Star Light, Star Bright

I don't know how long this will last, but the planet Venus is so bright and beautiful in the southwestern sky right now, you have to take a look! It is hovering near the moon.

Last night was clear and icy cold and the sky was absolutley filled with stars - the little dipper and the big dipper, too. But Venus and our moon were really putting on a show. A little sliver of a moon but bright as could be. Tonight I went out for another look not expecting much since it was cloudy but the clouds were moving quickly and Venus and the moon kept coming in and out of sight. It was so pretty and it was very moving.

Maybe because I just finished reading The Elegant Universe by Greene I was especially interested. In my neighborhood, if you walk down by the water on a clear winter night, you can always see a shooting star or two. I know they are always around but in some places it is just too bright to see them. Every once in a while, when the moon is full, it rises over the horizon in the east (right over Jamestown) and appears gigantic. I know it is an optical illusion but what a sight to see. There is a bench on the hill over the water and you can sit there and take photos or just watch the moon rise higher and higher until it makes a reflected path on the bay.


Venus is the second planet from the sun, so is our neighbor, but has no moon of her own. I recently learned that a day on Venus is equal to 243 of our earth days. Talk about a long week at the office. A very slow rotation compared to us and it is very hot there - I think about 900 degrees F. Yikes.

But viewed from my back yard she looks quite beautiful. Please take a look before this phenomonon makes a hasty exit.

Great Back Yard Bird Count

If you love nature and the environment and would enjoy participating in a citizen-type data collection, why not particpate this year in the Great Back Yard Bird Count?

This annual event relies on people across the country to help the Audubon Society and Ornithology Lab at Cornell to count the types and species of birds they see in their back yard. The term 'back yard' can be applied to your neighborhood, nearby park, anyplace you can walk to if you want to go farther afield and see a wider variety of birds. For those of us living near the oceans and wetlands of Rhode Island, this opens up a lot more possibilities for bird watching and reporting.


If you go to the website for the GBBC, you will be walked through the process, provided with a checklist to fill out and submit online, be able to enter a photo contest, and after it is done, you can see the results.

It is a fabulous and fun thing to do with children. There is a special page for kids with games and activities. What a great way to get kids started on a love of nature and the environment!


All 50 states are represented. Why not help Rhode Island get on the Audubon map? You can spend as little as 15 minutes per day or up to as much time as you wish. The dates this year are February 13 - 16. See you at the bird count!


PS Bird watching in Rhode Island is excellent - you can choose a house near the woods or one with lots of trees, shrubs and the salt water estuaries provide herons, swans and egrets to admire, too.

Bite the Bullet - Price Cuts

When selling your home, we set the price together - seller and realtor, as partners.

We realtors will provide you with comparable sales from the past 6 months and this will give you a very realistic idea of what your home will sell for - you can even extrapolate the price per square foot for an even more accurate projection.

But sometimes our sellers want to add a little padding or think their house is a little above average. (who doesn't think that? it is an endearing quality!) And so, in the spirit of partnership and wanting to please our clients, we price the house too high.


And eventually this will lead to the need for a price reduction. At this time, it is far better to make a bold move, bite the bullet and price the house in a way that will get attention in today's crowded marketplace.

Some people are timid and inch their prices down in little increments as if they don't want anyone to notice! One big bite is far more effective than a bunch of little nibbles. Chances are your realtor has already told you the correct price of your house. Be brave!

With beautiful photography to showcase your home to its best advantage, an appropriate price will sell your house. We have many buyers looking but no one is going to overpay by even an iota. Buyers are educated, too, and know what price is appropriate.

No one wants to leave any money on the table and we want to get you the most possible money for your home. But in a few months, after your house has sold, and you gain some perspective, you'll feel a lot better and will be on to the next phase of your life whatever that may be - maybe a condo in Florida or a new house near your family or just downsizing or upsizing. No more stress!

The 5 Star of New England - Rhode Island

What do Turk & Caicos; Baden Baden, Germany; New York City; and Rhode Island have in common? The answer might surprise some but not those in the know….

All have been awarded the prestigious Five Star Diamond seal of approval from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences (AAHS). Rhode Island has the additional honour of being the first US State to ever receive this achievement. The AAHS exclusively awards this Five Star award to places deemed to be the pinnacle of quality in the global travel and luxury services sector.

Rhode Island has won an Oscar! This is how Rhode Island Tourism Director Mark Brodeur described this award by saying “This is a huge accomplishment – this is our industry’s Academy Awards”.

Rhode Island Governor Carcieri agreed by saying that he has “always maintained that Rhode Island is the star of New England” and expressed his pleasure that “our state’s wonders and its hospitality have earned worldwide recognition as well”.

If you don’t already own property in a Five Star location, correct that by buying a luxury property in Rhode Island!

We offer tremendous value for our luxury and waterfront properties as compared to other luxury real estate destinations such as the Hamptons, Greenwich, Martha’s Vineyard, or Nantucket.

One example of the impeccable properties currently offered in Newport include Oakwood - the 19th-century summer residence of Mary Alida Astor Carey – which is revered as one of the finest historic properties of coastal New England. This 24-room Italianate-style home set in six acres of walled private grounds has hosted many of the area’s most distinguished families over the years. The price will pleasantly surprise you!

Sweet Pea

Every year, sometime in February, I have a little ritual that keeps me going until spring. I start seeds in my sunroom – always sweet peas to plant on my trellis.

There is something special about placing the little seeds in the peat moss in the cardboard pods that makes me feel like everything is going to be alright.


My sunroom, where the plants spend their beginning days, faces south and is all windows, and the best part is it has a stone floor with radiant heat. So it is a perfect spot for incubating seedlings. Within a few days, they start to sprout and within a couple of weeks the vines grow to several inches long. Amazing. The miracle of life never fails to astonish me - Think of all the DNA and information in that tiny seed.



After a couple of months, the plants get moved outside to a cold frame for a few weeks until they get planted in the ground along the trellis. Being cold weather plants, the sweet peas are among the first plants you can sow outside.

Some day, maybe I will have a proper greenhouse to plant and work in all year but for now, my sunroom and coldframe work just fine.

It is still too early for me to start my seedlings but it is not too early to start thinking about it. Last fall, I took some pods from my neighbor Marie’s plants – she calls hers ‘beach peas’ because they seem to grow wild in her yard. They are more hardy than my hothouse sweet peas but look the same. I am waiting to see if those beach peas come up on their own in my garden this spring. One can only hope!

Fountain of Life

When I first moved up to Newport from Miami, almost thirty years ago, the one single place I recall making the biggest impression on me was Spring Street. We didn’t HAVE streetscapes like that in Miami. Beaches we had. Tourists we had. Big fancy houses and traffic and large showy boats and rich seasonal inhabitants we had. But Spring Street? This was something new under my personal sun…this was out & out exotica to me.

Then as now, every building was quirky in its own way and every building hailed from a different era. A tiny little 19th century artist’s cottage stood in the shadow of Trinity Church, which was itself a product of the early 1700s. A clump of grand mid-17th century houses rubbed elbows with wood frame storefront commercial buildings from the late 1800s, the second & third floors of which had long since devolved into rental apartments. An exuberantly, eccentrically shingled Dudley Newton house faced off with a utilitarian looking locksmith shop that appeared to have been there since George Washington was in office. Buildings from all eras were jammed together, all mixed up, incongruously thrown together like some demented jazz riff on three centuries of American vernacular architecture. That first summer I was here, I remember being stuck in Spring St’s merciless summer traffic somewhere between Church and Mary Streets and seeing it, REALLY seeing it for the first time, and thinking to myself, “My god - this is absolutely amazing”. Thirty years later, that same stretch of Spring St still manages to inspire in me a frisson of that original feeling.

Spring Street has been there for getting on close to three hundred years now. An essential component of Newport from the town’s inception in 1639, Spring Street was so-called because it terminated in the town spring, the waters of which still travel underground, out of sight, somewhere beneath Coffey’s Citgo Station. That now-invisible and forgotten spring was why Newport’s founders chose the site in the first place, and why it was able to prosper as a settlement; their 17th century equation was brutally simple = no drinking water, no town. That spring was literally the Fountain of Life for early Newport, and the movement of its swirling waters is still eerily somehow visible in the traffic patterns behind the courthouse - all roads leading inexorably towards that center spot, cars restlessly & centrifugally circling, like water rushing down a drain. I never pass the spot without thinking how far we’ve come…and how little has changed.

Pockets of Recovery

Every time we pick up the paper or turn on the news we are bombarded constantly with updates on increased foreclsores, declining sales, layoffs and tight credit. However, on page 3 of the Business Section of the local paper I saw a sign of recovery. It went unnoticed by the author of the article and probably by many who read it. It was like that wayward Robin I noticed in the yard on a wintery day in February. One of those days when Spring seems so far away and yet, if you look hard, you can find the clues that maybe, just maybe, something good is not that far around the corner.

The average price of a home in Narragansett for the month of November 2008 was 20% higher than the average price of a home in November 2007 while total units were only down by 3. I asked myself how could this happen in the middle of a meltdown when everyone was screaming that the sky was falling and the world was ending? I thought that no one had any money or a job and that banks weren't lending and everyone was going bankrupt! Where did this come from?

There is no doubt that there are areas that have been and will continue to suffer in this real estate fueled slump. However, many of the issues that drove these problems are not present in many of our coastal resort markets. We have not been overrun with foreclsoures, inventory is relatively stable, there was a relatively small amount of speculation and development in this area over this past decade. This region also has a tremendous amount of desirability, beautiful coastal beaches, interesting historic Towns, architecture and access. Those people out there who still have money, and there must be a few still out there, are focusing their interests in areas they know will continue to outshine the rest of the pack. So, before you throw in the towel on this wintry day, remember, I spotted a Robin!