Maybe we should be expanding our dog parks, rather than building swimming pools and running a useless PR campaign.

Longing To Be Free

Childless couples with dogs moving to the suburbs for the sake of their pets.

Fun story, what with owners named "Whitney" and poodles named "Bailey", and it's almost impossible to imagine quite how, exactly, there can possibly be such a thing as a "husky-chihuahua mix", but if this is a trend, the realtor in me says we should encourage it.

And the taxpayer in me can see how much we could save on schools: surely canine obedience schools cost far less than high schools, and that's assuming these people are even interested in training their dogs to obey: I'm guessing not.

Dear Governor Malloy: I'm a member of the NRA: I didn't bankrupt the state, destroy our infrastructure, or subvert the laws of our country. So who's the terrorist?

Did I just say something inane? Again??!!!

An irrelevant Dannel Malloy calls NRA members "terrorists". The faster he's out of here, the better.

A minor note: he and his posse now complain that Connecticut's pistol-carry-permit law requires, besides a criminal background check: local, state and federal, that the applicant complete an NRA-certified instructor's 8-hour pistol safety course (including a range session). The reason for that requirement is that the NRA is the only organization that certifies such instructors, and that only after intensive training and examination. Despite what this idiot and his friends claim, NRA - certified instructors are private individuals, with no fees flowing to the organization itself: they'e accredited by the NRA, period. Even if Daniel himself were to offer to provide that same training course, I wouldn't trust him to ensure my safety or the safety of others, nor should the residents of this state.

Just in time for summer, a price cut on Club Road in Riverside

96 Club Road, 1898 home completely modernized and expanded (to 7,500 sq. ft) has dropped from $7.5 million to, as of today, $6.695. No pool, but it's immediately adjacent to the Yacht Club, and here's a secret: clubs love having their immediate neighbors as members — cuts down on complaints — so enjoy the RYC's pool with your new friends, and save your money.

And if you have a boat, Bob's your uncle: the marina's fabulous.

(Note: this is brother Gideon's listing, but we don't cross-pollinate; I just report price cuts as they come across the wire.

This seems reasonable

30 Valleyood Road, Cos Cob, reports a contract after just 15 days, priced at $1.430 million.

Back in 2008, the then-owner priced it at $1.295 and got no takers: it was a perfectly nice, but tired old house, and wasn't worth close to that price. These sellers paid $753,000 for it in 2011 (a price that surely reflected the overreaching in the first place), fixed it up nicely, even added on a bit, and have been rewarded for their efforts.

I'm tempted to say that the moral here, in the case of that 2008 owner, is "don't be greedy", but it's more likely that the poor woman just listened the wrong agent.

(This strikes me as slightly obscene, but my beloved Uncle gary was a Freudian psychiatrist, so my reaction may be skewed — he would have enjoyed it, though).

World ends: women, but not minorities, hardest hit

A friend sends along this communication from The Hamptons Blue Book, with the observation that "the barbarians have officially stormed the gate".

History of this little, but exclusive volume here. The article is from 2007, the year before Walter Noel and Bernie Madoff's fall from grace. I like this part:

All this furtiveness hasn’t stopped some supposedly private people from offering up more than their share of information. The Noels, a Greenwich, Conn., family with a home, the Dolphins, in Southampton, have an entry nearly a half-page long. But who wouldn’t want to crow about five daughters, three of them Ivy League educated and all married off, and 16 grandchildren? It is the kind of display that might appear gauche, if it wasn’t what made the Blue Book such an amusing beach read.

I imagine that particular entry was significantly edited in 2008.

The next time someone complains about the "gender wage gap", consider this

Put down the slide rule and HELP somebody, for God's sake

(Okay, it's a photo that popped up when I Googled Images, "crying Hillary supporters", but close enough)

Women leaving science majors for victimhood studies. 

Two engineering professors have published the results of a new study that sheds light on why so few women graduate college with a STEM degree.

Led by Colorado School of Mines professor Greg Rulifson, the study tracked 34 freshmen engineering majors over the course of four years to explore what makes students, especially women, abandon engineering in lieu of other fields.

Of the 21 female students interviewed, fully one-third left engineering by their junior year. Rulifson and his co-author Angela Bielefeldt identified one factor common to all female students who left: the desire to “help society/other people,” or “social responsibility.”

The “social responsibility” definition includes “care for the marginalized and disadvantaged,” “environmental conservation,” and “empathy,” the professors noted.

Of the 21 female students, 14 expressed a strong dedication to social responsibility. Half of those students eventually switched majors upon realizing they wanted to pursue fields they felt had more to do with helping people.

One student, Maggie, switched to Community and International Development to study “systemic problems in different communities and how to address” them.

Jocelyn, another student, left engineering to study Environmental Policy, and hopes to become a lawyer. “I can make a bigger impact [that way],” Jocelyn told researchers.

Rulifson and Bielefeldt stated that they weren’t exactly surprised by the results.

They pointed to a 2014 Purdue University study, which discovered that the vast majority of young girls want to grow up to be “successful and caring,” but they don’t see that as an option for engineering professionals.

That study urged engineering departments to infuse a “feminist care of ethics” into their curricula to help retain women. By doing that, engineering students would be “provided with opportunities to define, address, and apply social responsibility continuously.”

Published in the new issue of the journal Engineering Studies, Rulifson and Bielefeldt’s new study similarly concludes that “engineering should include concern for people, communities, and societal welfare at the heart of the profession.”

“Women in engineering are more motivated by helping others, and engineering education needs to provide more examples of engineering as a helping profession,” the professors wrote.

Bless their caring hearts, but opting out of careers that actually produce something of value, something that people will pay for, is bound to yield lower payoffs. 

Until there's a federal law to correct that, of course.

When nature resets stores' inventory plans

New storm arriving, and that poses a challenge.

In Old Greenwich, Feinsod's Hardware has been forced to shuffle a bit.

At the Feinsod True Value hardware store in Old Greenwich, manager Larry Weiner said the latest weather reports required a change of plans: The spring planting items had to be put away from the front of the store, and the winter materials were retrieved. “We were putting out the grass seed. We stopped what we were doing, we had to go in back and get the snow shovels,” said Weiner.

Long ago, before what I assume were insurance liability concerns ruled out the practice, we high school kids loved storms like this, because the town would hire us to work on the sanding trucks on the night shift at, if I recall, three-times the minimum wage, so six bucks an hour. Wait for the announcement that school would be cancelled the next day, then report at one of the maintenance depots and pow! Instant wealth, at least until our girlfriends discovered our windfall. 

Good gig, if you wanted it.

Ain't happening

Giddyap no-go

429 Taconic Road, 13 acres, house, and a pony-trot area, has been relisted, again, and is now asking $14 million. That's an improvement over the $23.5 price it sought back in 2013 when all the world, or at least this listing, was new, but really, who wants this sort of property? Send your child and her horsey off to boarding school and live in Greenwich proper, for far less money and in much more comfort.

That seems to have been the market sentiment so far.

The price of admission

14 Druid lane, Riverside, $2.195 million, gone in less than two weeks. 

Built in 1954: if only I'd appreciated so much during that time.

New Lake Avenue listed in the nose-bleed altitude

751 Lake, asking $8.195 million. When it was new in 2014 I had clients who spent a long time here, considering, and though they ultimately chose another home, that decision had nothing to do with the exceptional quality of this one: it's Kaali-Nagy designed, and beautifully built.

I'm always struck by the transient nature of Greenwich residency when sales like these hit the market. Brand new in 2014, $7.850, pool and extra landscaping added and then ... off they go.

This is not a new phenomenon in town: I think I read, decades ago, that the average stay in town was 18 months, and certainly, growing up, few of my friends stayed around long enough to hit permanent status. Might as well have lived on a military base.

Good for real estate agents, though.