Wednesday, May 21, 2008

No Time

I've wanted to write about several topics recently, but have had no time.  Not sure why, but suddenly I've been up to my ears in projects.  Today I'd better get out with the weed eater if I want to stay ahead of the game in the yard maintenance department.  The recent rains haven't helped--I've been waiting for the grass to dry before I work, but that simply hasn't happened.  I can't afford to wait any longer.

We just started with a new person to clean our house, and the problem of finding good workers has been on my mind a lot.  But I haven't had the time to post on it.

Last night, Marizin Espinosa gave me URLs for some other publications, such as La Crítica. La Estrella and others.  I'll get those up when I can.  I also have to update the URL for thePotrerillos Infoplaza blog--she's been working hard on that.

Reading La Prensa as my self-improvement exercise in increasing my Spanish literacy has bee interesting.  If you disregard the near-total lack of meaningful political news and look for other interesting topics, , you can find them.  There was an excellent article on recycling the other day, another good one on Sunday, I think, about Panama City's museums and their neglect.  I'm looking forward to reading the other periódicos for a different viewpoint.

But it's weed eater time today.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reading the newspaper is a good idea for improving Spanish, but I just haven't been able to forse myself to do it.

Joyce said...

I know--"force" certainly is the operative word here. What I have found that helps is to just print out an article that even looks vaguely interesting and save it to read later. I truly dislike spending a lot of time at the computer. I find it uncomfortable for reading. Still like my hard copy!

I find that I have more patience and am far more likely to look up words in the dictionary with a hard copy. Also, given the way I'm doing Spanish "classes", once every two weeks for an hour with our friends, if I run across a phrase I just can't figure out or want to know why a certain construction was used, I can highlight it and ask Maritza. That worked out really well last night. I had no idea what a "gusano barrenador" was--"gusano" is the general name for fly or caterpillar larvae but nothing in the dictionary for "barrenador". Turns out that's the term for the screwworm, an incredibly nasty parasite that plagues primarily cattle but can be a problem with dogs and humans as well. I found out so much from Ricardo that I intend to do a separate post about it. Sometime.

Joyce