Good Friday to you

 A sunny, cool spring day. The temperature topped out at 4C, but there was a bit of wind too, which made it feel cooler still.

Managed both my outings today. It was a run in the morning, with Frederick Douglass, of course. The story continues. He's still barnstorming, still encountering adoring audiences and racist thugs. He has started a newspaper with a black Harvard-trained medical doctor as his co-editor, and has moved his family to Rochester NY. 

His great mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the main abolitionist organ, the American Anti-Slavery Society's The Liberator, is angry with him for starting the new all-black newspaper, which will compete for funding and readers with The Liberator. He's also hurt that Douglass, he thinks, has shown little concern for a lengthy illness Garrison fell into while they were on the speaking circuit together.

Douglass's break with the doctrinaire non-violent, "moral-suasionist" AASS seems inevitable.

In the afternoon, it was a brief ramble around the holiday-dead downtown - with little to show photographically. Not nothing, of course, just...little.

Clarence St.

Alleyway off King St. There was a junky cooking crack a little further along. I quietly turned and went back the way I'd come.

Queen's Ave.

Queen's Ave.

*

I continued with The Hidden Life of Trees. Author Peter Wohlleben talks about them as if they were human. He's a bit of a romantic about trees, surprising given that he started his career in forestry looking after the interests of the logging industry. Now he manages a small forest owned by a town - which is still harvested, I gather, but he uses much more progressive, tree-friendly husbanding practices.

The passages I was reading today talked about how some deciduous trees in forest settings "decide" as a group when they will procreate. They don't produce seeds every year, and they evidently "decide" the year before whether they will or not. 

The reason trees take a year, or more off, scientists believe, is that it's a way to discourage herbivores such as deer and - in Germany - wild boar, which eat the seed nuts. When the trees in a forest don't produce nuts, deer and boar populations crash. Then when the trees do procreate again, more of the seeds are left on the ground to germinate. 

In forests, all the trees of one species procreate at exactly the same time, further evidence, Wohlleben says, that trees communicate. 

In the initial chapters he explained various ways trees communicate. One is by scents emitted and carried on the wind that alert other trees of danger or beckon predators that like to feed on the insects that eat the tree's leaves. 

Another is by electrical impulses passed painfully slowly over underground root connections as well as over intricate fungus networks that connect trees over vast distances. It sounds a bit like science fiction sometimes - or fantasy: the real-life Ents from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. 

*

I continued with my project of renovating winter 2016 photos. The Lutes arrived in Valencia on March 10. We spent a couple of days showing them around - mostly the Fallas sights. Then we were off across the country in a rented van, with the first stop Granada for the Alhambra.

Churro maker at stall by the Norte train station

Fallas tableau in Ruzafa neighbourhood

The Alhambra, I've decided, is probably the most impressive ancient site/ruin I've seen. It's a palace and fortress complex, originally built in 889 on the remains of Roman fortifications, abandoned, then renovated and rebuilt in the mid-13th century by the Arab Nasrid emir Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar of the Emirate of Granada. The gardens, architecture and artwork are all exquisite.