Monday, January 27, 2025
This blog posting had already been written and was ready to post, then simply vanished, poof! so I’ll try to reconstruct it. Let’s see what I can remember. I won’t wait to post this time for fear of losing it all again.
Vance and Trump have revealed their official portraits.
Mr. Trump seemed to think that issuing edicts in the middle of the night would help him sneak them through. Doesn’t he know that he is being monitored 24/7?
I have a family member who voted for Trump, but won’t say who.
Donald Trump was temporarily forced to bring a planeload of deportees back from Colombia, the birthplace of my son Jonathan, because it wasn’t given permission to land. Trump had the plane turn back, then threatened Colombia with a loss of US aid and many other privileges, so that the Colombian president finally succumbed, allowing the deportees to land and disembark.
On January 26, Coolfont, the hotel in Berkeley Springs, W Va. where my son worked, burned down overnight.
The giant pandas at the national Zoo recently enjoyed frolicking in our rare “viral” snowfall.
Cold and snow notwithstanding, the 2025 “March for Life” attracted some 150,000 participants, though estimates vary. Vance spoke to the crowd in person, Trump by video call. 
As my readers already know, I do not support “abortion rights”, rather the right of any individual at any stage of human development from conception to natural death to keep on living regardless of past behavior.
This sign has been in my front yard for over a year now.
This aerial photo shows displaced Gazans walking toward Gaza City on Jan. 27, 2025, after crossing the Netzarim corridor from the southern Gaza Strip. Is the war now finally over, or at least paused? Ever since knowing several Palestinian refugees displaced at the time of Israel’s original founding, my sympathies have been with them. I’ve had a number of Jewish friends, including some from Israel, who share my feelings.
Like a some better-known women whose husbands suddenly left them for younger women after more than 20 years of marriage, my own experience was not unique in that regard. What was unique in our case is that my husband was totally blind and had never worked a day in his life before we married back when I was only 21. After my birth family had finally come to accept my marriage, my husband then decided he was in love with a younger woman, someone who helped him daily in his office, so they flew to Las Vegas, where he divorced me and married her both on the same day. He also took all our joint funds with him, leaving me without a penny, soon discovered when my check bounced at the local grocery store. My kids and I delivered phone books pulled along in wagon to get a few dollars. Eventually, I obtained child support, but refused alimony as I didn’t want to be beholden in any way to my ex. There was no regular child visitation, but I do remember once taking the children to the home he shared with his new wife to pick up Christmas presents while I waited outside with the car heater running, listening to music on the radio. I had a serious suitor back then, but hesitated to marry ever again.
Once about 3 years after he’d left, my ex-husband called me to ask about some of my articles about Cuba appearing in the Washington Post. We carried on a cordial conversation for about half an hour. When I called him back, his wife told me curtly that she would pass along any messages, but we never spoke again. Nor when he died in 1999 was I invited to his funeral or even mentioned in his obituary, but attended anyway, to the apparent shock of his second wife. There I saw their young daughter for the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Plato's_Retreat
At some point in my single life, I went with a male friend to Plato’s Retreat, a sex club in Manhattan, where a man could enter only with a woman, but women were welcome to arrive unescorted. Everyone went inside naked. The whole scene did not appeal to me and was not particularly arousing, so I spent the whole time swimming alone in a heated pool while my male escort did not seem very turned on either. In fact, most people appeared rather bored, perhaps as they might have felt at a nudist gathering.
While I was raising my children by myself, I suffered a loss from which I have never fully recovered, the accidental and untimely death of our oldest son, Andrew, whose gravestone rests now in my back yard.
In 2000, at age 62, I joined the Peace Corps as a health volunteer in Honduras, excused from Spanish classes as I was already bilingual. Hondurans have told me that I don’t have a gringa accent, but not a Honduran accent either. I extended my Peace Corps term to 3 ½ years, returning there every year since with my own health-related projects, including most recently last June. Until the pandemic, I also worked part-time as an on-call Spanish interpreter, but now in my 80s, I no longer care to be with sick people or to travel around on public transportation, so am fully retired. Living alone as I do now, it’s all I can do to go up and downstairs a few times a day and take care of myself.
Very belatedly, I’d now like to pay tribute to my dearly departed friend Robert (never Bob) Turner, who came to me recently in a dream, someone I’d known since childhood. When I last saw him, he was living with his pet cats outside Blacksburg, Va.
Robert Turner. PhD, (1938 - 2021) - Blacksburg, VA
This posting is not identical to the one that had vanished, but that’s OK.
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