Today, my darling grandson, Louis Robert Blackwell Baines, turned three. We've already had multiple videos of him opening his presents - very diffidently opening his presents, I thought.
To lead off this post, here are a few of my favourite pictures of the boy from past visits. Well, okay, quite a few. How's a guy to choose?
I need to some new ones. Get me that second jab! I wanna go to England.
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Yesterday was a write-off. I slept very badly the night before, woke a little after four and never went back to sleep - not sure why.
I have noticed, though, that if I have a long sleep in the first part of the night - and that night I slept from 11:30 to 4:10, when on a normal night, I could be up twice in that interval - I often have trouble going back to sleep. It's almost as if my body is saying, 'Okay, you've had almost five hours, that's enough.'
I have wondered if the epidemic of sleep deprivation that is so much written about now - of which Karen and I are sufferers - might be partly misdiagnosis. Do we really all need seven to eight hours? I sometimes feel better and more energetic on days when I have less.
Four and a half hours is never going to be enough, though.
That said, I did my usual 35-minute fast walk in the morning yesterday, I had a 40-minute nap in the afternoon, stayed awake until almost 11:30 last night - and I feel more or less fine today, just a bit weary. I was able to do my usual 5K run in the morning.
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It's the late 1880s and Frederick Douglass, now in his 70s and starting to slow, accepts a diplomatic post from the new Republican president, Benjamin Harrison. He is sent as "minister" to the Republic of Haiti, the part of Hispaniola governed by descendants of rebellious slaves.
The new administration wants to establish a refueling port somewhere in the Caribbean to support its merchant marine and has zeroed in on one in Haiti, Mole Saint-Nicolas. Part of Douglass's brief is to negotiate an exclusive lease on the port. The mission goes badly - not, if Blight is to be believed, because of any failure on Douglass's part- and he eventually resigns and returns home to retirement, and recrimination from enemies over his supposed poor performance in Haiti.
Douglass was chosen because he was a black man who would presumably inspire trust in the island nation's black government, which had just changed after a violent coup. Douglass was perhaps too sympathetic to his host's sensitivities over matters of sovereignty. He also flat-out disagreed with the policy of some in the administration of using intimidation and, if necessary, force to get its way.
He was saddled with a hawkish military man, Admiral Bancroft Gherardi, as co-negotiator. At one point during the process, seven American war ships were docked in Port-au-Prince harbour. Gherardi made the further mistake of raising the spectre of manifest destiny doctrine, suggesting it was America's "destiny" to occupy Mole Saint-Nicolas. The Haitians turned down the lease proposal, and Douglass went home.
In the years immediately following this misadventure, Douglass vigorously defended himself in writings and speeches from critics who accused him, often in racist terms, of failing the mission, of insufficient loyalty to his country and of general incompetence.
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I didn't have a lot of energy for anything yesterday, but did work on some photographs - some from a late afternoon ramble the day before. I walked east on Central Ave. and across Colborne into Old North. I'm not quite as pleased with the day's output as I had been on my first day of shooting Old North homes and gardens, but I did get a few I liked.
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I also worked on re-editing pictures from our 2013 winter away in the Southwest of the US. The pickings were sometimes slim as I hit more folders decimated by the file corruption I described earlier. In some folders, most of the pictures were spoiled.
Near the end of our time in Tucson, we got around to exploring the Barrio Historico, an old, predominantly Mexican neighbourhood just south of the city centre. It's mostly low-rise adobe row houses, some with blank street fronts, like these. In the first picture, the small sign on the yellow door on the left tells callers to enter via the patio at the back.
Canyon de Chelly was the next stop. I took lots of pictures there. We loved the place, but I couldn't find any shots in the folders of raw files that were both free from corruption and from which I hadn't already made reasonable pictures.
Next it was Santa Fe, which disappointed us a little, I think. There are a few good museums, though, including the Museum of International Folk Art, where I photographed these south Asian marionettes.
From there, we drove through mountains to Taos, the famous artist's colony where Georgia O'Keeffe spent time before settling on her own property not far away. One of my favourite subjects was the view from the Rio Grande Gorge bridge on US64, with the Guadelupe Mountains in the background.
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