I thought I was a genius when I created a homemade version of Starbuck’s “mocachino”. I’d make a small cup of instant espresso, hit it with some whipped cream and a little sugar. Presto! tasted just like Starbucks.

I started down this path because I don’t really enjoy coffee but have noticed that I love espresso, especially in fine restaurants. I started to drink 2, 3 even 4 cups a day. It was yummy, and I could have sworn that it has cured a hangover. Until…I crashed.

I’d never known what people meant when they said “caffeine crash”–now I do. My recent slide into hell left me feeling as if I’d gone down with the Titanic, then washed up on the shore, lifeless…like a dead beach ball.

I needed to invent a substitute…so I created another concoction: “TeaChino”…I make a cup of tea and hit it with a little whipped cream. Yum!

I mean bleechhh! I’m going to keep trying to find a way to perk up and not kill myself.

The other morning, I was looking out of my office window (the one that faces the front yard)–suddenly, I notice two teenage girls approaching my neighbor’s house. I know these girls, they are about 13 years old and solidly in that annoying “and I told him, just what-e-Ver” phase.

I wouldn’t have continued my gaze had it not been for what they were wearing at 12:00pm in the afternoon: pajamas. Also, they were each holding a Starbucks cup and each had a purse slung over their shoulder.

It looked like a scene from the Nickelodeon version of Desperate Housewives or the New Jersey version of Laguna Beach — next on: Desperate Turnpike Stories.

I couldn’t not stare — all I kept thinking was what my mother would have said had I tried, not only to get to the front porch in my pajamas, but ALL the way up the street. What’s going on? And what’s with the Starbuck’s and purses?

It is days like this when, as a someone who doesn’t have children, I begin to think…I need to get out of suburbia…I need to live in Manhattan. I’ll open a small diner-slash-deli-slash-gourmet grocery store…and live among the fabulous city dwellers.

But wait. I have central air conditioning and a Chocolate Labrador. No reasonable apartments that are not in Brooklyn have central air…and the room this dog needs is along the lines of Marmaduke…not FiFi the Manhattan poodle.

What was I complaining about anyway? So, the girls went visiting in their pj’s at 12 noon…I was working in my pj’s (Giants shirt and sweats) too, and did so until 1:30pm…

Are pj’s the new power suit?

Photo: Flickr.com