clearly not afraid to embrace the letter "a," New Canaan has a lively downtown business district filled with stores selling things we can’t afford to buy and restaurants we don’t want to remortgage our homes to eat in.

It’s also one of those metaphor towns that instantly evokes a social stereotype. You know what I mean: Detroit = "Disenfranchised Autoworkers." San Francisco = "Pot-smoking hippies." Long Island = "Joey Buttafuoco". For New Canaan, it’s “Self-Loathing Yuppies,” thanks to the only two major movies inspired by and filmed in the area: The Ice Storm and the Stepford Wives remake, starring Nicole “My Pants Are On Fire When I Claim Not To Have Had Cosmetic Procedures” Kidman. Because I’ve seen her in person, and I promise you, that woman has a Botox technician on speed dial.

But back to my point, which is that aside from an abundance of overindulged, plastic, self-pitying suburbanites (note to friends: not YOU, of course, Brooke, Lawrence, Mel, and Tom – I know you guys are still keepin’ it real), New Canaan also has Waveny Park. Waveny is a beautiful, spacious public area with a lovely old mansion. In the summer (starting on June 11th), they hold free concerts on Wednesday nights on the back porch of the house.

While they are technically for residents only, it is easy for unethical non-resident area freeloaders such as myself to horn in on the fun.

The acts are all has-beens (or more accurately, never-wases) and the music itself ranges from forgettable to puzzling. This year’s kickoff band, “The Bob Button Orchestra” bills itself as playing Big Band classics. I can’t confirm or deny this, but my main take-aways from last year’s show were this:

1) the average age of the band members is approximately 72

next) they like to dress like pirates, complete with puffy shirts and red satin sashes
and

c) despite their advanced age (or perhaps because of it) they like to swill Captain Morgans straight from the bottle between songs (possibly explaining the pirate getups).

It’s become a much-anticipated Wednesday summer family tradition for us. We get the kids, pick up a pizza, and relax with friends while enjoying the fresh air and the “music”. After dinner, the kids run around in the field, doing their best to contract Lyme disease by breaking the Guiness Book’s “Most Ticks Acquired Within a 1-Hour Span” world record.

The evening concludes with a visit to Waveny Mansion’s public toilets, (spotless, mind you, featuring abundant toilet paper, soap, AND hand lotion), where I pick off as many of the ticks that I can, bag them up to send to the state testing lab at $25 a pop, and stuff them into their pajamas so we can execute a swift bedtime once we get home.

The one downside of these concerts, aside from the fear of having our car towed, is an uncomfortably surreal feeling caused by looking around at your fellow concertgoers. They all look like they stepped directly out of a Tommy Hilfinger print ad. And the hordes of roving kids evokes a sort of reverse Children of the Corn, except instead of being filthy and creepily homicidal, they're all preternaturally well-mannered with blonde bowl haircuts and slight French accents, picked up from various summer au pairs.

But if you can suspend your class discomfort, come join us on any given Wednesday. We’ll be easy to spot: amidst a sea of natural-wood camp tables, fashionable umbrellas, carefully packed wicker picnic baskets, and Lilly Pulitzer cricket sweaters, you’ll find a tiny oasis anchored by an ancient, stained Mexican blanket, surrounded with a loud plastic cooler and cheap camp chairs with huge corporate logos (free from various work giveaways).

We’ll save you a slice of pizza, and I’ll even ask Bob to pour you a shot of Captain Morgan’s.

You can access the 2008 Waveny Park concert schedule by clicking here.

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An Open Letter To The Open Office

To my coworkers:

It's been a tough earnings season, and I recognize that praise has been in short supply around the office nowadays.

But I'm a people person. I'm all about positive reinforcement, in case you can't tell from my Successories posters. And I think I’ve found something we can get all Oprah about, and that's the fact that we've survived the new and exciting "space management" theory, designed to stuff more people into less square footage and foster the holy trinity of business “ations” – Innovation, Collaboration, and Humiliation. No matter that the practical result has been to make us all feel like a pack of rabid gerbils.

When they started remodeling the floor, I mourned the loss of my office (and my door, speakerphone, and the nice view of the sculpture garden). I listened with while you twentysomething Manhattanites yapped on about how “fun” and “social” the new floor design would be, and how it would encourage the “sharing of ideas.”

I'm getting used to not having a door, or any sort of personal space or privacy. I've purged my computer of my favorite Keanu Reeves screensaver. I've removed all of my office flair so that I don't mess up the prescribed color scheme. I've done pretty much everything that I was told to do to mark my personal space, short of peeing in all of the corners of my cube.

But we can always do better. And by 'we' I mean you. So in the can-do spirit of “continuous optimization,” there are a few pieces of advice that I'd like to share, in the hope that it will make MY life a little less stressful:

1) If I go into one of the private rooms to make a call, do NOT automatically assume that I have a job interview/messy divorce/gynecological problem.

2) On the other hand, if YOU get a call about YOUR job interview/messy divorce/gynecological problem, get at private room, stat. I don’t need to hear the gory details. Let’s preserve the magic by keeping some secrets from each other.

3) Yes, I can hear it when you blast gas. And I’ll be smelling it in ten seconds.

4) The first day you eat a tuna sandwich at your desk, it’s inconsiderate. On day two, it’s cruel. By day three it is considered an act of aggression under NATO rules of engagement. Cease and desist immediately or face complete retaliation, possibly involving some sort of curry.

5) While I understand that the presence of estrogen in my body means that I’m supposed to be a Grey’s Anatomy fan, I’m not. I don’t give two craps about McDreamy and McTrampy or whoever those characters are, so please, save your detailed blow-by-blow recap for email.

6) Pay the points and lock down that interest rate-your credit score is appalling, and you should be damn grateful that you’re getting any sort of loan with the market the way it is today.

7) He is totally cheating on you. Grow a pair and dump the jerk, already. Or at least drink a nice glass of shut the hell up instead of calling all your friends to whine about it.

8) Yes, so-and-so probably WILL get promoted before you do, if there is any justice in this world. She is smart and a hard worker. You are a blame-thrower with anger management issues and an obvious YouTube habit.

Thanks for letting me give my suggestions, and keep up the good work, Comrades of the Cubicle! Monday is fast approaching, and I’m looking forward to the 9:45 Coffee Area Weekend Drunken Hookup Report. Much more exciting than my weekends of soccer games and Costco trips.

Yours Truly,

Manager Mom

P.S. All situations depicted in this post are dramatic exaggerations. Except for the tuna fish eater - whoever you are, I am totally coming after you.

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Paging Fairfield County Bloggers!

The other day, I had my first "huh, never thought of that before" moment about having my blog. I was having breakfast with a friend and she was telling me a story when all of the sudden, she stopped suddenly and said, "Oh! PLEASE don't write about this in your blog!" I assured her that I would never betray her confidence, and even if I did, my blog has (how do I put this kindly without insulting myself?) specialized appeal.

So why bother blogging? Well, for someone who has to operate in the language of soul-sucking, mind-deadening business cliches the better part of each day, it's a nice change of pace and creative outlet. It's also a good way to keep family, potential identity thieves, and the random strangers that try to friend me on Facebook up to date about on what's going on in my head and my life.


And as a very cool and unexpected side benefit, I've had a few strangers read my stuff and leave comments and reactions, which has led me to uncover a rich vein of other interesting writers in the area. As their postings and occasional emails have lead me to believe, they're not only happening from a digital perspective but appear to have a high probability being fairly cool people in the real world.

So I thought, wouldn't it be super-duper swell to see how the other half lives, to meet some of these people and talk shop? After all, The Best Way To Have A Good Idea Is To Have Lots. And what better way to generate ideas than to gather in person in a location where they have half price cocktails?

So here's my idea: bloggers from the FC: Let's meet up sometime.

Now, just to be clear, I'm not inviting you over to my house - that's a little bit "To Catch A Predator" for my tastes. I was thinking somewhere glamorous, like the snack bar at the Norwalk Costco, or possibly the High Ridge Road Cosi if we were really feeling crazy.

The marketing person in me understands that to generate excitement for the event, we need a catchy name. Since I have limited capacity for further creative endeavors in my last remaining brain cell, I am appealing to Taken With A Grain Of Salt to apply her alliterative skills and come up with something. To be really intimidating, she might consider incorporating "2008" and/or the word "summit." I have found that in the corporate world, that's the best way to get people to attend your meetings, presuming you fail to get budget approval to serve food.

Next, the location. I had been thinking we could rent out Herbietown, but then I remembered that it's a figment of that guy's imagination. Therefore, my Plan B is to have the tuned-in Stamford Talk recommend a place in the area that might pass for what the kids call a "hotspot," preferably one where we have a high probabibility of seeing and being seen, and maybe even having someone email the Stamford Advocate to get us written up in the world's most boring gossip column.

If you don't want to bring your family, I'm sure that Fairfield County Child can give us some tips on where to find and exploit cheap child care labor.

For entertainment, we'll munch on Baby Food while Jeff Herz enlightens us on His View Of The World. and Indigo Sarah delivers random meta-stories about the Pope and The Canadian.

I'll partner with Amy Bow to lead a discussion on topics specific to working and/or extremely pregnant moms, ranging from MILFishness to maternity underwear.

And when the whole shindig is done, Mr. Stamford can post about how much the event sucked. That way, Kevin, who will no doubt blow off the event because he is Always Home And Uncool, can sleep easy knowing he didn't miss anything special.

There are plenty of other interesting people in the area, and if I left you off, don't take it personally. I just ran out of clever shoutout gimmicks. If I left you/your blog out, leave a comment with some big ups for yourself, so we can check you out.

And as for the event itself, it would be delightful for any and all that want to attend: fellow bloggers, occasional readers, player haters, prior stalkers. We will do our best to be inclusive and bore anyone who shows up.

So... I'll throw out a date. Friday the 13th. (In June). Happy Hour. Location TBD. Any takers?

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My Mom Went To London, And All I Got Was This Lousy Post

I’m currently on an overseas business trip, and since I had a Friday meeting, I put in a requisition for a weekend layover with Manager Dad. It was promptly authorized because a) he’s a really, really good guy; and #2, he had been granted a similar waiver about a year and a half ago when he had to go to Paris on a weekend which happened to coincide with my 36th birthday.

So I've been here since Thursday afternoon. I’ve had some quality alone time, defined as "time not spent cooking, picking up family detritus, or laundering clothing."

But as delighted as I am to hang out with my own self, I miss everyone. The youngsters get angry with me when I travel and don’t want to participate in the perfunctory dinnertime phone calls home. So I try desperately to engage them in conversation as they breathe heavily into the receiver. (The Girl ended our conversation today with “I’ll talk to you when you get home, mommy…I’m giving the phone back to your husband.”)

And because I had the bright idea of taking a red-eye over in order to maximize my time here, the jetlag is starting to get the better of me. I am so exhausted that I'm having Jacob's Ladderesque hallucinations; physically, I’m starting to resemble Estelle Getty on a crack bender.

But I've been having a fantastic, rejuvenating trip. I've taken tons of photographs, frightened scores of shoe salesmen with my horrifyingly ugly, not-yet-pedicured, mangled runner's toes, and generally stopped at whatever places caught my eye. I'm an art fanatic so I made a point of hitting Tate Modern and a few other contemporary art museums featuring images that would be considered hard-core pornography were they not displayed in a building designed by a distinguished architect.

And since I cannot force my beloved spawn to eat at any restaurant that doesn’t include the word “pancake” somewhere in its name, I took the opportunity to try new cuisines- Indian food and Dim Sum in Chinatown. Now, I’ve eaten plenty of Chinese food in my day (after all, I am American) but never dim sum. I'll definitely repeat the Indian food but dim sum is a delicacy that I fully intend to deprive myself of in the future. I’m no linguist, but based on today's meal, I would guess that ‘dim sum’ is Cantonese for “fried dumpling filled with miscellaneous ground up kitchen leftovers.”

I am also preparing to break my strict 'no-bringing-home-presents-after-a-business trip' policy. I implemented this after witnessing the way a former boss was treated by his children when he forgot to bring them a gift after a day trip. But in this case, I have been gone for a long time, and the guilt machine is running on a double shift.

Plus, we have been working hard to brainwash The Boy into becoming a fan of English Premier league soccer, and I found a logoed wallet from Arsenal, which is his favorite team. (He doesn’t have any money but he has an extensive collection of my hotel room keycards that he likes to carry around.) So I had to preserve family Feng Shui by making a complimentary purchase for The Girl, and Harrod’s had some miniature British licensed character fuzzy animal set, so all should be well.

But hands down, the best part of the weekend: I was wandering through Sainsburys grocery store. (I am a horrible cook, but I love to grocery shop - must either be guilt remnants from my Catholic upbringing, or good old-fashioned masochism) when I decided to buy a single-serve bottle of wine to keep me company in my hotel room. And I got carded! With no apparent irony! By a female cashier, who was wearing a wedding ring!

Just think… if live in a world where THAT could happen, maybe we CAN reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and solve global warming. Maybe the Buffalo Bills WILL win the Super Bowl in the same year the Cubs win the World Series! Maybe we will see Obama & Clinton running on a joint ticket!

Or maybe, just maybe, I could bring home some dim sum, and get the family to take a bite from a deep-fried mystery dumpling.

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Meet Me At Mygatt

Many things annoy me. But the top of the triangle of my Mom's Heirarchy of Irritation would have to be crap. Stuff. Knicknacks. Trinkets. Items. Collectibles. Things that come into my house through backpacks, bags, UPS deliveries, or clutched in little fists. Things that find a resting place somewhere highly visible and extremely inconvenient, where they dig themselves in with the tenacity of a disgraced politician attempting to cling to power.

I don't think anybody else in my family nobody notices or cares about this phenomenon except for me. I once left a pair of underwear in the living room (don't trouble yourself wondering how they got there in the first place, or whose they were) for THREE DAYS just to see if anyone else would notice and perhaps by some miracle pick them up and put them in the laundry hamper.

If it was not already blazingly obvious, I will tell you that the little pair remained crumpled forlornly on the floor next to the coffee table the entire time.

Although we are a typical family of four, I have become convinced that we make an atypical amount of garbage. Aside from the four humans living in the house, I believe we have an invisible Clutter Gnome that sprinkles random toys, broken pencils, newspapers, scraps of scribbled-on paper, and stray Cheerios all over the house, just to drive me batty.

Not too long ago, I spent an afternoon with some strange, yet strangely lovely people called "Freegans", who have inspired me to try to live a more neutral-impact lifestyle. So I have created the Mantra of Mess in accordance to the The Karma Of Crap: for each that comes in, one must go. Since we somehow accumulate approximately fourteen hundred new items each and every day, even our enormous, city-issued waste of my taxpayer dollars, garbage bin cannot handle the load.

So when the pile of stuff in our mudroom grows to a kitten-swallowing size of alarming proportions, I take matters into my well-manicured hands: I load up the minivan and head down to the Katrina Mygatt Recycling center.

I don't know who Ms. Mygatt was, or why she deserved to have a dump named after her. But I'm slightly envious because the dump is a rockin' Stamford hotspot.

I had visions of a smelly, grime-laden place overrun with flies and staffed by ancient, toothless, leather-skinned old men. Now granted, there are SOME flies, and SOME smell, and just a wee bit of mystery mush on the ground. But overall, it's relatively clean and well organized, featuring a surprisingly egalitarian and cosmopolitan mix of patrons. And Mr. Toothless is actually a pretty decent guy once you get to know him.

You hear languages ranging from English to Spanish to Creole. You see construction workers, gardeners, and other laborers hauling in scrap metal and yard waste. You see soccer dads in their Toyota Priuses dropping off year-old Nokias, no longer needed now that they got their new Apple iPhones.

You see Ugg-clad, blonde-helmet-coiffed, Lincoln Navigator-driving moms dumping loads of Land of Nod and Pottery Barn Kids catalogs. You see high schoolers furtively dropping off boxes filled with underagedly-drunk empty beer bottles (which are promptly snapped back up for deposit redemption purposes by the duct-tape bike-riding guy that shouts incomprehensible things at you when you're at the High Ridge Starbucks or sometimes the A&P). And you'll see me, freestyling unique strings of expletives after I smack my head on the open hatch of the minivan trying to dig all of the cardboard boxes out of the cargo area.

Since I am always in need of a few environmental offsets, I go to the dump whenever I can. I usually hit the Mygatt after a leisurely morning at the Stop and Shop, or sometimes as a way to psych myself up for that modern-day survival of the fittest expedition known as "Shopping Costco on a Saturday".

As far as my total carbon footprint, I probably waste more in gas driving to and from the dump than if I just waited for the monthly curbside pickup, but hey, we all gotta honor the earth in our own special way.

Besides, Mr. Toothless looks forward to my visit. I think he likes my furry Uggs.

For more info on the Katrina Mygatt center, click here.

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Easy, Cheap, & Fun - That’s How We Roll In the OG

I just sent away for our Stamford beach parking sticker, which is a huge psychological milestone – summer is on its way. Although I’m sure we’ll have at least one freak April snowstorm, and if history is any guide, it'll most likely the be weekend that I’m trying to have my kids’ birthday party in the back yard.

Now, don’t get me wrong- the Cove is a great park – the kids love riding the tram to the beach and checking out the turtles at Soundwaters. But unfortunately, like many things in Stamford, it doesn’t quite pass the white glove test. It’s just a hair seedy, whether it’s the condition of the facilities or some of the clientele it attracts.

Sometimes, I like to go to a place where you can feel pretty confident that you WON'T see a drunken, unemployed vagrant passed out on the sand with an angry sunburn and an empty bottle of gin clutched in a nicotine-stained hand. A place where a family of four can pretend to be stinking rich for a day, without actually having to spend a lot of money. A place where the outhouses are stocked with toilet paper and are infused with the sweet scent of Febreze.

That place, my friends, is Old Greenwich.

Just a mere 10 minutes from downtown Stamford, take Route 1 to Sound Beach Avenue and keep driving past Binney Park until you hit town. Turn right on West End Avenue and park behind the CVS.

Start by letting your kids run off their carsickness on the playground or athletic fields behind Old Greenwich School on Sound Beach Road. If the child happens to sustain a playground-related injury, bring them over to Greenwich Pediatrics, just across the parking lot. Tell Dr. Korval that Manager Mom says hi and we’ll no doubt have an infection of some new exotic parasite for him to diagnose soon.

Stroll by the fire department, and check out the super shiny fire trucks. Occasionally, the nice fireman will treat you to a “jaws of life” demonstration, tearing up an abandoned car. This is officially about the coolest thing a 4-year-old boy can witness in person outside of a monster truck rally.

By then, if you’re getting hungry, grab a cheap slice and a hot toasted Panini wrap sandwich at Sound Beach Pizza (formerly Arcuri’s). Or, carbo-load at the Upper Crust bagel company. Either way, finish off your meal with a stop at Darlene’s Heavenly Desires for an overwhelming array of candy and ice cream treats. This store is bursting with evilly enticing diet busters; you’ll gain 5 pounds just walking in the door.

Work off the sugar high by continuing your stroll along Sound Beach until you get to Binney Park. This is a beautiful, peaceful park which - beware – is dotted with tiny landmines of black, glooby goose poop. Shade yourselves in the pergola and watch dog owners and bridal parties wander by. This is especially entertaining once the bridal parties first become aware of the goose poop issue.

End the afternoon browsing books and playing computer games at the Perrot Memorial library and pick up some used kid’s books for a buck a book as a souvenir of the day. On weekends, they'll sometimes have story readings and performances from children's authors and musicians.

Old Greenwich is also one of the best places to watch Fourth of July fireworks. Parking can be a challenge, but it’s totally free and you can get there as early as you’d like and picnic (pre-order from Lexzee’s or Garden Catering in town.) The park is beautiful and the fireworks go on forever. Be forewarned: your children will covet the huge helium balloons. Don’t give in. The balloon vendors charge, I kid you not, TWENTY dollars for the damn things. Manager Family has been going every year since the kids were born, and highly recommends. Look for us - we'll be the only family who kids are sobbing because we won't get them a balloon.

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YouTube Is So Yesterday

We're in the thick of March Madness now, and Manager Dad (who is on probation due to the subpar picks he turned in for my brackets this year) just told me about an absolutely brilliant feature that cbs.com) built into their Final Four coverage - the "Boss Button". Apparently you can watch streaming video of the basketball games, and if you are in danger of being spotted by someone important, you just click on the Boss Button and it immediately damps the volume and covers your screen with a faux spreadsheet. Note to Bravo TV, can you please install a similar feature attached to the videos featuring your exquisitely dumb, beautiful wannabe supermodels?

As we are all aware, the web affords a breathtaking array of ways to better occupy your attention than work or spending time with family. In no particular order, here's my current top 4 recommendations:

Television Without Pity - If you don't have time to actually watch TV, or don't really like the shows but are forced to make awkward chitchat with Bob from Accounting and need a few "American Idol" tidbits, this site is for you. Filled with comprehensive, snarky, and brilliantly written recaps of all of the shows you care about, and many that you don't. The women who write Go Fug Yourself (another great time waster) cut their chops on this site.

Dickipedia - Yes, it's like Wikipedia, but substantially more entertaining. With entries on the likes of Kanye West, Dr. Phil, and Billy Packer, among others, this site is all about the insufferable, self-righteous jerks that annoy you, but you were never quite able to articulate exactly why. I eagerly, eagerly await the launch of the companion "Skankepedia," referenced in the Tom Brady post.

Sleeveface - a site featuring user-submitted pictures of people holding up record covers where their faces should be. This site is a consummate example of why we needed an Internet in the first place...to feature utterly pointless, yet extremely cool sites like this one.

The Anagram Generator - simple, straightforward, interactive. Type in a name and it spits out an exhaustive list of associated anagrams. Functionally useful, and with an eerie prescience about the anagrams it's supplying- upon inputting Manager Boy's name, the Generator returned "Common Torment" as the first choice.

These are three of my current favorites...any other suggestions? I'm going to have some free time in the next few weeks- my boss is going to be tied up with his "spreadsheets".

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Restaurant Smackdown!!!

My husband and I don't get out much. The going Fairfield county rate of $15 per hour to hire even the most underage, inexperienced, mouth-breathing child care provider pretty much guarantees that. But this Saturday night my Mom announced her intention to visit, providing us the opportunity to exploit her for free babysitting under the guise of grandmotherly love.

To set the context for our evening, you should know I have been fully brainwashed by child rearing experts as to the critical developmental importance of family dinners. According to said experts, if we do not eat dinner together at least 3 times per week, our daughter will wind up a teen drug addict/prostitute and our son would be destined to grow up an illiterate germophobe who regularly beats up his classmates. Or maybe they'd just have low self esteem, get bad grades, and wind up toiling in a dead end job such as professional VCR repairman or something.

Either way, it ain't worth the risk. So we do the dinners, although typical dinners with a 5 and 7 year old are MUCH closer to the side of pain than of pleasure. There's nothing more satisfying to a mother than lovingly crafting a home cooked meal, and putting the plates in front of your angelic children... to have them say, even before the plate hits the table, "yuck...I hate this!"

The meals themselves are not as much family bonding time as they are Manners Boot Camp, as we try desperately to keep it all together and impart some social graces while actually consuming food. Each meal follows a pretty well-defined script, consisting of eye-rolls, fidgeting, dropped food or spilled drinks, and one parent or the other barking shopworn phrases such as "please sit down;", "Use your manners," "Are you going to eat that?" "please don't throw vegetables at your sister," and "Why are you smearing honey in your hair?"

Hence, the prospect of a dinner with just the two of us is something we jump on at any opportunity, whether it's at Morton's or McDonald's.

We had dinner at the tiny, yet warm and welcoming, Emme of Capri on Summer Street. (Manager Mom highly recommends.) We were able to relax and have a delicious meal as well as some semblance of a coherent conversation. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we decided to go for a drink and dessert elsewhere, just to prolong our time away from home. So we decided to stroll around downtown to find another place to try. We even held hands while we were walking (awwww) although my hands are so chapped from overwashing it could not have been a pleasant experience for Mr. Manager Mom. (Manager Dad?)

We wound up at Ferrante, where we each ordered glasses of wine and something sweet. Our bartender was friendly and took care of us, but she had a curiously dour air about her - and after getting our drinks and placing our food order, she vanished for about fifteen minutes, leaving us to stare longingly at the hazelnut ice cream melting all over our lava cake as it sat on the bar's serving station two feet away. Somehow, the kitchen staff that delivered the dessert could not be convinced that it was ours, despite the fact that we were the only people sitting at the bar.

Finally, one of the waiters took pity on us and slid our dessert over. We dug in with relish and single-minded focus. All of the sudden, we became aware of a commotion! A kerfluffle! A brouhaha! A to-do, not more than 5 feet away at the back of the restaurant! Said ballyhoo (thank you by the way, thesaurus.com) resulted a man lying flat on the ground and a small crowd of people yelling for someone to call 911.

Somehow, we managed to miss the moment of impact (were we drunk? chocolate-crazed? you decide) - but the other bartender, a comely young Russian lass, was only too happy to dish that OUR bartender got in a fight with the manager and called her boyfriend, who came in to take a swing at said mananger, rendering him prone on the floor.

Needless to say, we assumed she would probably consider herself fired, and wasn't coming back.

The ambulance was called, and the manager seemed OK, and we were done with our drinks and dessert. As we got ready to leave, we suddenly became aware of a short slippery slope of potential moral dilemmas:

- We could easily live life on the edge and skip out on the bill.

- Knowing that we could, should we? Did the universe or the moral powers that be owe us a freebie to compensate for the bystander trauma we might have incurred by witnessing the aftermath of this senseless violence?

- If we did wimp out on the dine-n-dash, did we have to tip, since the person who served us would never see the benefit?

- And if so, how much of a tip was sufficient?

For the record, we DID pay, and we tipped about 15%. But there was definitely a moment where we were inspired to get our Bonnie & Clyde on. Hey, us minivan-driving, corporate-working for, suburban-living average Americans have to stay dangerous somehow.

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Shop Shop, Hooray!

While I like to think that my blog can be meaningful and thought provoking, I have had WAY too many rants about gloomy topics lately - taxes, school closings, and Mary Kate Olsen, among others.

So please indulge my desire to celebrate something completely frivolous: the continued resurgence of the Stamford Town Center. No longer do us Stamfordites have to hang our heads in shameful subservience to the hushed, marbled glory of the Westchester Mall, with it's fancy stores and overpriced parking.

It wasn't so long ago that the Town Center was teetering on the brink of irrelevancy. One could smell a not-too-distant future where even the Macys would flee, destined to be replaced by a Sears and/or a Steve and Barry's, while the rest of the mall became overrun with Dollar Trees, Fashion Bugs, magazine shops with large inventories of porn, and maybe even a check cashing store.

But just as the mall teetered on brink of going toe up, the Mall Gods did unleash hell, annihilating a whole wing and birthing a shiny new structure from whence the H&M and the Barnes & Noble did emerge . Along with a bunch of soul-sucking, overpriced, mediocre chain restaurants.

Don't get me wrong - while I am PHILOSOPHICALLY violently opposed to the idea of eating at a chain restaurant instead of a local place (with the possible exception of the PF Changs, and OK, I have been known to take the littlings to the California Pizza Kitchen once in a while because the little heathens hate food that has any real taste), in PRACTICE, the presence of a Capital Grille means that the gods of bland upscale mediocrity think this little mall just might make something of itself.

And so...the improvements begat Starbucks! And an Apple Store! And now comes news that Zara is on its way! And more tax revenues through increased shopping traffic, leading to more cachet for the downtown area, leading to appreciated home prices, which will spawn even more pseudo-upscale stores from which we can purchase more stuff to tastefully appoint our renovated Cape Cods. It's a perfect suburban bourgeois storm! We might even be deemed worthy of a J. Crew someday!

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Activities I hope my kids don't want to participate in

As a mom I want my kids to be well rounded, and I try to be supportive of their interests. But there things that I just cross my fingers and hope that they don't want to do, just because I don't want to deal with the personal consequences of the activity.

For example: I hope my kids never want do hockey or figure skating - because I don't want to get up at the crack of dawn to take them to the ice rinks. And there are some sports (like football) that I just find brutal and boring and I don't relish the thought of having to spend my scarce free time sitting through the practices and games.

So in the spirit of complete selfishness, here's a list of activities that I am hoping mightily that my kids will not become interested in:




Cosmetology
Girl/Boy Scouts
Civil War re-enactments
Tuba lessons
Synchronized swimming
Wrestling
Flag corps/Baton twirling
Irish dancing
Anything related to Star Trek
Boggle tournaments
Young Republicans club
Curling

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My Wine Label

Manager Dad and I were in Vegas a few months ago. We went there to renew our wedding vows in because we had been married 7 years and have not cheated on each other yet. The ceremony at the Viva Las Vegas wedding chapel. Their Elvis looks NOTHING like the king but I highly recommend the "One Song Package" where for only $275, you get Elvis doing the ceremony PLUS one song at the "reception", with a photographer and free live webcam streaming thrown in. Klassy! (Ironic use of the "K" intended).

So we were celebrating after the event (which a bunch of our friends came to, and despite the ridiculousness of the situation, I got all cheesed out and emotional when we were in the middle of the vow renewal.) We ordered a bottle of wine, which was out of stock, so our waiter substituted this one instead at the same price. It was from Lamborn Family Vineyards and it was a zinfandel and it was delicious. It might have been the company (the man I LOOOOVE) the location ( Foundation room at the House of Blues on top of Mandalay Bay, looking out at the whole twinkly strip) or the fact that the wine we'd had prior was from Jerry Garcia vineyards, and it tasted about as good as his lungs and liver probably looked around the time of his death.

At any rate, I enterprisingly went online to get some more, and found that they were only sold in 7 stores around the country. One of them was in San Francisco, where I had to go on business trip. Being 1) extremely cheap and b) a master time-waster, I decided to take a walk from my meeting to the wine shop and pick it up instead of having it shipped to me at home. I wound up passing the office for a cool marketing agency and I wound up hiring them and falling head over heels in friend love with their whole staff, and all kinds of nice things came into my life as a result of this bottle.

And then I found out that they were having a contest to name their next vintage of Zinfandel. I cranked out this little ditty, which made the top 5 submissions. So the Lamborns put this to a vote within the online community. I put out the call to my evil minions (many) and my friends and relatives (few) to go and vote for my story... and viola, darn it if I didn't win!!!

On day I left for Sundance, I got a note from Brian Lamborn (the son of the owner) with one of the labels. I attached it for your viewing pleasure. They'd just bottled it (not yet released) but here is the first preview of the new Zinfandel - the 2006 Lamborn "Serendipity" Zinfandel.

Buy lots of freakin' bottles. (They're only making a few thousand cases and when they're gone, they're gone). And oh by the way, can you send me a bottle when you do? because the Lamborns don't ship to Connecticut. Nice people, but tey need to stop paying attention to details like "federal law."

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