happenings

we had dinner at el tigre tonight. the neighborhood was hopping. the reason being they are working on the road into el callejon. several dump trucks arrived with caliche and dumped it on the side of the road. apparently, it is up to the people living there to spread the caliche out. no construction workers provided, it's a do-it-yourself thing. they won't pave over this either. it will just get packed down really tightly over time by cars going over it. life in a 3rd world country for sure.....

my mom arrives tomorrow! it's quite a trip to get here.... charlottesville to cincinnati to newark (overnight there) and then on to puerto plata! i haven't seen her since may, so i am quite looking forward to seeing her! she's been following the blog and getting excited to see firsthand the things that we have been writing about and doing. it will be interesting to see what she thinks of it here.

we have had a busy past few days. over the weekend we had a C21 training session. we actually did learn quite a few things and found it to be helpful. we got a chance to put it into practice today with a client. we have gone out a few times as a team with clients - and today was one of those times. the clients were not ready to buy and were looking way beyond their price range, but it was a good experience for us to try out some new ways of working with clients. wish we knew then what we know now!

brad pitt and angelina jolie have been in the DR, filming a movie along with robert deniro and matt damon. the movie is "the good shepherd". now i am not much of a celebrity watcher, but i think we both have had our moments where we have thought, maybe we should have gone to santo domingo to possibly catch some of this filming. i mean brad pitt and angelina, come on, they would be quite something to see in person! when we were in santo domingo in the fall, they were preparing to film the movie version of "miami vice". it seems like the DR is becoming a popular place to film - particularly the colonial zone.

we went out to the lot today in perla marina to see if the guy we hired had finished out the work on clearing lot. of course he hadn't. we're about 3/4 of the way through the job. the overgrowth has been chopped down. now the stuff needs to be piled up into one area. of course we get a song and dance from the guy who helped us hire his friend to do the work. apparently, some sort of bug is biting the gardener dude and he can't finish the piling up of the overgrowth. WHATEVER! it is of course a tactic to get us to pay more money. the lot looks a lot better though at this point.