Some Of My Favourite Agnes Martin Paintings!

Agnes Martin was born in Macklin SK in 1912 and died in 2004. She was a well known Abstract Expressionist and created many of her works here in SK.  When we drove through Beacon NY on our way to the cabin during our holiday, we stopped at a huge gallery, the Dia Beacon and looked at their large permanent collection of her works.  Here are a handful of my many favourites.  Seeing  all these large paintings hanging in one room gave the space a feeling of serenity due to the subdued colours and simple line and grid designs.

 

 

Incredible NY Buildings From Then and Now

 Everywhere we looked in NYC there were amazing buildings, incredible architecture....we so enjoyed seeing the mass of concrete, steel, brick and architectural creativity!

 

The Chrysler Building

 

The Chrysler Building

Grand Central Station Main Entrance

 

The Constellation depictions on the ceiling inside

The Main Terminal Lobby; a child's red balloon floated away to the ceiling

AKC Museum Of The Dog

Porcelain figures from China

Child's Dog Cart from the late 1800's early 1900's

Mexican Statue

Paintings as well!  Who knew such a place existed two blocks from our suite?

Looking at from afar but otherwise avoiding the Empire State Building

The United Nations Buildings

The old and the mid century and the new.

The Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian

Looks like some architect had one too many.......

The most iconic building of all....ya' knew it was coming, right? hahaha

"Our" New York Church

My husband got onto my computer today and was able to restore a few of the fonts that went missing some months ago thanks to a link in one of the posts that overrode something or other. Don't ask me what happened, I just know he figured out how to restore at least some of my former "funner" fonts.

Somehow we missed getting a photo of the exterior of the old Gothic building housing the Church of the Incarnation that we attended in New York, but my husband did get a couple of photos of the lovely interior. Just gorgeous in all the ornateness.

 

LIttle Cabin In The Woods......

 Slowly photos are trickling in from my husband's phone to my photo files and sometime this weekend my husband will open a Drop Box file so our son can send his own photos from our time away.  One small set of photos I do have already is from our trip upstate to the "cabin" north of Red Hook.  Not being a camper in any way, shape or form, this large luxury cabin was just my style and I am so grateful for our kids taking us there for 4 days. Have a lookee see:

How beautiful is this place, right?

The backyard pathway to the river and swimming holes.

Getting ready for our first bbq meal.

Our son the Grill Master!

Final salad preparations

The nearby Elizaville Diner...Exterior

View from the diner

The interior

Driving to the cabin.....

And to the diner.

Time to go back to the city.

Home, Freezing, Soaked, BRRRRR....First Time Our Furnace Has Been Turned On In Mid September!!!!

What a day, what a day, what a day this has been!!  A good day, but we are completely zonked. It is currently about 7:30pm and my husband has been in bed for the night since 6:10pm, that is how zonked he is!

We were both asleep last night just before 10pm. I woke up at 3:30am, half an hour before the alarm went off and my husband just beat the alarm by seconds....it would have been 1:30am Regina time.  So, I have now been up for 18 hours, but I am still too wired to sleep, so might as well end this trip blog for the present until the photos get moved off my husband's and son's phones for publication here in the hopefully very near future.

We did take time for a decent breakfast even at that early hour to use up some of the leftovers.  Fortunately we had very little food that had to be thrown away.  At 4:50am we were down at the desk checking out and waiting for our taxi to arrive by 5am, the one the front desk staff had booked for us the previous evening. They HAD booked it!  We were there and heard the conversation between the desk clerk and the establishment's regular driver. When the driver was not there by 5:10am and no sign of any cars on the street at all, the front desk clerk told us he would call a Yellow Cab, which was there in about 6 minutes. The clerk was most upset and said it is very weird that this driver was not only not there early, but apparently wasn't going to show up at all.  The Yellow Cab driver, as we drove at breakneck speed toward La Guardia Airport, told us what had likely delayed to the other driver. There was a huge accident on the main freeway coming into our place that had traffic backed up for miles.  As our driver swung down another side street to avoid the pile up, we could see hundreds of cars stranded at a complete standstill and many, many flashing red and blue lights attached to police cars and ambulances.  It is quite possible that if our original driver was also trapped in the slowdown and had he shown up to take us to the airport WE could have been trapped in that horrible traffic mess and possibly been so delayed we might have missed our flight to Toronto.  Bonus #1.

Bonus #2 is that when we got our boarding passes printed up and headed into the LONG lineup to get through security, my dear husband, who pays all kinds of attention to details in airports and such places, noticed as we coiled around and around the pathway set up for the lineup of passengers, a sign that said the passengers were to take TWO different paths to security.  No one else seemed to be seeing the sign and there were only a handful of people waiting to go into that area of security.  My husband told me we were going to take that secondary path.  We ended up behind only ten people waiting to go through security there, rather than a couple of hundred others who remained in the original line up.  Bonus, we got into security quickly and another bonus is that we just happened to have wandered into the section of security that uses the wonderful newer machines that can see and interpret everything in the luggage, only the liquids in their separate bag needed to be removed from our carry ons. We were able to leave our shoes on. While we were waiting our turn to go into this area we glanced over the the folk going into the other security area and noticed they were opening luggage to dump computers and prescriptions along with the liquids into the trays going through x-ray AND they had to take their shoes off, which we didn't have to do.  Definitely a bonus for us, me in particular as I absolutely have to sit down to get my shoes on and there wasn't exactly a plethora of benches once we got our bags back.  Oh, and also part of this airport area bonus is that when we arrived at the airport we had no idea where to go to get our passes printed up.  We just headed for a sign that said Air Canada and had several people sitting at a long counter there, just like any area of an airline that weighs luggage and receives luggage and prints up passes.  There were surprisingly few people there and that was because, as the woman we walked up to told us in no uncertain terms, this was the place where people who are part of a particular Air Canada special elite programme go to check in. It was not for us mere peons. She was not kind. My husband told her that he was very sorry, but that as a visitor to the airport he had no idea whatsoever where else to go for a pass, that there were no visible signs directing us anywhere else, but that he would be happy to go wherever she directed us. She harumphed quite a lot, asked for our passports, printed up our passes and waved us on our way to the departure gates. teehee

Bonus #3 is the most amazing one to me:  We got through getting our boarding passes and security so quickly that we had far more time to wait for our flight than we thought we would. As we sat waiting and wondering how best to fill the time, I got looking at our connecting flight in Toronto.  My husband and I started thinking about how long it might take in Customs in Toronto with the crowds headed that way....so many passengers on several flights early in the morning.  He started remembering how very, very far we would have to walk to even get to Canadian Customs after we landed and then how we had to walk almost as far back the way we had come to get to the national flight departure gates.  It hit us suddenly that, particularly if our flight from New York left even a few minutes late, we were most likely going to miss our connecting flight by quite some time.  We looked at each other in horror, realizing then our booking mistake when we first made plans to travel.  At that exact moment, I looked up and saw another departure gate across the room and the screen behind the desk appeared to be showing yet another flight to Toronto that was leaving 90 minutes ahead of the one we had booked.  I told me weary husband to get over there and find out how full it was and if there was ANY chance at all we could get on that flight instead; to get moving to ask because they were going to start boarding in about fifteen minutes.  Off he went with missionary zeal to talk to the woman at the desk. He returned a few minutes later to tell me that she had agreed to put us on standby and page us if such a thing turned out to be possible.  Not thirty seconds later she paged us, we grabbed our luggage and passports, raced over to her and within seconds she had taken our old boarding passes and printed us new ones for the earlier flight. WOW!!!!  She was even able to seat us together near the back of the plane and there was lots of room in the overhead bins back there for our luggage.

Bonus #4 is that due to our arriving in Toronto so much sooner, we could have lunch at 9:30am at the airport!!  I have to admit that after we got off the plane from La Guardia and realized how heavy our carry ons actually were as we trudged slowly along the incredibly long route to Canadian Customs, we kind of folded energy wise. haha.  We were SO slow that by the time we got there no one from our flight was anywhere in sight! They had all cleared already.  However, that meant we had no line up at all.  Since we had filled out our Declarations online the night before all we had to do was walk right up to a Customs officer's window in the otherwise now completely deserted room, declare two bags of green tea leaves and a bottle of  Yuzu juice, both of which are allowed and very quickly we were trudging back again to find our departure gate for the Regina flight.  We had LOTS of time to stop and eat lunch just after 7:30am Regina time and we found a kind of nice little place with a very tasty breakfast!  Bacon and scrambled eggs and toast and tater tots....my husband was too tired to eat so he wanted a small plate of parmesan fries. Unfortunately they are not on the breakfast menu, but the server took great pity on him when he was so very disappointed and brought him a bowl of tater tots covered in parmesan instead, hahahaha. He really enjoyed it along with 2 Corona Cera! I can't imagine drinking even his no alcohol beer at that time or the morning, but he had helped me carry my very heavy luggage along with his own for the seemingly miles we had walked after our flight, so he deserved a relaxing time and a treat to drink.  He was SO HAPPY to be able to sit down in a comfy booth and have a ton of time to enjoy his food and drink.  It was a lovely surprise.  AND for my blood sugar a big relief. If we had kept on our originally scheduled flight from La Guardia I wouldn't have had time to eat anything between our breakfast at 2am Regina time and our arrival home at 1:30pm other than a small cookie provided on the plane from Toronto.  I would have been in a coma by then because I didn't realize at the time I still had a nut bar in my purse! hahaha That and the cookie would have carried me most of the way, but it would have been pushing it.

Bonus #5: our flight to Regina was absolutely packed full.  We knew from looking at the sheer number of people and their full sized carry ons that there wasn't going to be room for all that luggage in the small sized bins of the Airbus 319. We have flown in those before and it is a nightmare of tiny bins. SO when the inevitable call came offering people free under the plane storage for their carry ons and no one stepped up, my husband and I decided we would do that.  We were flying directly home so the chances of our two bags going missing were pretty slim.  The bonus was that for those of us, all four people whoopee, who stepped up and let our baggage be moved under the plane, we were allowed to board immediately after the business class passengers. We had lots of time to get comfy and watch the rest of the passengers struggling to find space somewhere, anywhere for their bags in those wee overhead bins. In the end the plane was delayed leaving by ten or more minutes because there simply was no way to get everyone's luggage overhead. So, the last ten people to board had nowhere for their bags so one of the flight attendants got a cart and loaded those ten bags on it for transport to the under carriage of the plane.  When we got to Regina to debark it was kind of cool not to have to wrestle heaving carry ons down from the luggage bins.  

Bonus #6: Two friends surprised us by meeting us at the airport to drive us home. We felt loved and not bereft this time when we got to the baggage carousel. They not only drove us home, they stopped at the grocery store for us along the way so we could grab some basics until we get ourselves together over the next couple of days and organize a proper list. How kind and caring is THAT?  And even more so when they themselves are trying to get ready for a big trip to the Maritimes, flying out tomorrow morning at the same ungodly hour we flew out when we started our own trip.  We felt very welcomed home, that's for sure. It took a bit of the edge off missing our kids already and realizing we will not be waking up in Manhattan in the morning.

The one non-bonus in all of this is the crappy weather.  In Manhattan it was between 78F and 86F every day we were there, even when it was raining. When we landed in Regina today it was 59F, pouring, teeming rain and just starting to blow like crazy.  It is September 15 and we actually had to put our furnace on when we got home...THE FURNACE....in mid SEPTEMBER!!! What kind of a crazy place is this, anyway??

My husband was very upset right after we arrived home and he discovered that in his attempt to disconnect some electronics before we left on our trip he had managed to disconnect the television, so not one programme we had set to record actually did.  He was so very upset, but I told him that his bad news had nothing to do with a flood or mice in the basement, so it was no big deal. It is only tv, right?  If you want to know how a programme turns out you go online and look it up. AI has to be good for something, right??  hahaha

It is almost good to be home in some respects, but have to admit it helped a lot that both kids texted us  this evening..... 

Impressions Of The Day

After the worst sleep last night I have had in months I no more felt like going out this morning than I did in jumping off the Empire State Building six blocks away from us. However I forced myself to eat breakfast and get ready for the day. I staggered along the three blocks to Grand Central Station with my husband, collapsed on a slippery plastic seat on the 6 train a couple of minutes later and from there the day was a happy blur of sights and sounds, but tonight I have no stamina left to record the events chronologically in much detail. At Union Station deep below Times Square we transferred to Q train and began the long journey deep into the borough of Brooklyn: flashing past underground stations, flying over Manhattan Bridge, water and boats and the Statue of Liberty glinting in the morning sunshine, descending back underground for half an hour before the train disgorged us onto a narrow pedestrian walkway, mostly deserted of other passengers, with a long walk to the Exit….it reminded us of the deserted, terrifyingly narrow pedestrian train platforms in rural Japan. I was still staggering about trying to clear my fuzzy, exhausted brain but I noticed right away the buildings being only three or four storeys high, the sidewalks far less crowded than in Manhattan, a general welcoming grubbiness and a few trees scattered here and there. We walked for several blocks into this neighbourhood so deep into Brooklyn we were close to Coney Island, and located the reason for this long trip on public transportation: Eichlers! It is a retail store for all things Jewish, a much larger, brighter, more well stocked store than the little hole in the wall shops tucked away on the side streets in Williamsburg where we have done our Jewish accoutrements shopping in the past. The bright lights hurt my eyes as I gazed at rows and rows of books written in Hebrew, music recordings and a huge section dedicated to teaching young children the faith. While I was having visual overload my husband was purchasing a new  prayer shawl and it is some beautiful. He has been looking for a way to revitalize his Daily Office, (Anglican clergy daily prayers) and if this gorgeous, full body enveloping tallit doesn’t accomplish that I don’t know what will! 

By the time he led me out of the bright lights of Eichlers I was about to lose consciousness, but he got me onto a transit bus a block away. We travelled almost to the Coney Island connector bus before getting off this bus, crossing the street and boarding another of the plushy, more expensive express buses to take us miles and miles across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway back to Manhattan. As we flew along the expressway I admit I dozed off for a few minutes and when I came to I was gazing across the water at the Statue of Liberty for the umpteenth time this week. I flopped my tired self off that bus back beside the Bowling Green subway station, beside the Jewish Holocaust Museum, expecting to hop on the subway to immediately go home and go back to bed, but somehow found myself being propelled several blocks farther south along the sidewalk back to the waterfront, past the Staten Island Ferry terminal with its plethora of security guards with sniffer dogs, around to the eastern boardwalk to Pier 11 where my husband gleefully produced two tickets to ride the ferry all around that arm of the East River, eventually docking back at the terminal only a few blocks from home. The trip is a blur of choppy waves, seemingly interminable stops, being forced to sit down topside by a lovely couple from Chicago who were determined I would be better off sitting in a hard chair facing the opposite direction to where we were heading the whole trip, instead of standing comfortably at the rail enjoying the view and keeping my tummy from jumping, who talked incessantly even though all I could hear through the gale force wind was, “Mwaamp, mwaamp, mwaamp” as I tried to keep my heaving, seasick tummy in check. My husband, still standing happily at the rail taking phone photos of the Manhattan, Williamsburg and Green Point skylines, had no idea even at this point, four hours after leaving  home, that I had not overcome my morning stupor was grinning and hollering, “Surprise honey! A ferry ride! Isn’t this great?” Hahaha. He was having the happiest morning ever and who was I to disillusion him? After 45 minutes out on the choppy water we finally docked at home. Getting off the boat and out of the wind….but thank God we’d been sitting outside on the top deck instead of inside on the lower deck where I would have been very ill indeed….I started feeling a bit better; enough better that when my husband took us for lunch at Townhouse Diner I was able to ingest a sandwich and keep it down. No wonder I had been dizzy and ill on the ferry: besides being sleepless most of the previous night, it was at that point six full hours since I had eaten breakfast! No wonder I was so woozy! Thankfully the sandwich helped me feel considerably better. I will never confess to my happy husband, thrilled by both his new tallit and his ferry ride surprise for me, just how wretched and miserable I was feeling from the moment we left home today. He is such a sweetheart and wasn’t able to return upstate to see the Motorcycle Museum or take a trip over to Roosevelt Island, which he was very accepting of, despite how badly he wished to do both things. As far as he is concerned I had as wonderful a day today as he did and once we finally arrived home and had a nice visit with our son I was feeling a lot better. As groggy and fuzzy as my head was today, I managed just fine and I love my husband's attempts to make me extra happy. 😊 Bless him! 

Oh Frick!

 We received a nice surprise this morning! Our son had the morning off so he wondered if he could accompany us to the Frick Museum. Of course we said he could. Since he is extremely familiar with the collection, having worked there several times in the last couple of years lighting various exhibitions, he knew exactly which salons we would enjoy the most. What a joy to see works by Rembrandt and Turner, Veronese, Goya, Hals…..the list goes on. It was a delight for all of us to see our favourite painting: Saint Francis in Ecstasy (Saint Francis in the Desert) by Giovanni Bellini! It was painted around 1475-1480. The painting contains a fair amount of symbolism that my husband enjoys. It was amazing to see the actual painting!! There are rooms filled with oriental porcelain and small bronzes, as well as some incredible medieval works from between the 13th and 15th centuries. The colours of the medieval works are still vibrant: reds and oranges in the Italian works and blues and green favoured by the German painters.

Unfortunately the pigments used by artists in the time of Rembrandt, as well as the use of so much linseed oil, are blackening. Details in many of the paintings of that era are disappearing, fading away to black. The fading colours are called Fugitive Pigments and it is a shame their green, blue and brown vibrancy does not last forever the way the bright medieval pigments seem to. Grateful we saw some of these famous works before the remaining background details blacken into obscurity.

After a delightful couple of hours there admiring the paintings and the lovely fountain featured in the inner courtyard, it was time for lunch. Even though our son has often worked at the Frick he has never eaten a restaurant meal in this most exclusive and expensive area of the entire city. So, he contacted his wife’s aunt who lives in a penthouse only blocks away from the Frick. She suggested the Leo Cafe at the nearby Asia Society Museum. Tucked away at 725 Park Avenue we nearly missed the unassuming looking building. The cafe there was perfect for us: clean, quiet due to a small number of customers, and a short but comprehensive menu. My son had a flank steak sandwich on ciabatta bread with spicy chips,  my husband enjoyed a salmon bowl with a large piece of salmon on a bed of quinoa and assorted cold vegetables, while I had a chicken salad: six large slices of chicken on a bed of shredded curly cabbage, mixed greens, dried shiitake mushrooms, green onions, diced fresh pears and a large amount of slivered papaya. Oh wow, we really enjoyed the clean restaurant, attentive staff, muted sunlight, surrounding greenery, small number of customers and most delicious foods at an incredibly reasonable price. The quiet ambiance was conducive to family visiting before our son had to get back to his studio to continue packing for the move that will now happen early next week….giving us an unexpectedly free day tomorrow to do something on our own that neither of the kids would enjoy. Maybe a ferry ride over to  Staten Island for the day? Could be raining by late afternoon so if we can get ourselves moving in the morning we could get to the Island in time for lunch at Blue, then home before the rain falls. Think I will suggest that to my husband. 

On our way home this afternoon we stopped in at a museum only a block from home: American Kennel Club’s Museum of the Dog. We knew nothing about it and had low expectations, but it was the most fun we have had at such a cute place in ever so long. The walls on the ground floor are set up like a portrait gallery for dogs of any and all breeds. Some of the artists are gifted at realistically capturing the various expressions on their poochy subjects’ faces and the fluid motions of their muscles when walking or running.  There was a large ceramics collection, antique dog collars and leashes,  an interactive video where you can play at being a professional dog trainer, interactive dog recognition and breed histories challenges, a wall covered in drawings and paragraphs about their own dogs written by elementary school children, amazing full sized bronzes and heavy ceramics of several breeds…two full sized ceramic replicas of Dalmatian spotted Great Danes immediately caught my attention. On the top of the three floors of exhibits was an art contest: 20 works of art and photography created by local dog lovers. We were each given a ballot when we paid the entry fee and chose our most favourite from among the twenty. That was fun. I loved a small bronze of a dog carrying a large stick in its jaws, running toward someone with the obvious intent of wanting to play Fetch! It was titled, “Favourite Stick”. My husband voted for a black and white headshot of a rescue bulldog cuddling up head to head with its new owner and it was captioned, “You Chose Me!”  We each took a self photo that was then matched to what breed of dog each of us most resembled. I have done this before several times over the years, in various places. As always I was matched with a bulldog, but my husband turned his head just as his photo was being taken, so he matched with a bulldog as well and I didn’t feel so badly, hahaha. The biggest joy for me was discovering oversized AKC tee shirts for sale in the gift shop! Now I have the extra item of sleepwear I have been needing for the rest of the trip! YES!  👏 

In a couple of hours it will be time for dinner. I would like to return to the sushi shop we went to last week, but am guessing my tired husband will prefer to remain here and finish up the last tomato 🍅 and remaining strips of skinny bacon 🥓 for sandwiches. We shall see whose views win out tonight! Hohoho!

We have finally opened all the windows to try to rid this suite of the disgusting deodorizer that has been making me ill since we arrived. Tonight I will try sleeping on the living room sofa with all three windows open and see if it helps rid me of the overnight congestion. Here’s hoping….

Back In The City

 Sadly we all had to leave the cabin yesterday to return to regular daily life in the city. The kids will return to work and we will try to snag a washing machine and have a laundry day here. 

After feeling so much better the past two days, I am struggling again to sleep here. It is 2:30am and I am wrapped up in a sheet on the living room sofa so I don’t wake my husband by putting on a bedroom light. I am starting to wonder if there is an allergen in this apartment: the laundry soap used on the bedding, some kind of powdered carpet deodorizer in the large throw rugs, a hidden plug in air freshener…I need to try to track down this information because something in here seems to be setting my sinuses off again…a sort of floral odour that is very subtle, but present. Just praying I can figure it out and eliminate whatever it is. I am so disappointed to find myself awake again in the middle of the night and feeling less than well. I think I will pack my nose with Vicks VapoRub to cover up that smell. 

A happy thing though is that a few minutes ago I found a couple of emails from friends at home that were newsy. If I try answering them now I will never get back to sleep, so will wait until tomorrow. 

Having the extra hours at the cabin yesterday made the entire day more relaxed for us all. The kids went swimming again, my husband made baking powder biscuits for brunch, his third day of yummy brunch fixings after pancakes and French toast. We completed a wickedly difficult puzzle…well the other three did. I was the assistant who asked if this or that piece went here or there with a growing degree of accuracy as the days passed. It was a fun project. 

The drive back into the city was along another gorgeous, tree lined highway. We came back into the most northern part of Brooklyn and stopped at an Irish style pub owned by acquaintances of the kids. Lovely pub, mediocre food and a brusque chat with this acquaintance that made me want to box his ears….don’t know what was up with him, but considering the only other customers were a pair of foul mouthed drunks, he could have expressed a bit more interest in the fact that our kids had come so far out of their way to support his business. Grrrrr….mommy noises! It left a nasty bruise on our otherwise happy trip home.

The final trip home was through the city on very busy and crowded streets and byways. The rural highways and some of the city streets seem narrow to us so the tolerances between vehicles are smaller. Travelling for a couple of hours with cars speeding past only inches away was somewhat nerve wracking for us, so we were grateful both our kids are such experienced and aggressive NYC drivers. They drive like everyone else in the city, whereas my husband and I are a bit leery. Our hesitation would irritate the other drivers and potentially cause accidents. 

I don’t know if we were happy or sad last evening as we transitioned abruptly from lakes and trees to skyscrapers and exhaust fumes, but our kids were excited to be back in the city. They are already planning a return to the cabin at the next possible opportunity; perhaps in the winter to enjoy the snow and the lovely looking fireplace. We are most grateful they took us there to share the more rural experience together. It was so much fun, conducive to getting to know our daughter in law better. 

And now, to try to sleep here on the sofa. Praying about these allergies. Too much has gone into the planning and execution of this vacation to have it ruined by my sinuses! 

Our Last Day In The Country Cottage

 A happy surprise for today: our daughter in law was able to arrange to have today’s afternoon meeting on the phone from right here at the cabin. Since new guests are not booked in this evening we have permission to remain here for the day. Our son doesn’t have to be back at work until tomorrow morning. All of us were dreading having to set an alarm for this morning and racing about packing up, the drive home with the stress of possibly being tied up in traffic back in the city and having the worry of making the time deadline for the meeting. Today will now be much more relaxed and perhaps the kids will be able to return to the small lake they discovered yesterday so they can swim some more. I no longer have the hip mobility to swim, unfortunately.

Yesterday we had morning and evening deluges of rain, followed by baking sun. Such a pretty day, with raindrops glistening from the leaves and flowers in the front yard. Two deer graze regularly here, a doe and fawn. As bucolic as that scene is first thing in the morning over breakfast on the front porch, the growing deer population is spreading ticks and Lyme disease throughout the county at a rapid pace. However, I don’t think about that as I sit here in peace watching them enjoying fresh green shoots of grass.

An extra day in the woods watching the deer and getting the occasional burble from the Kill during rare breaks from the humming cicadas…luxury! 

Where We Actually Are Located!

Our beautiful cabin in the woods is in Columbia County near the hamlet of Elizaville, whose claim to fame is a 50’s style diner plunked on a grassy knoll just above a pond at the edge of a feed corn field, the only place of business anywhere in sight for several miles in all directions.  We have just come from a very late lunch at the diner, not having eaten breakfast until after 10am. The kids are upstream at the swimming hole in the Roeliff Jansen Kill that flows along the back edge of this property.  My  husband is working on the puzzle we started a couple of days ago and I am blogging and dozing alternately. Feeling so much better today with using the antihistamines. I slept for 8 hours last night.

In between meals we drove to the Bard College campus for a tour around its lovely green lawns and gardens and campus buildings, hidden among tall leafy, ivy wrapped trees. Twelve years ago our son completed his MFA after enrolling in their intense programme taking up two to three summer months for three summers running. What a treat to finally see this glorious place that confirmed in my son’s mind New York State was where he wanted to live.  We also toured the on campus Hessel Museum and Art Gallery where we were treated to an exhibition of art dealer and abstract artist Dorothy Parsons, long known more as an art dealer….she was instrumental in helping artists such as Jackson Pollock and Agnes Martin become more well known. Although she did not paint her own first abstract painting until the age of 47, she was one of the first female artists to receive acclaim in that genre of work. It was so much fun to see her works from the 1950’s up until the 1970’s. She passed away in 1982, I believe. The exhibition is curated by one of my son’s Bard mentors…the one who first contacted him with an invitation to apply, Amy Sillman. We particularly enjoyed watching two short filmed presentations about Dorothy Parsons put together from old black and white tv interviews where we were able to see and listen to Dorothy Parsons herself. She was known during her lifetime as more of a dealer than an artist in her own right.

We enjoyed driving along today on several of the many rural roads in this area. Intersections to access most of them from the slightly wider connectors like 9G, are nearly as hidden from view as the main rural roads themselves due to the long expanses of thick forest along the main corridors. Once off 9G for example the vistas open up with feed corn fields and small well kept acreages owned often by wealthy New York City families who want to own a couple of horses and a cow during their summer holiday residencies there. Driving for so many miles through these trimmed, mowed and freshly painted houses, BMW’s and Corvettes and Harley Davidsons and huge new 3/4 ton trucks in the driveways, brings to our minds afresh the degenerate, scruffy looking rural areas around our own city, populated by real farmers who work so hard and don’t always have the time or financial resources to keep the home quarter residences and yards looking so pristine. Every property we have seen since leaving the city could be featured on a postcard. It looks most strange to us.

Tonight we will all pack up as much as possible to be ready to leave early in the morning. We will blast off in a reasonable enough time to break for breakfast part way back so our son can rest a bit before the last push back into city traffic. We have a 3pm deadline to get our daughter in law back for a meeting so we can’t dilly dally around here getting ready to leave. Just as well or it would be noon before we leave, haha. We have all been very relaxed here! 

A laundry day will be next on our agenda back at the rental and then we will choose a couple of sightseeing destinations for mid week before a big Shabbat dinner with the other side of the family on Friday…the end of our second week in NYC. The time is flying by too quickly. 

In A Cottage In A Wood…..🎼

This weekend I find myself, with the family, residing in a luxurious three storey , four bedroom luxurious “cabin” tucked away among the trees somewhere north of Red Hook NY.  The whole day had an aura of unreality, (or at least of serious disconnect from my own reality), as we left NYC after a long drive across Manhattan, onto the massive George Washington Bridge and out into the more rural area leading us here to the gorgeous Hudson Valley. Being personally familiar with only NYC in this state, it was a bit of a shock to make the transition from concrete jungle to heavily treed forest, complete with grazing roadside deer, so quickly. Our son drove us along the three and a half hour route with his wife and GPS guiding him. The traffic was not all that bad for a Friday, so that was a relief. 

Along the route we passed the West Point military academy and that set the tone for the surroundings of the rest of our trip through scattered towns that all look like movie sets: posters honouring various members of the military hanging from the light standards, colourful three storey clapboard houses on large lots with manicured lawns, white and black wrought iron picket fences, American flags drooping in the heat from the support posts of wide verandas and a scattered tossing of subtly sized political posters, every downtown sporting at least one small greening copper statue honouring fallen soldiers from the previous wars. Every town we drove through had the near perfection of a Hollywood set and to be honest I found it a bit eerie….breathtakingly beautiful, but eerie nonetheless. 

A couple of hours into our journey we stopped for lunch at the town of Beacon: giant sub sandwiches stuffed with chicken and Caesar salad or falafel with tomatoes, plus a “small” order of tater tots. We sampled for the first time canned coconut water with chocolate….it sounded like such a bizarre combination my husband just had to try it, but it tasted like chocolate milk! Yum! 

The town of Beacon was also a destination stop for us to spend several relaxing and rewarding hours at the Dia Beacon Art Museum. It is my son’s favourite art gallery and when he did his Master of Fine Arts degree at nearby Bard College a number of years ago he visited Dia Beacon numerous times. Dia Beacon is a huge building that was originally a printing facility for Nabisco packaging…built a few years after the turn of the last century. Unusually for typically dark and gloomy factories of those days, the building was designed in such a way that it is filled with panes and panels of glass in the walls and slanted overhead skylights so that the entire giant building is filled with natural light. None of the exhibits are lit by electric lights….amazing. It is perfectly lit by the sun overhead. If you are interested in architecture and the modernization of old industrial buildings into more modern, reappointed spaces look up the Dia Beacon and read its history and about the foresight of the original builders as well as the man who recreated it to be the incredible art museum it became in 2003. 

It is a museum dedicated to abstract artists and sculptors such as beloved Saskatchewan artist Agnes Martin, and Richard Tuttle who inspired my own son to pursue art as a career and lifestyle and even in his 85th year continues to be my son’s friend and mentor. Sculptor Louise Bourgeois’s huge metal Crouching Spider is part of their collection, the first woman artist to be featured among what was originally the collected works of white male artists. … to the point where it is now a bit of a joke. Now many women are featured. 

I was blown away by the surreal sculptures created by Richard Serra: massive curved  sculptures of weathered steel many feet tall that we could walk into the centre of, either directly or through narrow curved pathways that left me feeling like I had been abandoned at the bottom of a deep hole. These pieces from his Torqued Ellipses collection are so massive they are in their own deep space apart from the main floor gallery spaces. I learned that Serra and particularly Donald Judd began the movement of employing fabricators to build such large or such complicated works that would be physically impossible or too time consuming for the artist to complete alone.

Another fascinating sculptor, at least to me, is Michael Heizer. He specializes apparently in embedded stone megaliths and negative space floor cuts. One of his works at the Dia is a series of four geometrical shaped concrete floor cuts. Standing at the top of the cuts is like standing at the top of a concrete canyon where the shape of the cut carries straight downward for I don’t know how many feet. They appear to go on down to the centre of the earth! 

After feasting our eyes and over cramming our senses we took another hour to sit outside the museum midst the trees, sipping cold yuzu spritzers and debriefing about all that we had seen, before carrying on for our final hour of driving to the cabin. 

It took us awhile to find it as we were missing one portion of the address, but after driving past the same small corner of land covered in hay bales and fields of feed corn stalks, we contacted the owner of the cabin. She directed us to a nearly invisible, narrow side road, we followed it for a quarter mile and suddenly there at last was our accommodation sitting among the trees with rolling lawns, a bbq space and a creek at the far end of the property burbling along quite happily unaware of how lost the newest guests had gotten themselves.

We hauled our gear into the cabin, unpacked, explored its decks and screened in porch and basement games room, made a grocery list and headed south,  through Red Hook and into the town of Rhinebeck for a fabulous Indian feast at Cinnamon, followed by a quick shopping trip at Hannaford’s grocery which features the lowest grocery prices any of us have seen since the Covid pandemic. Even after factoring in the exchange rate with Canadian dollars I purchased the groceries for between one third and one half the price I would have paid for the same items at home in Regina. Incredible! 

Back at home we relaxed with cups of peppermint tea and began putting together a large and complicated puzzle that we thought would take us all weekend to complete. Between our son’s wife displaying more puzzle ability than she thought she had and my son’s skill of quickly seeing the correlation of shapes and colours, they put together a complete first corner in record time. 

By ten thirty we were all happily picking bedrooms and falling into bed, but of course after four hours of sleep I have been awake for the last two hours and am feeling ready to return to the Land Of Nod for a couple of more hours until it is time for  breakfast. Then while the rest of the family is busy hiking through the tick infested forested lands, I will happily spend my day reading The Odyssey and catching up on my missing sleep. My respiratory allergies continue to drive me crazy so I am going to have to pick up a package of antihistamines at the first opportunity. Sigh…such a perfectly beautiful setting, complete with chorusing cicadas overnight, but death to my sinuses that had barely healed from the A/C fiasco back in the city. It is still nice though to have a break from all the concrete for a weekend.

 

The Benefits Of Getting Lost!

 We managed to find our way yesterday around the bus and subway systems to meet Aunty J for a tasty lunch at L’Ami Pierre….tasty Caesar salad and baguette chicken and brie sandwiches. We arrived a few minutes before she did, so sat on a bench outside people watching. The noon hour brought out hordes of younger up and coming business men dressed nearly identically in shirts of white or pale blue and dark navy suit pants and jackets, brown shoes. I guess individuality in suit and shirt colour is not encouraged here. It was most interesting watching this blue suited army. The women tended more toward blacks and greys, their feet shod in dark coloured flats with at least some variety of styles.

After lunch we headed to the Museum of Modern Art where we enjoyed looking at the small exhibition of older Diego Rivera sketches and coloured drawings and paintings. Many of his works paid tribute of course to Frida Kahlo, fellow artist and romantic partner. I had forgotten that she died at the age of 47. The humour Rivera injected into his small drawings about man vs the machine was amusing while still making his point. One large painting paid tribute to those who overthrew dictator Diaz during the 1910 Mexican revolution. Apparently it lasted until 1917 and it took another three years for the country to stabilize. After the Rivera exhibition we stopped at an expansive exhibition of works by Marcel DuChamps. I had seen most of his newer paintings and modern sculptures such as his “Fountain” urinal collection, but what I had not seen before were his earlier published cartoons. They are hilarious! After we saw these two exhibits we sat for an hour outside in the lovely sculpture garden sipping proper iced tea (cold tea with ice cubes, no sugar) and chatting. It was a lovely afternoon.

At 4:30pm as we were leaving the MoMA my husband told me we were within walking distance of Barnes and Noble in case I wanted to pick up a couple of books to take to the cabin this weekend. It would save us having to get up early this morning to race off to the Strand bookshop. Seemed like a good idea at the time, so we confidently headed to 5th Avenue. 

Here we made our first mistake. My husband, the intrepid mountaineer path finder was looking at the street map on his phone and for some reason became directionally challenged. Instead of walking toward the Barnes and Noble outlet we were ten blocks away from starting point before he realized we were walking in the opposite direction! Groan…..we were going to have to retrace the same ten blocks, then start our hike to Barnes and Noble all over again. Nooooo….after two hours of walking, sauntering and standing at MoMA my hips were already tired. Oh well….

There were some lovely surprises though due to our misdirection. We came upon St. Thomas Church which my husband has been hoping to view since his first trip to NYC in 2018, we passed by the famous Plaza Hotel, fronted by gorgeous Pulitzer Fountain, the huge bronzed statue of General Sherman, and lo and behold, a street-side pop up from Strand Bookshop! Oh wow, how cool! Right there in plain sight was the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey that J recommended only an hour earlier. I snapped it up! Finding the Strand street side meant we wouldn’t have to go to Barnes and Noble, so could retrace the ten block error and head to the subway station to catch the train that would take us home.

Along that part of the route I realized how exhausted I was getting, but walking along beside the south end of Central Park was a gorgeous visual distraction. Until……hey, wait a minute…to get to the subway we should have turned away from the park at the exact point of having retraced our ten block mistake! Wha? My sheepish husband rechecked the route on his map and realized he had made the same mistake in orientating us to the route on the map. This time we were “only” six blocks out of harmony, but oooh my, such long blocks! Another retracing of our steps to our original starting point, we covered the four block walk to the subway, finally arriving to catch an immediate train as I was about to collapse from exhaustion. (Please note, I was also very ill with the respiratory reaction to sleeping with the AC on overnight three nights in a row.) I must have looked pretty ill by then because two women on the rush hour jammed train cleared seats for me to sit down. Fortunately when we disembarked we were only three blocks from home. I staggered into our suite, dropping my cane into the middle of the living room floor and collapsed on the sofa. By this time it was over six hours since I had eaten and after so much exercise my blood sugar was too low. My sweetly penitent husband, feeling humiliated by his route mistakes, made me a sandwich, forfeited his last slice of Japanese green tea cake roll to me and pampered me like crazy. The poor guy was so upset, I felt badly for him. There were so many nice surprises by us taking incorrect routes that there was no reason to be upset.

We were both in bed with the lights out by 8:45pm and we didn’t get up and going until 7:30 this morning. It is about 10:30 am now and I have made a trip to the nearest pharmacy a couple of blocks away for a small jar of my favourite respiratory healer: Vick’s VapoRub, at my husband’s insistence. Now I am at home resting while he makes a long loop to a few organic markets and  a computer store for a new mouse. He forgot to bring his and that is why we had so much trouble completing our government forms. Using the little roll pad on the laptop was frustrating and slow. It is nice to now be familiar enough with our neighbourhood to each be able to get out on our own. 

This morning our son is picking up the car from an in-law that we are borrowing for our trip to the cabin tomorrow. Once he finds a place to park it near his home he will come here for lunch and an afternoon visit. We may go to the Morgan, or I will send the guys on their own. I want to be as healed as possible before we go upstate tomorrow.

Yesterday was the hottest day yet at only +31C and today is a lovely +27C, with rain possible tonight and tomorrow. Love this weather. It is cooler than usual for August in NYC, but perfect for us.

Fun With Phones!

My husband had a struggle yesterday getting my mobile phone set up to keep a copy of my I-94 available for quick download in case I ever need to present it. The struggle lasted all morning and then into the late night hours when the Google Play he was forced to put onto my phone in order to get Firefox in order to get Document File in order to get the I-94 “in the hole in the bottom of the sea”, started sending out message after message at 11pm before I had my phone shut off for the night. We couldn’t get the Incoming Text notification volume turned down for some reason but finally succeeded after freaking out about the tenants right around us possibly being awakened by the noise. What a nightmare! My phone then needed charging so I couldn’t shut it off overnight, but we finally got the Do Not Disturb to work. We were so tired when the first 25 notifications started arriving that we were completely bamboozled by how to make it stop! As soon as we get home I will have my phone scrubbed, purged of the whole works and return to my usual Phone Calls And Texts Only format. What an hilarious time we are having here with our technology, hahaha…

We did get out for the afternoon to explore our immediate neighbourhood a bit more. Completed our list of small purchases needed for food and kitchen comforts, found another discount grocery, a nice Japanese grocery and a great hardware store. 

We ate lunch at an Italian restaurant as the deli we wanted to go to still had a lineup at our late lunch time of 2pm. The Italian place wasn’t fantastic but it was packed with regulars who know every cook and server so the atmosphere was relaxed and fun. There was enough food to feed four people so we skipped cooking dinner last night and traded leftovers. I ate the last couple of slices of my husband’s chicken parm pizza…his so called personal sized pizza was 12 inches…and he finished up my giant plate of veal parmigiana and mountain of spaghetti. The spaghetti sauce was quite bland, but each table had a shaker of mixed Italian herbs to use “to taste”. We were rather liberal with our use of it and here at home my husband shook some Tabasco onto the remains to spice it up a bit more. The huge side salad that came with my meal was delicious and we both enjoyed sharing it. Today it is back to cooking for ourselves. 

Best grocery find of the day: no sugar added Kind bars. Not available in Canada. Also they are very low fat, as in less than a third of the fat content of the ones we get at home that I can eat only occasionally. Wish I had room in my luggage and a heart to fill in declaration forms so I could bring a few boxes back with me.

Getting Settled And Properly Registered

 It is wonderful to see our kids! They spent their weekend feeding us amazing meals, examining and then tricking out the somewhat deficient kitchen in our suite, (making sure the gas stove works properly, lending us a “properly sized and sharpened” kitchen knife, food for our first morning’s breakfast, tea, a cutting board, etc.), so we are now able to cook more than fried eggs and toast! They are both fabulous cooks so we have had two scrumptious dinners at their place already: Sezchuan chicken and mushrooms with rice and chili pepper green beans on night one followed by sausages with sautéed red and yellow peppers, onions, zucchini and squash on night two. Yum! Our offerings to them will be more along the lines of pancakes and French Toast, haha City vs Prairie cuisines? haha

Yesterday our son spent the afternoon with us. We began with a late lunch at a Japanese restaurant with extremely reasonable prices and Bento boxes filled full of deliciousnesses! For the equivalent price in Canadian dollars the Japanese restaurant we occasionally go to outside of our own city at home is ripping us off in terms of portion size to price. We could have brought half our meal home yesterday, except that it was so tasty we ate most of the meat and veggies and tofu, saving only a large portion of the rice and edamame for lunch at home today. 

Then we found our neighbourhood Trader Joe’s and CVS Pharmacy and went shopping. My son and husband carried home most of what we needed and today my husband and I will return to the store to complete our “Necessities List”. TJ’s is only five blocks away and CVS three blocks, so that is a blessing. While the selection at TJ’s is fairly basic, the prices are fantastic so we can do most of our shopping there.

The kids are working this morning so we will spend the time watching the rain coming down and filling out the very detailed Customs and Immigration forms required of anyone who has plans to remain in the U.S. for a period of 30 days or more. My husband started working on his yesterday, but had to spend so much time on a different website specializing in explaining what some of the questions mean that the C/I website timed out, all his work to that point was lost and he has to start all over again. To do both our forms today is going to take a couple of hours. Had we realized the extent of the paperwork required for this length of stay we would have still had to lease our apartment for the full 30 days as required by law in Manhattan, but checked out by day 29 to avoid all the detailed paperwork.  This particularly complicated form is not needed for leaving the U.S., but failure to file would likely mean we would  be refused re-entry in the future. So, filing these forms will be a good way to fill a rainy morning. 

We did get our I-94 forms filled out and submitted yesterday. Those were shorter and easier to understand. Those forms register our presence in the country, that we entered legally and we must carry a copy of them with us at all times. It was interesting seeing on that website all the information registered there about our previous trips to the U.S.  It actually clarified for us some of the dates of previous visits where our memories were a little fuzzy. 

This suite is kinda cute. It is a flashback to the 1970’s in layout and furnishings. The lamps and heavy dark furniture are a flashback in time for us. The layout of the apartment is almost identical to the layout of my and my roommate’s apartment where we lived in Calgary in 1973! It is much larger though and the spacious rooms are a treat. The whole place seems to be typically New York City shabby and comfortable. Little attention has been paid to the kitchen area, but with the assistance of our kids we will now be equipped to enjoy it. The price we are paying to be in midtown Manhattan makes it incredibly easy to overlook the age of our accommodation. The staff thus far are lovely to deal with. The laundry room is very nice with new machines and large tables for sorting clothes. The only thing I will have to buy today is a non skid rubber mat for the bathtub. It may not be absolutely necessary, but I have to be so careful and there is no “roll bar”, as I like to call it, to hang onto. 

When we first sat down on the well used mattresses on the bed we were a bit nervous, but that bed has turned out to be amazingly comfortable. We have had two excellent nights of sleep. We are on the quieter backside of the building, so with the air conditioner running on low speed for white noise we haven’t had to use our earplugs! Amazing! 

I think we are going to be very happy here. The weather has been perfect for us, highs of +27C both days and not forecast to go up more than a couple of degrees for the rest of this week: a happy introduction to N.Y.C. in the summer. The A/C units in our suite will make any hotter days bearable. 

Tomorrow afternoon we hope to start touring some of the sights of interest within walking distance: the Morgan, the Frick and the New York City PublicLibrary art collections, the U.N. building and a revisit to Grand Central Station to take a better look at the amazing art that is on the high walls and ceiling in the huge lobby.

Walking to the kids’ apartment is just over a mile of good exercise for us and there is a bus to catch two blocks from our suite that drops us off one block from them. Our son presented us with two fully loaded Omni transportation cards to use for bus and subway fares, so we are well taken care of as we find our way farther afield in the coming weeks. We are off to a good start, walking further and more frequently in the past two days than I have since before my hip surgery last year. It feels GOOD! And for some reason I just lost my chosen font size. Sorry ya’all…..