Real summer?

I've decided my problem is that I don't have enough hours in the day.

I got up late today - 7:40 - after a not-great night of sleep and went into a Portal call with Caitlin over breakfast. It lasted over an hour and a half. (She was in a chatty mood: Louis was off with Carrie, Bob was at work.) By the time I got out for my morning exercise, it was past 11.

Frederick Douglass has lost his intellectual help meet, Julia Griffiths, who has gone back to England. She will soon be replaced by a new female collaborator, the German feminist and abolitionist Ottilie Assing. Part of the passage today was a literary analysis of My Bondage and My Freedom, part was about the evolution in Douglass's political thinking and strategies. 

A bunch of things have happened to roil reformers. The Fugitive Slave Act (1850) continues to be the biggest upset, but Missouri and the Kansas Territory have now been permitted to have slaves, an extension of the slave holding territory, and the Dred Scott Supreme Court case has found against Scott, a recaptured fugitive who was suing for his freedom. 

The grounds given in the decision were baldly racist. Douglass seems almost to have taken a worse-is-better position on Dred Scott, arguing that it will hasten the end of slavery because of the outrage it has elicited in the north. He is now deeply involved in party politics, but flip-flops a bit. 

At election time, he votes and advocates for the newly formed pro-abolition (but pragmatic) Republican party. The rest of the time continues to support the positions espoused by Gerrit Smith's more purist Liberty party. (It's interesting that the GOP was originally the anti-racist party in America, while the Democrats supported the pro-slavery south.)

Just at the end of today's passage, Blight starts to talk about John Brown and the raid on Harpers Ferry. So I've got that excitement to look forward to tomorrow.

*

The rest of my accomplishments today were fairly paltry. I did read the paper, although it only made me very angry. Two stories in The Globe about police brutality in Peel region - west of Toronto - had my blood boiling. 

In one, an elderly south Asian man with mental health issues was shot dead in his apartment by a four-man SWAT team because he was waving a kitchen knife and coming towards them. The police watch-dog determined no charges should be laid or disciplinary actions taken against the officers.

In the other, a 17-year-old black man had his car rammed by police and was violently arrested because they believed he was a suspect in a high-profile kidnapping case. The boy didn't look anything like the suspect, other than the fact that he was black, so was obviously racially profiled. It didn't sound like anything would happen in that case either. The young guy was traumatized, his family says. Will he get any kind of compensation, or even an apology? Probably not.

And then we had The Globe's resident right-winger, Andrew Coyne, characterizing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's call for a global minimum corporate tax - a brilliant policy that would eliminate tax competition among countries - as "a global tax cartel." Sticks and stones, Andrew, sticks and stones. Never mind. Biden is raising corporate taxes in America anyway, and expects to raise $2.5 trillion to pay for infrastructure. It's about time! 

I did make our dinner as well. 

*

I got out for a wee ramble in the late afternoon, down to Harris Park, up to Blackfriars, across the bridge and back along the other side of the river. On this side, I was stopped by a couple of old dudes sitting on a bench on Ridout near the bridge. (Well, they were quite possibly younger than me, but you know what I mean.) The one called out, 'Did you get any good bird shots?' I stood and talked to them for five minutes or so. 

The one guy who did most of the talking - big guy with beard and long-ish hair, bracelets on his wrist, wearing a button vest and a strange porkpie-like leather hat - claimed to have seen and photographed many birds recently along the path, including an owl and migratory birds that I think he called 'masks' and hawks with their prey. He also claimed to have caught and released in Victoria Park 28 squirrels, with which he was hoping to attract birds of prey. He was eventually rewarded by getting shots of a hawk eating a squirrel in the park.

Might have been all bullshit, but equally might not have been. The guy did have verbal diarrhea, though. At the end, he was talking about the baseball team, in which I have almost zero interest. I finally had to walk away, waving, while he was in mid-sentence. 'Enjoy the fine weather,' I said over my shoulder. 

The guy was on a bike. He later passed me on the path, and stopped up ahead and was leaning on the railing. Well before I drew even with him or could properly hear him, he was nattering. As I came up, he said, 'Fabulous view,' pointing, I think, to Labatt's Park. 'Yeah, it's a lovely park,' I said and kept walking, a little faster. He was still talking.

I did take pictures, of course.

Eldon House: magnolia buds

Harris Park: squill carpet

Harris Park: spring

Harris Park: squill carpet squared

*

And I did work on one photo from our 2016 winter away. I call it 'Lisbon, Unidentified Church'.

Okay, so I didn't do nothing. What in fact didn't I get to do that I wanted to? Well, I didn't read any of either of my books. The Hidden Life of Trees has been languishing unread on my ebook reader for a few days now, the library loan soon to run out. And I didn't even look at a crossword puzzle. 

See what I mean? Not enough hours in the day.