The Pronoun Blues
Here are some examples from the May/June 2020 issue of Writer’s Digest: “…every author has to come up with their individual voice.” WD interview with Jenny Lawson p.44 “…everybody when they start out tries to…
Correction in the ESL/EFL Classroom—Experience Conflicts with Research
Research-based best practice suggests that making pronunciation corrections is at best a waste of time, and at worst discouraging to students. At first glance, this seems true because when I make corrections, sure enough, students…
Books I Read Recently – Mini-Reviews
Like many of us bookworms, I’ve been reading a lot during this stay-at-home order. Here in Ajijic, my friends and I usually buy used books and pass them around. Once in a while, we’ll get…
Meditation in California and Mexico
A couple of weeks ago I was listening to one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Gil Fronsdal, of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. IMC is not too far from where I used…
Medical Care in Mexico
I live in a small town in Mexico. However, I have read that the town has the largest expat community in the world. All I know is the traffic is bad in the summer, worse…
Losing Beckie
I’m reading Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a fabulous memoir by Alexandra Fuller. It takes place in Africa—Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. Just shy of half-way through the book—spoiler alert—the narrator is supposed to…
Chepa
Chepa is my Spanish speaking partner. Every week, she patiently corrects my Spanish and slows down her Spanish so I can understand it. Even though she has a hard life, she’s unfailing patient, polite…
What Harley Taught Me
I felt so virtuous bringing home a large shelter dog after my darling Myla died. I had walked this dog—an Afghan hound mix–when I volunteered at the shelter—another thing I felt virtuous about. Too much…
National Novel Writing Month 2019
The official goal of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is 50,000 words of a novel—1667 words per day. My goal, however, was to write every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’d been suffering from writer’s block…
Confessions of a Convenience Vegan
Vegan is such a loaded word. It means no meat or dairy, for sure, but also no leather purses or shoes, and a generally conservationist lifestyle. I fall so far short of this ideal that…