About Me

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Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, United States
You can view my original blog (Part 1): http://honduraspeacecorps.blogspot.com

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Now what?


Our fall weather here in Berkeley Springs has been really quite comfortable, with no need for heat so far.  Nor was summer particularly steamy, requiring hardly any A/C at all.  We just go outside in shirtsleeves, with the air still quite balmy, yet the leaves are all turning color, indicating that fall has now arrived.  Seen below are the headwaters of the Potomac River, which widens and deepens before eventually reaching Washington, DC. 


My son likes to go out for a drive early every morning, up and down, here and there, and all around.  Many folks are then just out walking, or out walking their dogs, which puts our dog Willow into a frenzy of barking out of our car window. 


Below is a house we always pass as soon as we cross the Potomac River. 



The blog police seem to have loosened their grip now, no longer going after small-bore blogs like this one.  That's a relief! 

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Here are some more local Halloween decorations. Folks are just having fun, using their own ingenuity.











                                        

In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is celebrated the day after our own Halloween.
 


Our local Mexican restaurant, Mi Ranchito, is also celebrating the Day of the Dead with colorful decorations and some special dishes. 


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Something else quite scary right now is that Donald Trump is still our US president.  But if our country and the world can endure for just the next couple of years, he may then retire to Mar-a-Lago to hit the golf course there and simply leave all the rest of us alone.  Yet the fact that Mr. Trump has been cutting down so many trees at DC's local golf course is quite concerning, indicating he might actually be planning to stay on to keep on harassing us, rather than taking up a quiet harmless hobby like GW Bush, who just paints colorful portraits of his friends. 

Trump has really been quite busy lately, out touting voter fraud, something which meticulous investigations have found to be exceedingly rare.  But Trump's current laser focus on fraud indicates that he expects Republicans to not do well in the midterms, so fraud will just be his excuse.  If he would simply butt out, his party might actually do somewhat better now with voters.



Krull Commentary: Trump’s tricks no longer entertain–or work

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Alberta, where my late father, Leonard J. Currie, actually was born, has just rejected secession.  

Why would Albertans even consider joining our country with Donald Trump now as our president?  They have just decided they actually would not. 

That would be a bridge too far for most Albertans, also proving to be a rather distant bridge for Americans to cross, most already getting pretty darn tired of and fed up with Mr. Trump's antics, now looking forward to seeing him gone, gone, gone.  Some of my own family members have even considered moving to Canada to join their cousins there if Donald Trump still sticks around.  How did that man ever get into office?  How did that calamity even happen-- was it only an unfortunate accident or just a very rare quirk of fate?  That question will be debated by political analysts and historians for years to come.  

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Now, let's take a virtual tour of France.


                                                               Here is the interior of Napoleon's home.


                                                        
                                                              This, of course, is the Eiffel Tower. 


Here now is a window in the Notre Dame cathedral


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Not many flowers are blue, but these flowers I picked actually are. 



 
Flowers can even be almost black, but I've never seen any black ones growing wild. 
Nor are flowers of the actual colors shown below very easy to find anywhere.







Immediately above are some rainbow chrysanthemums.  How do multicolored petals grow right on the same blossom?  Quite a feat of genetic engineering!  




Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Great or not quite so great after all?

 

Yahoo News

Talk about racial or ethnic profiling, the Trump administration is now going after voters with Hispanic-sounding names.  In Nevada, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department had flagged as potential noncitizens were actually US citizens. 

I do hope that Donald Trump and his allies will take a severe drubbing in the next election and that we can finally get Mr. Trump out of politics for good.  He's been nothing but bad news for our country and even for the entire world.  If he tries to run as vice president on the next Republican ticket, that may well doom that ticket, as American voters have finally started getting pretty darn fed up with him.

Is Donald Trump actually the very worst, most incompetent, and most corrupt chief executive that we've ever had in the 250 years of our nation's existence?  I might not go that far, as I wasn't alive back when Andrew Johnson was president, as he is usually ranked as the very worst of all. 



Andrew Johnson (17th President): Often ranked as the worst or among the lowest due to his fierce obstruction of civil rights for newly freed slaves and his dismantling of Reconstruction after the Civil War, which led to his impeachment.

Wikipedia: Among scholarly rankings, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt are most often ranked as the best, while James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Donald Trump are most often ranked as the very worst. 

If Hillary or even later Kamala (or both) had taken presidential office in the US, not only would the glass ceiling finally have been broken, but our country would be much better off, so much more respected around the world than is the case right now.  Of course, Donald Trump actually considers himself to be the very greatest. most competent, most beloved American president of all time.  Any lesser evaluation of his presidential tenure is simply "fake news." 

“O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!  Robert Burns (1759-1796)

President Donald Trump has published a self-ranking on Truth Social placing himself alone in the very top category labeled "The Greatest," evaluating himself as being superior even to presidents like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.  Wow, what a guy! 



Wash, Post, Trump says his political operation is spending $400 million on midterms


Wash, Post,

5 things to know about the federal judge Trump called a ‘crazed lunatic’

(Who is actually the crazed lunatic?)


Psychology Today

                                Is It Possible to Have Too Much Self-Confidence?

                                            When self-assuredness hides a deeper insecurity.



Donald Trump has recently been whining that Fox News is trying to be "politically correct," no longer supporting him as much as he rightly deserves.  (Even Fox has been cooling on Trump now.)

President Trump still wants to change the name of the state of New Mexico to New America, but folks living there are having none of it, vowing to keep their traditional name.  The president can call he state whatever he wants, but its residents are now looking forward to the end of his term. 

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Virginia Tech  in Blacksburg, Va., where both my late brother and father taught architecture classes, just started a new semester.  Our family still supports especially female architecture students. 

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News Analysis

NY Times, As Alberta Rejects Separatism, Carney Gets Much of the Credit

Prime Minister Mark Carney won over Canada’s most conservative province by promising a pipeline and campaigning hard, defeating its efforts to secede.

I follow Alberta politics as my late father was born in Stavely, Alberta.  My paternal great-grandparents raised 12 children on a wheat farm in southern Alberta. 

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Here now is a family of rare red wolves, the very most endangered species of wild wolves.  They may not actually be red.  Too many wolves have already been killed, so now do need protection.  Livestock can be kept safe with fences, real or virtual, not by killing wolves or other wild animals.  Let the wolves live; they are an essential part of the ecosystem. 


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Below is a message to a longtime friend living in Kenya who had once stayed at my former home in Washington, DC,  attending a training program there.  He had now wanted to send a friend coming to DC my way, but, alas, I am no longer there.  

 

Hello Boniface.

Wonderful to hear from you but I no longer live in DC, rather in rural Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, with my son and his dog in the house depicted here.

I had to shrink the photo of our house, but hope you can still see it.  Nothing like my house back in Washington, DC.


My son (copied here) works at a local hotel called CoolFont.  I had to sell my 3-story house in DC built in 1895 because every year the annual property taxes kept rising, thus forcing me out.  The house also needed repairs.  So I sold it and bought this house where I am now living with my son.  I wish I still lived in DC to be able to accommodate the GAO fellows, who could even walk there from my home.
I really enjoyed having them and hope they find accommodations, but anything in the Capitol Hill area where I used to live is now very pricey.
You might even say that I was priced out myself. 

If you want to find out more about my life now at age 88, check my blog honduraspeacecorps2.blogspot.com

I have not been back to Honduras, where I once served in the Peace Corps as a health volunteer, for over 2 years now.  I used to serve in Honduras as a volunteer Spanish medical interpreter, but I went there on my own and can no longer afford that now.  I still speak Spanish, as I have native fluency, and I also worked on-call as a Spanish medical interpreter in hospitals back in DC, but no one around here speaks Spanish except the proprietors of the local Mexican restaurant. 

I am not fond of our current president, but my son voted for him as did many other people, which why he is the president right now.

Tell me what's going on with you and your family these days and please send me a photo of you with your family. 

Best wishes, Barbara  (I sent him my photo giving a new wheelchair I had brought her to a woman in Honduras.)