Existential angst - the blog, not me...

Another day of no blogging yesterday. Tsk-tsk!

When I started this back in January, the idea was that it would fill in some time, help me stay somewhat disciplined and give me a chance to relate what was happening in the second year of the Plague.

Two problems: there's nothing happening - not in my life anyway - and the blogging is starting to feel like a chore. I doubt anyone is actually reading the thing - except maybe Karen, occasionally. So if I'm just writing it for myself - which is no bad thing - why do it in a public blog where I can't let it all hang out, as we used to say?

Maybe it's the feeling of millennial change that has me thinking this way today. Yesterday, I finished the interminable audiobook I've been listening to since March during my daily exercises: David W. Blight's 900-odd-page biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

Frederick Douglass is no more. He was active speaking and writing right up to his last day on the planet, railing about injustices against African Americans - the same injustices, if less blatant and brutal, that blacks still suffer in America today.

He keeled over in the front hall of his suburban DC mansion, aged 77 - massive heart attack. He was pronounced dead at the scene. His wife, Helen Pitts Douglass, was with him. Not a terrible way to go. 

He lay in state where dead presidents had lain, in three different cities. He was eulogized by every prominent black leader in America, and many whites - and was of course dismissed and criticized by white supremacist antagonists in unrepentantly racist terms.

The end.

So I had to find a new book to listen to. The compromise choice, which I started listening to on my run this morning, was D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose, an American author, from 2019. I'd never heard of it or her and couldn't find any mainstream reviews of the book, but the subject matter sounded interesting. It's about the women, mostly of French birth and background, who were recruited by a branch of the British secret service to parachute into France and help organize, train, supply and fight with the Resistance.

After the sedate, erudite gravity of Blight's book, this is a splash of cold water. It's sensationalist, written almost like a novel with richly detailed descriptions of scenes and conversations that it's clear the author is imagining based on what is known of the real people and circumstances. 

So far, it's quite compelling. I can see that it could bog down or - perhaps more likely given the subject matter - become somewhat harrowing. We'll see.

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I also, in the most recent installment of this blog, posted the final shots recovered from my winter 2013 photos of our sojourn in Tucson and the drive home through New Mexico. So yesterday, I turned to photos from winter 2017. We spent part of that winter in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, part of it in Malaga on the south coast of mainland Spain.

Thank goodness, the folders with my raw files appear to be free, so far, of the corruption problem that  ruined so many of the Tucson pictures. Here's a sampling of the first few I worked on.

Haría: city hall square

Haría: city hall square

Haría: strange rooftop sculpture garden

Hilltop viewpoint at north end of the island with view of Isla Graciosa

Isla Mujeres on the northeast coast, the town where our Airbnb was

Isla Mujeres on the northeast coast, the town where our Airbnb was

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Yesterday afternoon, I drove over to the LCBO at Wellington and Grand to pick up some wine Karen had ordered. On the way back, I went up to the hospital lands just east of Wellington. I'd ridden my bike through there the other day and thought it might be worth taking pictures of the old Edwardian era hospital buildings, some of which have been left standing, boarded up and decaying. It would have been worth taking good  pictures, but I didn't get any of those. 

The building I spent most time photographing was the War Memorial Children's Hospital, built in 1917. When Karen was a child, she suffered from a rare disorder that caused her to break bones in her feet easily. At one point, she was hospitalized at War Memorial, for three weeks, as she remembers, possibly longer. 

She remembers being annoyed that she had to go to the school in the hospital, but was still expected to do the homework for her regular class, part of the Advancement program which she had by this time started on. The hospital school was "just babysitting," she said. "It was just to keep us out of the nurses' hair."

Here's what the place looks like today. 

The developers say they're going to incorporate some of the surviving buildings into the new residential, business and recreation facilities they're building. We'll believe that when we see it.