Slippery slope?

Oh, dear! Another missed day yesterday. It was a down day altogether: rainy and cool - so no afternoon walk.

Most of the day - or at least the usefully-spent part of it -was taken up with processing pictures I had taken on a late afternoon walk Sunday. That day turned out much nicer than forecast: mild with some sun. I rambled over to Blackfriars and shot more blossoming trees. They are just spectacular this year. 

Karen and I were talking about this yesterday. She thinks they actually are more impressive this year than last, probably because of the different weather patterns. Which may well be. But I also wonder if we're just more receptive and observant of them because we don't have a heck of a lot else going on in our lives. And I've been particularly attentive because trying to photograph them.

Karen and I read a Ted Talk article recently about how to age "joyfully." One of the recommendations was to have and give flowers, that they actually trigger chemical reactions - oxytocin production - that make us feel better. It's speculated that is is possibly an evolutionary effect, that early humans figured out that where there were blossoms, especially on trees, later there would be edible fruit. 

In any case, here's some of what I got.

Ridiculously gorgeous. Not the pictures, the trees. And keep in mind, this is all within about six blocks of our building, going in one direction only. The trees, as the pictures show, seem more laden with blossoms this year, more densely packed.

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I did get out for my exercise walk yesterday in the morning, and ran today - up to Gibbons Park and back. I'm still, as ever, listening to Frederick Douglass's story as told by David Blight in his Pulitzer-winning autobiography of the great man. What a life it was!

He is old now. After Garfield's election in 1880, Douglass is demoted - sort of - from Marshall of DC to Recorder of Deeds, another lucrative civil service job. His recognition by successive Republican governments earns him some enmity and criticism from within the black and progressive communities, who accuse him basically of selling out to the Republican party. 

They are also critical of his nostalgic return visits to some of the haunts of his youth, where he engages with the descendants of the slave owners who abused him. They, to be fair, treat him with at least the respect of inviting him into their homes. But some press reports suggest Douglass is kowtowing. 

The criticism directed at him is made more pointed by his rampant nepotism. His children are all employed in one way or another at some point by the Deeds office. Blight dismisses this corruption as the expected norm in 19th century Washington, but it certainly does not go without notice or criticism in the press of the day, including in the black press.

There is much upheaval in his personal life in the early 1880s. Grandchildren die of childhood diseases. Ottilie Assing finally gives up on Douglass after some bitterness between them and leaves for Germany, never to return. And then his wife of 45 years, Anna, the silent partner in his enterprise, dies after being sickly for a few years and finally suffering a stroke. 

Anna Douglass

Douglass is devastated. He's also beginning to slow down, but still can rise to the occasion with a stirring speech, as at an Emancipation Day banquet in Washington. He is revered by the black community, but not universally. Younger black leaders are beginning to chip away at his authority as the main spokesperson for the community.

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Karen and I have been watching a new (to us) detective series, The Brokenwood Mysteries, that we both quite like. It's from New Zealand. It's well written with amusing characters. Maybe a bit Midsomer Murders-ish in its slightly tongue-in-cheek tone, although smarter and better acted. 

The lead is the deceptively clever but portly and slightly dissolute Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Shepherd. He's relocated to the fictional Brokenwood, an idyllic small semi-rural community, after the first episode in which he was sent from the city to solve a crime there. (The show is filmed in the Aukland area, with a town called Warkworth serving as the titular setting.) 

His partner is smart, pretty, thirty-something Kristin Sims who talks back to her boss with apparent impunity. There's a young male detective constable who gets all the joe jobs - he's quite amusing too, a bit of a lad, not too bright. And then there's the ne'er-do-well, part-Maori Jared who is Mike's neighbour and confidential informant.

We're getting Brokenwood on  Acorn, a service that streams mostly British TV and some movies. We've been getting Acorn free with our never-cancelled membership in the library we joined in Tucson when we were there in 2013. I've just discovered the library is losing Acorn, but Brokenwood is also available on Hoopla, a streaming service with similar content that many Canadian libraries offer, including ours. (We could also subscribe to Acorn for $7.49 a month.)