ThePlagueYears

Another day with no blogging yesterday. Tsk-tsk.

When I started this thing, I conceived of it as a way to fill time, keep myself somewhat disciplined and record what was going on in this the second year of the plague. 

Two problems: nothing's going on - not in my life anyway - and it's starting to feel like a chore. I doubt anyone actually reads the thing, except maybe Karen, occasionally. If I'm just doing it for myself - which is fine - why do it as a public blog where I can't exactly let it all hang out, as we used to say? 

Maybe it's the feeling of a millennial change today that's got me thinking this way. Yesterday I finally reached the end of the interminable audiobook I've been listening to while exercising, since March: David W. Blight's 900-plus-page Pulitzer-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

Poor Fred was active up until the very last day, speaking and writing, railing against the injustices suffered by blacks in America - many of the same injustices, if more blatant and brutal, that they still suffer today. He keeled over in his front hallway with a massive heart attack, aged 77, and was pronounced dead at the scene. His wife, Helen, was with him. Not a terrible way to go.

He lay in state where dead presidents had lain, was eulogized by every prominent black person in America and many whites, was of course dismissed by racists in unabashedly scurrilous terms- and buried in his old home town of Rochester, despite having lived in Washington for over 20 years. The end.

So I went looking yesterday for something else to listen to. The compromise choice was D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose, an American. I'd never heard of it or her, and could find no mainstream reviews online, but the topic sounded interesting. It's about women, of mostly French birth and background, who were recruited by a British secret department to drop into France and help organize the resistance against the Nazis.

After the measured, erudite gravity of David Blight's book, it's a splash of cold water. It's a bit  sensationalist, written almost like a novel, with detailed descriptions of characters and meetings that Ms. Rose is clearly imagining based on what is known of the people and circumstances. For all that, it comes across as carefully researched. And it's kind of fun so far. I fear it could bog down or, more likely given what we know of the fates of French resistance fighters, become quite harrowing.

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I also finished my review of winter 2013 photos from the American southwest in the last post. I moved on yesterday to winter 2017, which we spent partly in Lanzarote in the Canaries and partly in Malaga on the south coast of the Spanish mainland. Here are a few of the photos I found worth taking a second look at.

Haría: city hall square

Haría: city hall square

Haría: bizarre rooftop sculpture garden

Viewpoint at north end of the island: Isla Graciosa lying just off the coast

Punta Mujeres - where our Airbnb was

Punta Mujeres - where our Airbnb was

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Yesterday, in the afternoon, I went to the LCBO at Wellington and Grand to pick up some wine Karen had ordered. Afterwards I drove up to the old hospital lands just east of Wellington. They're slated for redevelopment. I had ridden my bike through there the week before and thought it might be worth taking some pictures of the old Edwardian hospital buildings. It probably would be worth taking some good pictures, but I didn't really come up with any.

The building I spent most time photographing was War Memorial Children's Hospital (1917). As a child with a rare bone disorder that caused her feet to break easily, Karen had stayed there on one occasion for three weeks, she thinks, or longer. 

She remembers being annoyed that she had to go to school at the hospital, but was also still expected to do homework for her regular class, in the Advancement program which she'd by this time begun. The hospital school was basically "babysitting," she said, "to keep us out of the way of the nurses."

It'll be interesting to see what they make of this building when they come to redevelop. Some of the buildings have been torn down, but the developers are supposed to be incorporating the three surviving structures. We've heard that one before, of course.