Quality Time

It is hard to imagine one night offering more big-budget, traditional, quality drama competing head-to-head than the network and cable lineup tomorrow. Starting at 8, Showtime serves up Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover in an original made-for-cable movie, Good Fences, that wickedly explores social class, upward mobility and race in a posh Connecticut town. At 9, CBS offers Glenn Close in Brush With Fate, a Hallmark Hall of Fame version of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club best-selling novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

With four toddlers in tow, Danica Howard was looking for a place to sit down. At Port Discovery children's museum yesterday, she found a bench - across from the Wonder Widgets table - and watched as her son, younger sister and two godchildren placed odd-shaped widgets into appropriately shaped holes. And she remained seated and relaxed even when, moments later, the four abandoned the task and began chasing each other. This week, the combination of frigid temperatures, school vacation and cabin fever has parents looking for indoor activities to occupy the little ones.

They're the scourge of family trips. They always take too long. They make us shiver in the cold and sweat in the sun. They make us fidget and fume. They make us so edgy we snap at the kids, our significant other and, sometimes, even at strangers. We swear this is absolutely the last time.But here we are again, waiting in line. Sometimes, it seems we spend the entire trip getting in one line after another. Even worse, we talk about them when we're not in them, devising strategies to avoid them even if that means getting up at dawn on vacation.

The school year is so new that the children have barely gotten their teachers' names straight, much less told every tale on the playground about their summer adventures, but already visions of vacations to come are dancing in their heads."

As surely as a platypus is an egg-laying mammal, Americans will work themselves into a frenzy over all things Australian this month as the 2000 Summer Olympic Games open in Sydney. Amid all the Aussie hype, it is unlikely that Australia's thriving wine industry will go unnoticed. Thousands of Americans who will travel to Sydney will be exposed to a wide variety of Australian wines. Chances are, they'll like what they taste because Australia's wine industry is consistently improving. You won't have to travel to Sydney to taste many of Australia's finest wines, however.

A Southeast Baltimore girl named Tiffany, 10, got dressed up in a pink and red sweater and took a long trip to see her mother yesterday. Together, they put on bonnets, gloves and aprons while they dipped Easter eggs and talked.But it wasn't a regular pre-Easter get-together. It was a visit behind bars. Tiffany was one of 21 Girl Scouts who came in a red van yesterday morning to the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup, where their mothers were let out of their 5-foot-by-10-foot cells to try and cram days, weeks and months of mothering into three hours.

It's Day 3 of the snow siege, and the plow still hasn't arrived. There's no way to get out of the neighborhood. There's no way to get to work. There's no way to get the kids to the babysitter's.It's Day 3, and it's snowing hard again. It's Day 3, and everyone is still stuck in the house.It's Day 3, and the world is divided into two types of people: those who are on the verge of losing their minds if they spend another day at home with their kids and those who have surrendered to the siege with almost Zen-like tranquility.

When Stacey Wasserman made the Owings Mills varsity volleyball team as a freshman this fall, she heard the same accusations her sister Kallie had heard three years earlier - that she only made it because her mother was a coach. Stacey didn't take long to prove those comments wrong. Just as Kallie had, she presented her rebuttal on the court. "When they came to see some of my games, they took it back," Stacey said. The Eagles' top setter, Stacey averages 7.3 assists a game - many of them to Kallie, who downs 2.8 kills a game as one of Baltimore County's most powerful hitters.