As seen in the photos, my next-door neighbors (note sign in front) in an attached house are
having a very large 2-story addition
constructed on the back of their home, along with many other renovations. My
house is the taller red house, with the second photo showing the view from my
front steps. The owners expect the job to take 6 months and have moved out meanwhile with their small daughter.
Alas, I’m still living in my own house, where banging and drilling of concrete,
plaster, and wood goes on all day long both inside and out. Worse yet, their giant
dumpster, emptied almost every day, usually sits parked right out in front of
my house, not in front of theirs. After
many polite and not-so-polite requests, the foreman had it moved so that it’s
no longer blocking my front door, just overlapping only part of my front yard. Still,
that’s progress and I hope to have it moved gradually over completely to their
side. If necessary, will appeal to city authorities.
After a worldwide uproar,
including from us at Amnesty International,
DR President Danilo Medina has apparently sent the legislature a
measure that would allow those descended from people coming into the country
after 1929 and affected by the high court decision to opt for DR citizenship
after all. It's supposed to go into effect June 1, which is pretty soon. If it should
actually work, I must express surprise and also relief. Maybe all the pressure
finally helped. However, people who have seen his proposal say the devil is in
the details, also in the changes that the legislature may make.
Last Friday, there was a huge rainstorm, but I had an
interpretation assignment, so I grabbed an umbrella and set out gamely for the
metro. But in a train inside a tunnel, there was an electrical outage and the train just stopped. By the time I made it
to a metro stop to catch a bus to continue to my medical interpretation
assignment, it was already the time I was supposed to be there. I asked someone
else waiting for the bus if I could borrow her cell phone to tell the medical office
that I was on my way, though sorry to be late. On that call, I found out the
patient had come early, her son had served as her interpreter, and they had
already left. So I went wearily back inside the metro station and came home,
forfeiting my pay and also causing my agency to lose its half. To compound my
problems, after arriving back home, I couldn’t find my keys and apparently no
one was home. Thinking I might have dropped them, I retraced my steps to no
avail, so I just sat out on my front steps—by then the rain had stopped—hoping
someone would show up with keys. Well, finally, a housemate came home and opened
the front door. Then another arrived and began a search outside and found my keys
under a rose bush where I’d plucked off some dead blossoms, so all was well,
but what a wasted day! The woman who found my keys is a GAO fellow from
Argentina who had once lived in NYC and told me how she had lost her keys in
Central Park and gone back the next day and found them, so she really has a
nose for lost keys!
With an old friend who now
lives across the river in Arlington, Va., I saw a play at the Arlington-based Spanish-language
theater, Teatro de la Luna, entitled
“Tango Turco” or “Turkish Tango.” I used
to attend productions there with members of a Spanish-language book club. That
was before I broke off ties after the dispute with my “nunny bunny” accuser
which led to the writing of my newest book, Confessions
of a Secret Latina. Although it had been some years since I had attended, I
was amazed when the woman greeting us at the door remembered me by name! What a
memory and how many people have passed through those doors since? My companion was
less fluent in Spanish, so we sat in a rear row where surtitled translations
flashed above. The staging and acting were excellent, but the work itself was a
rather light comedy, as the title would suggest. My interpreting work in
hospitals and schools is very basic, so after seeing that play, I found myself
missing the more literary aspects of my Spanish-language engagement.
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