Jabday

Red-letter day: Karen and I got our first Covid jab. It turned out to be the Pfizer vaccine. Our next jab is scheduled, at this point, for July 30. The receptionist I spoke to agreed that this could change - we could get it sooner.

We went to the Agriplex in the Western Fair Grounds. It's a very slick operation with tons of volunteers guiding people, taking information, answering questions. I was in and out inside 25 minutes, Karen the same. 

We wondered if part of the speed was down to the fact that some people were not keeping the appointments they'd booked. We noticed some of the folks doing the jabbing were sitting twiddling their thumbs. There were no line-ups and no delays when I went through. 

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It's another lovely day today. It was cool and cloudy in the morning, but cleared before noon and the temperature climbed to 21 or higher. 

I got out for my exercise in the morning. The Douglass story continues. Today's passages were all about John Brown, the raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown's martyrdom and the repercussions for Douglass. He was initially implicated in the plot because documents of Brown's discovered after he was arrested included letters from Douglass. An arrest warrant was issued for him. He fled to Canada first, then to England for six months. 

Most of what was shown in The Good Lord Bird appears to have been factual. But it didn't depict the aftermath for Douglass. He wasn't just hunted (albeit briefly) by federal and Virginia officials. He was also accused by Brown's sons and other survivors of the raiding party of cowardice and welching on a promise to join them. Blight seems fairly sure this was simply not true, that Douglass made clear to Brown at their last meeting that he would not join them, and that he thought the plan misguided and doomed. 

A highly politicized congressional inquiry into the raid concluded that Brown was just a crazy old man working on his own. Douglass was off the hook, and returned to America after a relatively brief sojourn in Britain, where he of course went on the speaking circuit.

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No afternoon walk today - unless I go out after finishing this post. I did work on more Lisbon 2016 photos. This one shows the National Pantheon, the Westminster Abbey of Portugal where the country's great and good are entombed. As we didn't know most of the figures buried there, the inside was kind of boring, but the outside was impressive. (This is a stitched-together panorama.) 

The rest were taken at the Azulejo Museum, a repository of works in the typically Portuguese majolica ceramics method. The first is of the chapel in the former convent, also a stitched-together panorama.